EP 9 — Why Your BMW is Smarter Than Most Factory Floors

In this episode of Industrial Visionaries, ZJ sits down with Markus Grundmann, board member at FlowFuse and partner at Senovo VC, to discuss the investment thesis behind FlowFuse and the broader industrial digitalization market. Markus shares his perspective on why the first wave of Industry 4.0 investments failed to deliver and how software-native companies are positioned differently in today's market.

What you'll learn:

• Why most Industry 4.0 investments failed to create successful exits and what made those approaches fundamentally flawed
• How Node-RED's widespread adoption across HiveQ customers revealed the market opportunity for enterprise-grade industrial software platforms
• The three mega markets VCs focus on and why industrial tech represents an underserved opportunity despite massive value creation potential
• Why VC funding in industrial tech is more challenging due to pattern matching and lack of historical success stories
• How software-native founders approach industrial problems differently than hardware-originated teams
• The competitive advantage of being early in less crowded markets where quality wins over marketing spend
• Why Europe's largest pump installation relies on "smell and feel" maintenance while a BMW provides more operational intelligence
• How ecosystem thinking and API-first strategies separate platform companies from incremental feature developers

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