Digital Iron Raises £1.6M to Modernise After-Sales Service for Heavy Equipment With AI

Digital Iron, a UK software company, has raised £1.6 million from Concept Ventures, FJ Labs, RTP Global, Seedcamp, and C2 Ventures to develop its AI-powered after-sales service platform for the heavy equipment industry. The company is building software that automates and streamlines the diagnostics, spare parts management, and sourcing workflows that currently make equipment maintenance and repair expensive, slow, and operationally disruptive for the construction, mining, agriculture, and industrial sectors that depend on heavy machinery.

Heavy equipment — excavators, bulldozers, cranes, agricultural machines, mining trucks — represents massive capital investment for the businesses that operate it, and equipment downtime is extraordinarily expensive. A construction site excavator sitting idle because the right part cannot be sourced quickly enough costs the project hundreds of pounds per hour in lost productivity. The after-sales service ecosystem that supports this equipment — original equipment manufacturer dealers, independent service centres, parts distributors, and fleet managers — is large and fragmented, with enormous inefficiencies in how fault diagnosis is performed, how parts are identified and sourced, and how inventory is managed across the supply chain.

Current diagnostic processes often require a skilled technician to manually interpret fault codes, consult technical documentation, and draw on experience to identify the root cause of a problem before determining what parts are needed. Parts identification in heavy equipment is particularly complex: machines have long service lives, are built to order with many configuration variations, and share parts selectively across model lines in ways that are not always well-documented. Finding the right part quickly requires navigating multiple catalogs, checking availability across a fragmented distribution network, and managing the logistics of getting parts to the machine's location. Digital Iron's AI platform automates the analytical steps in this process, accelerating diagnosis and parts identification, improving the accuracy of parts recommendations, and optimising inventory positioning to reduce the frequency of stockouts and emergency shipments.

The investor syndicate — combining Seedcamp and Concept Ventures on the early-stage UK side with FJ Labs (known for marketplace businesses) and RTP Global (a global fund with industrial software interest) — reflects the breadth of the opportunity. The funding will be used to develop the platform, build data integrations with OEM parts catalogs and equipment telematics systems, and grow the customer base among equipment dealers and fleet operators.

Sources

• Digital Iron — company website