Toronto’s Aerium raises US$2.5M to build AI for factories

Aerium, a Toronto startup founded by two former McKinsey & Company analysts, has raised US$2.5 million (about $3.6 million Cdn) in seed funding to sell AI software to industrial manufacturers and distributors, the company announced Oct. 16.

The round came from New York City’s Gutter Capital and undisclosed strategic angel investors, according to BetaKit. The money was raised through a simple agreement for future equity, or SAFE, that closed in July, BetaKit reported.

Co-founders Adam Trotman, the chief executive, and Michael Dawes worked in McKinsey’s Toronto office, where they built software and agentic AI for manufacturing clients. They left last year to start Aerium, BetaKit reported.

The company is aimed at what Trotman described as a coordination and visibility problem, in which a manufacturer’s data sits in spreadsheets, emails and employees’ heads. Aerium’s platform connects to a customer’s existing systems to gather, clean and centralize that data, then deploys AI agents and custom machine learning models to monitor operations and automate tasks, BetaKit said.

StartupResearcher, which also covered the round, said the product is meant to help with quoting complex jobs, coordinating production, managing procurement and predicting maintenance needs. It said the platform is designed to improve as it learns from jobs, orders and operational decisions.

Aerium is targeting makers of equipment, specialty chemicals and metal parts. It has a handful of customers, including a global transformer manufacturer that has not been named, BetaKit reported. The company recently hired its first employee and plans to add a few forward-deployed engineers in Toronto before the end of 2026, the outlet said.

Trotman said the goal is to augment workers rather than replace them, in part by capturing institutional knowledge as experienced staff retire. He told BetaKit he hopes Aerium becomes the next Siemens, Honeywell or Emerson, which he described as operating layers for manufacturing and distribution. “We essentially want to be the next evolution of that,” he said.

The round is small by venture standards, and neither outlet reported a valuation. It lands as Ottawa pushes money toward applied AI outside the big model labs. The federal government this month added $500 million to a regional AI program, bringing it to $700 million, and Toronto’s Cohere said it plans to buy cybersecurity firm Aisle and form Cohere Cyber. Early-stage firms such as Bia Health, which raised $2.15 million for an AI diagnostic assistant, show the same pattern of small rounds for narrowly focused AI products.

For Canadian manufacturers, the pitch is practical rather than futuristic: tools that pull scattered operating data into one place and flag problems before they stop a line. Whether a two-person startup with a single hire can deliver that at scale will depend on how many paying customers it can add beyond its first few.

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Sources: BetaKit (Oct. 16, 2026) and StartupResearcher (Oct. 16, 2026).