Two of the people who built Palantir’s Foundry data platform have raised $66M for a company that sells automation to factories rather than hardware. Lumaril disclosed the Series A at a $400M valuation on November 1.
Co-founders Mark Elliot and Ben Duffield both describe themselves as creators of Foundry, with Elliot adding a stint as Palantir’s commercial chief technology officer. The team around them carries similar lineage: an operations lead from Palantir’s public sector work and Zipline, a business development lead from Anduril. Offices sit in New York and El Segundo, California.
Software that sits on old controls
Lumaril describes its product as an autonomy layer for physical production. It connects to the control systems a plant already runs, learns how each facility performs at its best, and continuously adjusts production for throughput, yield and reliability.
The pitch rests on an installed base that nobody wants to replace. Industrial infrastructure, the company argues, runs on decades-old rule-based systems staffed by veteran operators who are retiring faster than they can be replaced.
What the round does not show
The disclosed figures are thin. Neither customers, plant counts, nor measured gains appear in the material available, and it is unclear whether the $400M was struck before or after the new money. Paying on added production is the model the company has described, but no contract has been published to support it.
Industrial automation is a crowded field where incumbents have decades of site relationships. Lumaril’s bet is that software talent from the data world can outpace them on learning speed.
