Plotly Co-founder and former CEO creates Flojoy, the first no-code test, measurement software
MONTREAL, QC / ACCESSWIRE / August 29, 2023 / Today, Flojoy announces an oversubscribed seed round of $1.3 million USD from Flybridge Capital Partners, Boreal Ventures, and BDC Capital to disrupt the test, measurement, & control (TMC) market with its open-source, Python-based AI software. TMC is the bedrock of every research and development “hard-tech” laboratory and software enterprise. Over the past century, there would have been zero applied science and manufacturing progress without the invention of the computer and its application to sense and control physical spaces. Now, TMC UX will undergo a renaissance, building off of the last decade of open-source software innovation.
“Test, measurement, and control (TMC) has been absolutely fundamental to every industrial manufacturing breakthrough, but the software has been in the relative dark ages,” said Jack Parmer, Founder and CEO of Flojoy. “Today’s scientists, engineers, data scientists and business analysts deserve better and no-code software to scale efficiently.”
Test, measurement, and control (TMC) and artificial intelligence (AI) are natural bedfellows. While TMC is concerned with sensing and responding to data from the physical world, AI is concerned with using vast troves of data to refine machine learning (ML) models for domain-specific mastery. Already, resourceful scientists and engineers are applying foundational ML models to textbook TMC use cases in every field: microscopes that ship with automatic object identification, computer-vision cobots that perceive and respond to their environments in real time, and oscilloscopes that learn to predict signals.
“Flojoy is applying the open-core/open-source model to software for heavy industry and deeptech. We’re thrilled to watch them accelerate the world’s largest R&D institutions with this approach – just like Jack and his team did at Plotly,” said Hassan Bhatti, Partner at The Community Fund, a Flybridge Network Fund.
Prior to founding Flojoy, Jack Parmer led the creation of Domino Data Lab’s Code Assist, a low-code capability to democratize advanced analytics using Python and R.
“Since founding Plotly, Jack Parmer has been an unstoppable moving force in scientific Python,” said Nick Elprin, CEO and co-founder of Domino Data Lab. “I’m excited to see him continue to expand cutting-edge options to build and operate AI at scale.”
At age 26, Parmer founded Plotly, the de facto interactive data visualization software for scientists working in Python and R, where he led the company as CEO through $18M in fundraising, $10M in annual recurring revenue, and created the “python code to web app” category, growing virally to 200 million software downloads under his tenure. Plotly helped to modernize numerical computing by making one of its pillars (data visualization) free, interactive, exceptionally well documented, and more complete in capabilities than most scientific charting software before it.
“With Plotly, Jack created a highly successful open-source data science company. The test, measurement, and control space is important to our fund and our portfolio companies, and we’re excited to partner with Jack and his team on their next open-source chapter, Flojoy,” said Charles Lespérance, Partner at BDC Capital’s DeepTech Fund.
Flojoy intends to use the seed investment to hire more engineers to build out first-class Python support for over 700 benchtop scientific instruments and microcontrollers, which will usher in a new era of open-source TMC standardization. Its first major customer is a U.S. electric aircraft manufacturer. Heavy industry and hard-tech titans like Hitachi, Ford, Boeing, SpaceX, Intel, and Medtronics are all essentially TMC companies at their core and Flojoy hopes to help.
With Plotly, Jack has shown his ability to foresee fundamental trends in the open-source community, hire world-class talent, and build what is now a pillar in the Python community. Floyjoy expands on the same traits that made Plotly a success, in what we believe is a market ripe for innovation,” adds David Charbonneau, Managing Partner at Boreal Ventures.
About Flojoy
Flojoy provides no-code, open-source, Python-based AI software for the test, measurement, & control (TMC) market. The Flojoy Studio is a drop-in replacement for engineering software such as LabVIEW, Simulink, RapidMiner, and Alteryx. Learn more at https://www.flojoy.ai/.
Download & Quickstart: https://docs.flojoy.ai
Friendly help: https://community.flojoy.ai
Demo videos: https://www.youtube.com/@flojoy_ai
Student Ambassador Program: University students only
Media contact: media@flojoy.io
Press kit: https://docs.flojoy.ai/press-kit
Contact Information
Lauren Burke
Media Relations
media@flojoy.io
SOURCE: Flojoy, Inc.