AVIAN Raises $2.6M To Scale AI Thermal Monitoring For The World's Most Fire-Prone Industrial Sites

(MENAFN- GlobeNewsWire - Nasdaq) Zurich-based industrial AI company will accelerate deployment of its end-to-end thermal monitoring platform across sawmills, recycling, mining, chemical processing, oil and gas, and maritime operations - categories where fire and downtime risk are increasingly outpacing what insurers are willing to cover.

Zurich, May 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Industrial operators across Europe and North America are facing a problem they can't inspect their way out of. Fine dust, friction, electrical faults, and aging equipment are pushing fire and downtime risk into territory that insurers will no longer underwrite at viable premiums. Sites that were insurable five years ago are being deemed too risky today. Against that backdrop, AVIAN – the Zurich-based industrial AI company building 24/7 thermal monitoring for the world's most fire-prone facilities – today announced it has raised a $2.6M pre-seed round, led by Founderful.

A belt failure caught by an AVIAN camera with smoke filling the room.

AVIAN was profitable and entirely bootstrapped for two years before raising. The company says it raised this round to go faster, expand engineering and deployment capacity, and scale beyond its stronghold in wood products into recycling, chemical processing, oil and gas, and maritime. AVIAN is on track to surpass $1M in ARR in 2026.

How AVIAN works
Insurance markets are tightening, and more sites are being treated as high risk as equipment ages and failure rates climb. The old approach to thermal safety still looks like periodic thermography, a technician walking the floor with a handheld camera once a quarter. That method misses the window that matters: the hours when a component starts running hot before it fails. Most thermal vendors also stop at the hardware, selling a camera and leaving operators to figure out setup, monitoring, and escalation on their own. AVIAN takes a different approach: the sensor is one component of solving the problem, not the product. Customers are typically up and running in minutes, not months.

AVIAN founders Drew Hanover and Thomas Laengle.

The team
AVIAN is a 10-person team based in Zurich. The company was founded after one of Switzerland's largest sawmills saw Hanover's robotics and AI research in the Swiss media and reached out about escalating fires, downtime, and rising insurance pressure.

"Most operators don't need another camera. At 3 a.m., they need to know that a bearing is running hot before it ignites the dust around it," said Drew Hanover, Co-Founder and CTO of AVIAN. "We bootstrapped the business for two years because we wanted to build something operators actually trusted. We raised with Founderful for one reason: to keep doing that, in more markets, faster, without changing what we are. We spent zero minutes on a deck."

Alex Stöckl, Partner at Founderful added: "Within a year of incorporation, the team at AVIAN already served dozens of manufacturing businesses in the US and Europe, preventing real fire incidents on a daily basis. With their thermal-vision technology, there's an immediate ROI and a new industrial intelligence layer that unlocks further use cases and value for customers over time - backing them to accelerate their go-to-market and product roadmap was a no-brainer."

What's next
AVIAN's roadmap splits into two tracks. First, the company has spent years building relationships with insurers to understand how risk is assessed, and its growing camera fleet is positioned to produce something underwriters increasingly demand: real-time, site-level risk assessments backed by live thermal telemetry. Second, AVIAN Vision extends the platform beyond thermal by upgrading existing CCTV systems to detect smoke and fire, giving customers a way to broaden 24/7 protection across an entire facility without replacing the infrastructure they already operate.

AVIAN's long-term thesis is straightforward. Industrial risk has been priced for decades using actuarial tables and historical claims data. The next decade will be priced using quantifiable, real-time operational data, and AVIAN believes sites that have become difficult to insure can become insurable again through data, discipline, and proactive systems.

Media images can be found here.

About AVIAN
AVIAN is a Zurich-based industrial AI company building 24/7 thermal monitoring for high-risk operations. Its end-to-end platform - combining infrared camera hardware, anomaly detection, smart alarms, predictive maintenance reports, a notification engine, and human support - is deployed at approximately 50 sites across 9 countries, primarily in wood products, with growing traction in recycling, chemical processing, oil and gas, and maritime. AVIAN's mission is to make high-risk industries safe and insurable again. More at

About Founderful
Founderful is Switzerland's leading pre-seed fund, backing founder teams building tech companies with the potential to become global market leaders. Founderful has a track record of supporting exceptional founders in creating breakthrough companies and has the passionate conviction that the Swiss startup ecosystem is just starting to write its best success stories.

CONTACT: For further information please contact the AVIAN press office: Bilal Mahmood at... or +44 (0) 771 400 7257.

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