Most stories about industrial AI start with buzzwords and end with dashboards. This one starts on the shop floor, with rotating equipment that fails at the worst possible time and quietly wastes energy for weeks before that. 

Intellithink is our bet that the next generation of industrial winners will treat these machines as live data sources. Doing this well, in our view, requires owning both the hardware and the intelligence layer.

The problem hiding in plain sight

Unplanned downtime is one of the most expensive line items in global manufacturing. For the Fortune Global 500, it is estimated at roughly USD 1.4 to 1.5 trillion a year, around 11% of revenue. Much of this links back to motors, pumps, conveyors, blowers, fans and gearboxes that sit at the heart of every plant.

Most of these assets are still monitored with route based checks and fixed preventive schedules. 

Why Intellithink went full stack

There are two broad ways to attack this problem. One is to sit on top of whatever sensors are already installed and only work with that data. The other is to design the data layer and the intelligence layer together. Intellithink chose the second path.

The company builds a full stack machine health and energy insight platform focused on rotating equipment, anchored by two products.

  • IntelliVibe uses in house designed, battery powered, Wi Fi enabled sensors that mount directly on motors, pumps and other rotating assets.
  • IntelliAmp is installed at the motor control panel. It measures high frequency current and voltage signatures to reveal electrical and mechanical faults and to locate energy waste.

On top of this, Intellithink runs a physics informed analytics layer. This helps customers get to useful diagnostics and energy insights faster, even if they have limited historical data.

Owning the stack has three important effects.

  • Better signals and fewer blind spots, resulting in earlier warning signs
  • Sensors, gateways and analytics are designed to work together, so plants do not need to stitch multiple vendors and integrations
  • Once the system learns a pattern that learning can be applied across customers and industries

Intellithink’s full stack approach is a deliberate bet on depth in a focused domain.

The team behind the stack

What continuous insight looks like

Intellithink already works with more than 50 enterprise customers in sectors such as cement, steel, metals, water utilities, automotive, chemicals, FMCG, food and beverage, mining, pharmaceuticals and general manufacturing. The focus is on enterprises with significant plant footprints and large rotating equipment fleets.

IntelliVibe sensors are installed on key rotating equipment and IntelliAmp devices instrument motor control centres. The platform then begins streaming and analysing data in real time. Within a short period, maintenance and operations teams start seeing three kinds of insight.

  • Early warnings of bearing degradation, misalignment, looseness, cavitation and structural issues
  • Visibility into power quality problems such as voltage imbalance, harmonics and flicker
  • Clear guidance on next steps, including which asset to inspect, what fault mode to check and how urgent the issue is

As value becomes visible, plants expand coverage to more lines, additional assets and sometimes more sites. 

Why we backed Intellithink and what comes next

At Pentathlon, we look for capital efficient B2B Tech companies built by teams who have lived the problem and are willing to make non obvious choices to solve it well. Intellithink fits that pattern.

  • It addresses a large, underpenetrated problem at the intersection of machine health and industrial energy efficiency, with thousands of potential customers in India, MENA and other industrial regions
  • It offers a full stack hardware and AI product that stands apart from software only platforms and OEM bound monitoring
  • It is led by a team with deep, relevant experience in mission critical software, embedded systems and industrial field work
  • It already shows a clear land and expand pattern with blue chip customers in heavy industry

If you are a founder debating whether to own hardware, how to blend physics and AI or how to move from periodic checks to continuous intelligence in industrial settings, Intellithink’s path is a useful case study. And if you run plants that struggle with unplanned downtime and rising energy costs on rotating equipment, this is the layer of continuous insight we believe will become the new default.