Meet Sam Burgess, CEO and Co-Founder at After Sales and Lifecycle Management Platform: SamsonVT

SamsonVT is a Manchester-based start-up that is helping manufacturers to transform product after sales and machine maintenance, with the assistance of Industry 4.0 technology. Our SamsonCORE product, for example, is replacing repair manuals and parts catalogues with interactive 3D models. This is providing engineers with a 360° view of products which are far easier to work with compared to flat 2D PDFs.

Engineers can use this “digital twin” to pull machines apart and obtain details on individual components, including their specification, part number, current stock availability, etc. When integrated with an e-commerce platform, engineers can even order replacement parts through the platform. They can also see how everything is reassembled – supporting on the job training.

Since setting up SamsonVT in 2017, the company has grown rapidly and developed a client base that includes global businesses such as Lotus, RS Components and Norton Motorcycles.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
Earlier in life, I was a team leader in the Royal Engineers and was responsible for the reliability of military machine assets. This sparked my interest in equipment maintenance and the after sales market. When I later became an engineering consultant, advising on product lifecycle strategies for global OEMs such as Chrysler and General Dynamics, it became clear that Industry 4.0 technology had the potential to resolve a lot of the inefficiencies in this market.

Together with my co-founder Ed Brunyee – a corporate finance adviser with a strong interest in cloud technology – we realised we could provide critical solutions to the $400B after sales market which had traditionally been underserved by the technology sector.
This was the seed that led to the creation of SamsonVT. Today, we are focussed on developing technologies that resolve many of the challenges OEMs experience in industrial machinery and product maintenance.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
Our team has expanded greatly over the last two years. We started 2020 with a team of 3 but have built that up to 24 people operating from our main base in Manchester and premises in Daresbury, as well as 3 full-time employees based in Poland. This team has been instrumental in building our business’ foundations and bringing two fantastic products to life – SamsonCORE and our AI-empowered condition monitoring solution SamsonBASE.

In 2021, we also kicked off a £1.3M R&D project in partnership with leading industrial and electronics products distributor RS Components. Supported by a grant from Innovate UK, this 12-month project will see us further develop SamsonBASE and create an affordable, plug-and-play predictive maintenance (PdM) solution for SMEs.
 

What can we hope to see from SamsonVT in the future?

 
We recently announced that we had secured $5.1M in seed funding, with investment coming from Par Equity and Blumberg Capital. This financial backing will enable us to pursue an aggressive global growth strategy.

We will be scaling our production capabilities and enhancing our customer service as we expand into new territories. This includes the US market, where we are working with advisors at Sand Hill East to develop our business development strategy.

In addition to this, we will continue to develop new and existing products. It’s clear that there’s a real appetite among OEMs for intelligent solutions that can remove the complexities currently in the product maintenance and after sales market – and we want to be the people supplying those answers.