Stockholm-based industrial troubleshooting platform Mavenoid has raised $1.9 million in a funding round led by Point Nine Capital, with participation from Creandum and angel investors. As part of the investment, Christoph Janz, Partner at Point Nine, and Staffan Helgesson, General Partner at Creandum, will join Mavenoid’s board. The company is planning to use the funding to hire more people and expand outside of the Nordics.

Founded by two former Palantir employees in 2016 and launched in 2017, Mavenoid is an automated troubleshooting platform that serves as the first level of technical support. The customer arriving at the website is asked a series of structured multiple-choice questions that narrow down the issue with their product.

“For example, if your equipment has trouble turning on, the Mavenoid-powered technical support might ask simple and structured questions that would diagnose the issue in the electrical system and provide the solution to fix it,” the company explained in a press release. “Answering structured questions provides instant technical support that’s actually useful, and is much faster than expressing a technical problem in your own words, which is why chatbots can be so frustrating.”

The founders of the startup, Shahan Lilja and Gintas (Gintautas) Miliauskas, got the initial idea of building a product for industrial troubleshooting after leaving Palantir. They ended up using a technology developed at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to create the first version of Mavenoid.

“The first diagnosis engine (the module that takes in symptoms of a problem and spits out possible solutions) that we used was spun off from SICS,” Shahan Lilja told Tech.eu. “The code base has since been completely rewritten but it turned out to be a great hack/time machine to get to market faster. Early on it really helped with credibility, learnings, references, etc. from all these multi-year R&D projects with large industrial organisations that we could piggy-back on. Some of our customers, e.g. Scania, come from the network around SICS.”