Collide Capital leads $3M pre-seed into Syncrowin's bid to make existing factories smarter

Syncrowin, a Melbourne company applying AI to the systems that run energy and manufacturing operations, has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding.

The round was led by New York's Collide Capital, with participation from Hustle Fund, POV Ventures, Australia's Co-Ventures and Ventari, alongside angel investors.

The company's platform is aimed at heavy industry — electricity, oil, gas and manufacturing — and is designed to help those sectors improve productivity, efficiency and reliability. Co-founder and chief executive Aisshwarya Kansakaar framed the pitch around the installed base rather than new builds.

"The world is spending trillions planning new industrial capacity, but a significant portion of what we need already exists, it's just not running intelligently," she said.

The proceeds are earmarked for the development and deployment of Syncrowin's AI-based operating system, along with increased headcount across its AI and engineering teams in Australia and San Francisco.

Kansakaar co-founded the business with chief technology officer Jaideep Upadhyay. The pair bring engineering backgrounds spanning mechatronics, mechanical and industrial systems, and AI. Upadhyay positioned the raise as a bet on software rather than steel.

"The last era of industry was defined by deploying physical assets at extraordinary scale. We believe the next will be defined by the intelligence layered across them," he said.

Syncrowin has been selected for the Energy Labs Scale Up program and previously received support from the University of Melbourne's MAP Accelerator — credentials that give the startup a foothold in the local energy and research ecosystem as it looks to convert pilot interest into deployments.

The pre-seed is notable for its investor mix: a New York lead cheque into a Melbourne industrial software company, with two more US names on the cap table in Hustle Fund and POV Ventures, plus local funds Co-Ventures and Ventari. For an Australian deep-tech team selling into conservative heavy-industry buyers, that combination of American capital and domestic venture support is an unusual early structure.

Kansakaar, Victoria's 2025 Young Australian of the Year, grew up in Nepal. The recognition adds a public profile to the fundraising effort at a stage when industrial AI startups typically compete less on model capability than on access to plant floors and the operational data that comes with them.

Syncrowin's challenge now is deployment. Selling into electricity, oil and gas operators means long procurement cycles, integration with legacy equipment and a burden of proof that the software performs under real production conditions — the gap between a pre-seed pitch and a signed multi-site rollout. The new funding, and the engineering hires it pays for, will be spent testing whether that gap can be closed from Melbourne and San Francisco at the same time.