Why we invested in UMH: Unlocking real-time industrial data at scale
Operational data is a foundational input for decisions across manufacturing, supply chain, energy management, and industrial AI. Yet much of today’s data remains constrained by the limits of proprietary legacy systems. Information is siloed by vendors, locked into fragile integrations, and often missing the context required for real operational or AI-driven use cases. As a result, many manufacturers spend the majority of their digitalisation efforts simply accessing, cleaning, and structuring data - rather than creating measurable business impact.
This challenge sits at the core of a global manufacturing software market exceeding $50 billion, where many digital transformation initiatives stall not because of a lack of tools, but because the data foundation itself is broken. Despite growing investment in AI and automation, progress remains slow as long as factory data stays fragmented and inaccessible.
Our investment in United Manufacturing Hub’s €5 million funding round reflects our belief that manufacturing is ready for an open-source data standard. UMH is building the foundational data layer for modern factories - one that makes industrial data accessible in real time and enables digital and AI use cases to move from concept to impact in weeks rather than months.
Breaking the Black Box of Industrial Data
UMH is designed to address a structural problem holding back digitalisation and efficiency improvements: industrial data is still trapped inside black-box systems. Its open-core, vendor-agnostic architecture introduces an independent data layer that sits between machines, IT systems, and applications.
At the heart of the platform is the Unified Namespace (UNS) - a real-time data hub that replaces brittle point-to-point integrations with a scalable, interoperable structure. Machines, sensors, PLCs, and enterprise systems are connected through standardised interfaces, with data cleaned and contextualised into a single source of truth that any application can consume without custom integration work.
On top of this foundation, UMH enables operational transparency, energy and resource tracking, condition monitoring, alerting, and industrial AI applications. Security is addressed through a zero-trust architecture designed for distributed factory environments, ensuring that connectivity does not come at the expense of resilience.
Importantly, the platform is built not only for data teams but for shop-floor engineers. Automation engineers and electricians can work directly with the system using low-code tools, dramatically lowering the barrier to adoption and accelerating real-world usage.
From Visibility to a New Generation of Factory Software
While many industrial platforms focus narrowly on dashboards or isolated use cases, UMH is taking a broader approach - establishing a shared data foundation upon which a wide range of current and future applications can be built.
By standardising access to factory data, UMH enables manufacturers to move beyond static reporting toward more adaptive, software-driven operations. Over time, this shift lays the groundwork for more advanced automation, AI and other intelligent systems, reducing reliance on rigid, legacy architectures and enabling factories to evolve as software capabilities improve.
This long-term orientation is a key reason we believe UMH can become core infrastructure rather than another point solution.
Now is the Time for Data-Driven Manufacturing
Manufacturing has reached a point where data availability directly limits the speed of innovation. While AI pilots are widespread, large-scale deployment remains difficult without reliable, real-time, standardised data from the shop floor.
At the same time, Industry 4.0 connectivity is now broadly in place across much of the market. This creates the conditions for independent software platforms to thrive - provided they are interoperable, secure, and flexible enough to integrate into heterogeneous factory environments.
Manufacturers are increasingly seeking vendor-agnostic architectures that give them long-term control over their data and the freedom to adopt new applications as technology evolves. UMH is built precisely for this moment.
Built by Engineers Who Experienced the Problem Firsthand
UMH was founded by Alexander Krüger (CEO) and Jeremy Theocharis (CTO), mechanical engineers from RWTH Aachen with years of experience in factory digitisation projects. The company emerged from a simple but powerful observation: most of the effort in industrial digitalisation goes into preparing data, not building applications.
They are joined by Niklas Hebborn (CCO), who brings experience in scaling software businesses and a clear ambition to build a category-defining industrial data company - one that combines open-source principles with enterprise-grade reliability.
Backing the Open Infrastructure for the Factories of the Future
We believe UMH is uniquely positioned to become the open-source data foundation for manufacturing. Beyond productivity gains, its platform enables more efficient use of energy and resources - making it a critical enabler of industrial decarbonisation.
By leading this round, KOMPAS is backing the infrastructure layer that will enable industrial software and AI to scale, helping European manufacturers compete globally in an increasingly software-defined industrial economy.
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written by Andreas Winter-Extra, Operating Partner at KOMPAS VC
