A pair of friends and former McKinsey & Company analysts with a background in manufacturing have teamed up to help industrial firms boost their operational efficiency.
Aerium aims to solve “the coordination and visibility” problem for industrial manufacturers.
In an interview with BetaKit, Aerium co-founder and CEO Adam Trotman said he and his co-founder Michael Dawes were exposed to manufacturing from a young age thanks to their parents’ work in the sector. They also both worked as analysts in McKinsey’s Toronto office, where they built software and agentic AI for industrial manufacturing clients.
Interested in doing more technical work on their own, the pair left the American consulting giant last year to launch Toronto-based Aerium, which aims to solve what Trotman described as “the coordination and visibility” problem for industrial manufacturers and distributors.
Aerium announced on Friday that it has secured $2.5 million USD ($3.6 million CAD) in seed funding to do just that. The funding came from New York City’s Gutter Capital and undisclosed strategic angel investors in a simple agreement for future equity round that closed in July.
Trotman noted that industrial manufacturers and distributors typically have lots of siloed information, spread across Excel spreadsheets, emails, and the brains of their employees, that prevents them from seeing “the full picture” of their business.
Aerium’s software platform integrates directly into clients’ existing systems to gather, clean, and centralize this data, and deploy AI agents and custom machine learning models to monitor their operations and automate tasks.
Trotman said Aerium’s goal is not to replace the work of people, but to capture all of this knowledge and make it easier to interpret for the people running these types of businesses as they contend with retiring staff and capacity constraints.
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Aerium is targeting companies that make equipment, speciality chemicals, and metal parts. The startup has already deployed its tech with a handful of customers, including an unnamed global transformer manufacturer.
The company recently added its first employee and plans to hire a few more forward-deployed engineers before the end of 2026 to help deploy its platform.
The young firm has some ambitious plans. Trotman said it hopes to become the next Siemens, Honeywell, or Emerson, singling this trio out as tech companies that have become “an operating layer” for industrial manufacturing and distribution firms.
“We essentially want to be the next evolution of that,” he said.
Feature image courtesy Aerium.
