Aaron Ganick is an electrical engineer by training. But he’s been immersed in the startup world for years, first at Boston University’s Business Innovation Center at the Photonics Center, then as founder of an indoor location software company called ByteLight.
Ganick sold ByteLight to Acuity Brands in 2015 and stepped away from startups to focus on corporate innovation instead. Now, the entrepreneurial world is calling his name again.
In late 2018, Ganick began working as director of Internet of Things (IoT) programs at A.W. Chesterton, a 136-year-old company that essentially leads the industrial sealing sector. Ganick and his team were responsible for figuring out a new, tech-enabled solution to monitor the state of Chesterton products and alert their customers when they were likely to break.
“Imagine big industrial water treatment plants, oil and gas refineries, chemical treatment plants, food and beverage,” Ganick said. “It was very exciting to join a company that had such an important product line. It wasn’t a matter of if these things were going to fail, but when.”
Ganick created an IoT product that relies on Bluetooth as its communication protocol. Anyone who wanted to check on the condition of, say, a pump would only need to be physically close to the pump to see details like equipment vibration, surface temperature, process temperature and pressure in real time. The tech stack Ganick’s team created for Chesterton reaches from a user app that exists in the cloud all the way down to the individual device.
That stack is adjustable based on an individual consumer’s need, too. Last year, Ganick and his team realized that their solution’s ability to be customized meant it could have applications outside of Chesterton. They decided to spin out their own startup, with Chesterton as its first customer.
Preddio Technologies launched at the beginning of 2020. Today, the startup has about 10 full-time staff in North Andover.
This week, Preddio raised $1 million in a “friends and family round” from individual investors, which the company plans to use to hire on the engineering, sales and marketing teams.
Ganick said the pandemic has given Preddio an additional edge: Remote work means that engineers are monitoring their infrastructure even less frequently than usual, so an IoT solution is especially useful. In addition to its flagship monitoring solution, Preddio uses “digital twin” technology to digitally replicate a facility’s infrastructure, then use real-world data from sensors on assets and relays that into the cloud. Preddio can run simulations on the digital twin to see how the real-world structure will be affected over time.
“We have simplified the engagement strategy, the implementation strategy, the maintenance and really the monitoring of all the services,” Ganick said. “We’re making sure all your cloud instances are protected, making sure you have 100 percent connectivity. All these nitty-gritty things that fall through the cracks. We are here to provide a guaranteed service to our customers unique to what they’re doing and let them focus on what they’re doing for their business.”
