Norfolk-based Ario is helping manufacturers improve their bottom line by making production and maintenance training more efficient with augmented reality technology.
In 2016, co-founders Joseph Weaver and Nate Fender left their full-time jobs with to begin working with a government contractor in Hampton and building out what would eventually become Ario. In January 2018, the duo established a five-person team to take on the project full-time and develop a marketable product.
"In the energy and utility industry in the U.S., nearly a third of the workforce is up for retirement in the next several years and in defense, there is not enough qualified maintenance personnel," Fender, now COO of Ario, told Inno. "If you're able to provide somewhat of a tool that can help someone with less experience perform at a higher competency, then you're able to potentially hire more people who would otherwise be lesser qualified to do more qualified activities."
The team worked on how to apply augmented and virtual reality in the industrial workforce, and identified commonalities in the problems faced by commercial manufacturing, energy and utilities and defense fields: a lack of labor to fill manufacturing jobs.
The solution, they determined, was Ario: a platform on which companies can upload training and maintenance protocol that allows employees to follow guided, step-by-step instructions based on the piece of machinery in front of them using AR technology, Fender said,
"AR is a feature, but the true essence of what Ario provides is way more than that," he said. "Allowing businesses and employees to capture and share expert knowledge inside an organization very easily and then have it be disseminated to new employees, creates a positive feedback cycle of not letting expert knowledge leave the workforce as people either turn over or retire out."
Ario now has 15 full-time employees on the team. In 2019, the company raised a $2 million seed round and predicts targeting a Series A in 2021.
The company was recently named a 2020 Richmond Inno on Fire Blazer in the Inno on the Road category.
Ario has 10 current clients and works with companies across manufacturing industries, including the U.S. Air Force and Canon. Using a subscription-based model, the platform generates revenue by billing customers per-named-user.
As the company continues to grow and find success, Fender said the biggest challenge is convincing the industries that positive procedural change is within their grasp.
"It's all about finding the businesses that acknowledge that change has to happen and having them be your advocate," he said. "Once they think about the benefits, it's easy to do the math on how this could impact their bigger business and turn a pilot or testing scenario into a greater conversation about how [this technology could] scale across their business."
