Welcome, Axion!
The AI observability platform for customer quality intelligence.
December 15, 2025
- Founder: Daniel First
- Sector: Vertical AI
- Location: Brooklyn, NY
The Opportunity
Manufacturing has become increasingly complex.
Products contain thousands of components, electronics are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and intricate supply chains span the globe. Despite this complexity, customer quality and issue detection remain largely reactive processes dependent on manual investigation and siloed data streams (oftentimes across dozens of platforms). Poor product quality costs manufacturers billions of dollars each year, and each day a poor quality product goes undetected exacerbates the downstream impacts.
Today’s field quality engineers face a daunting challenge: detecting emerging issues across millions of units in the field, investigating root causes across disparate data sources, and preventing catastrophic outcomes, such as recalls. The current customer quality toolset isn’t built for the scale of modern manufacturing. When these legacy tools do work, they’re capable of catching known issues, but fail to identify novel, emerging problems that don’t fit predetermined patterns. By the time these issues surface in the broader organization, the damage is already done. Brand reputation suffers, recall costs mount, and customer trust erodes.
What manufacturers need is an intelligent observability layer that can synthesize unstructured data across the enterprise product lifecycle and surface emerging issues at their earliest warning signals. Manufacturers require AI that can support their best engineers, detect subtle patterns, and empower teams to investigate issues at the speed of thought.
The Solution
Axion provides an AI-powered observability platform that transforms how manufacturers detect, investigate, and resolve quality issues impacting customers. Rather than forcing engineers to waste precious time manually piecing together insights across fragmented systems, Axion creates a quality-centric digital twin of failure modes that synthesizes data across the messy universe of manufacturing data — CRM systems, ERP databases, IoT, PLM records, service tickets, complaint logs, warranty claims, and so on. This unified view enables customer quality teams to run sophisticated anomaly detection, perform root-cause analysis in minutes, and solve emerging failure modes.
Axion’s AI is capable of discovering entirely novel patterns, correlating seemingly unrelated events, and flagging signals that huge teams of human analysts may never connect. Quality teams at companies like Cummins, Baxter, Medtronic, Boeing, and SharkNinja use Axion as their quality command center. What used to require weeks of SQL queries and spreadsheet forensics now happens in real-time within Axion’s single, intuitive center console.
For manufacturers operating at scale, where every percentage point of quality improvement represents millions in cost savings and brand equity, Axion provides the observability infrastructure that enables proactive quality intelligence. The result is faster issue resolution, prevented recalls, and confidence in product quality.
Why We’re Backing Axion
When we met Axion’s founder, Daniel First, we were immediately struck by his unique perspective on manufacturing quality. During his time at McKinsey, he witnessed firsthand how even the most sophisticated manufacturers struggled with quality observability. Daniel’s experience helps inform product decisions at Axion, from the platform’s architecture to its interface, designed to help engineers operate with maximum efficiency.
The market timing for Axion is exceptional. Manufacturing is undergoing a profound digital transformation with unprecedented volumes of data being generated, and AI is finally mature enough to make sense of it all. As the product lifecycle becomes increasingly complex, manufacturers can no longer afford to rely on reactive quality management. Axion is well-positioned to become the essential infrastructure for this transition.
Further, Axion has earned the trust of a customer base that doesn’t adopt new technology lightly. During our market research, we received fantastic feedback from users, citing the multi-million-dollar cost savings provided by Axion and the record time-to-value. As one executive put it, the platform delivers “eight engineers in a box.”
In short, we believe Axion has the potential to define the future of manufacturing intelligence — starting with quality intelligence. In time, we see Axion integrating across the production lifecycle. In Daniel and his team, we’ve found the rare combination of domain expertise, technical sophistication, and customer obsession required to tackle one of manufacturing’s most valuable unsolved problems.
What’s Ahead
Salesforce Ventures is thrilled to lead Axion’s $37M Series B alongside Bessemer Venture Partners, Inspired Capital, Amplo, and Schneider Electric.
Since our investment, Axion has continued its exciting growth trajectory, signing flagship customers and expanding its product surface area into other parts of the manufacturing value chain. We can’t wait to see what’s next for Daniel and his team.
Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Axion!
