Fitness Tracker for a Factory

It’s business school 101: You can’t manage what you can’t measure, but what if getting those measurements is no easy feat? Manufacturing is a sector responsible for a full third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions[1], yet having live insights into factory-floor operations has been historically hard to do.

Lauren Dunford, ’09, MBA ’2018, is CEO of Guidewheel, a venture focused on improving efficiency in manufacturing, and she describes the situation as “a patchwork of patchworks.”

“If you have a factory full of a hundred expensive machines, you’re not going to toss them all out in one year,” she says. “You’re going to buy a new machine if one breaks down, or if you need to add capacity.”

The result is a hodgepodge of equipment ages, makes, and models spread out across warehouses. If you happen to be the one tasked with running operations, trying to grapple with those run-time metrics can feel like navigating the dark side of the moon.

But there’s one thing common across all types of machinery: electricity. They all draw power, and that’s the heartbeat of what Guidewheel does.

“We light up the blind spots for our clients,” says Dunford.

Using wireless sensors clipped directly onto equipment, and an AI-driven dashboard for interpreting data, Guidewheel has developed a platform compact enough to ship in a cardboard box and simple enough for customers to install themselves. The venture supports small family-owned businesses to the likes of Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola FEMSA, and General Motors.

“Like a Fitbit can clip around your wrist and just from your heartbeat can tell if you are running or cycling or in REM sleep, from the power draw of a machine, we can tell how it’s operating,” she says, recounting that one client in West Virginia even used Guidewheel’s technology to avoid a factory fire.

“We can actually count output, and of course get all the predictive indicators if a machine is having a problem.”

By capturing an exact picture of how each piece of equipment is operating, factory managers can intervene quickly when they spot an issue, avoiding wasted material, time, and money.

Productivity is paramount

The list of goods that Guidewheel clients manufacture is a litany of modern life, the everyday conveniences that keep us fed, healthy, and driving on the correct side of the street—items like picnic coolers, RV seats, plastic honey bears, berry clamshells, surgical sutures, greeting cards, metal rods, tile grout, vitamin bottles, and the color in traffic road stripes.

“It’s all interconnected. Our security, our ability to keep our standard of living, is all based on a resilient supply chain,” she says.

Dunford is blunt. Reducing carbon emissions is not the top priority for some of their clientele—productivity is. Increasing a factory’s productivity improves its bottom line, but it also tends to reduce energy use and emissions intensity. Anecdotally she says many clients have seen a 15 to 20 percent reduction in emissions intensity, and a third-party audit found an average of a 41 percent increase in production from the same assets among their clientele.

That’s a big deal when multiplied across millions of factories worldwide.

“And that’s what we’re out to do. We can drive at scale an impact on climate that is the size of all of Brazil, Mexico, or Canada’s emissions.”

In 2024, Guidewheel secured $31 million in Series B funding led by BlackRock and Temasek’s Decarbonization Partners Fund. As part of the latest round of investment, Guidewheel will begin formally tabulating all carbon savings affiliated with its technology. For clients eager to track ESG metrics, the Guidewheel dashboard gently assists with this process, too. 

Win-wins

Dunford has always had a bent toward efficiency. In high school, she led backpacking trips in the East Bay sierras, teaching kids to carry the 10 essentials as lightly as possible on their backs. As a Stanford undergrad, she met her cofounder, Weston McBride, ’09, who is still the CTO of Guidewheel, as they went head-to-head in rival environmental student groups. She’s proud of establishing Stanford’s Green Fund, operational improvement projects at the university that eventually pay for themselves.

“Boy, for things that both save money and are the right thing for the planet, I got hooked on those win-wins. Let me pour my heart and soul into finding and going after those.”

In the years between her BA and her MBA, Dunford earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study reducing waste in the supply chain. Then she led West Coast partnerships for Revolution Foods, an Oakland-based company that delivers readymade lunches to U.S. public schools, producing millions of units a week.

When something went wrong in production and affected a customer, she was the one who got the phone call at 5 a.m.

“Seeing the whiteboards, clipboards, paper that we were using to track production, I realized, oh my gosh, there aren’t great tools for manufacturers—even in the heart of Silicon Valley,” she says. “So, I spent every second of the MBA looking at how we solve that problem in a scalable and profitable way. I see my calling as let’s find the low-hanging fruit in the area of manufacturing.”

Guidewheel first piloted in Kenya, her husband’s home country. In Nairobi, she says the first test users brilliantly helped to simplify and co-design what has become Guidewheel.

“Everything that’s unique and wonderful about Guidewheel has been an idea from our customers,” she says. “We originally started with this premise that the most interesting innovations and ability to think ‘clean sheet’ about what’s possible for the world’s factories would actually come from emerging markets. They were less bogged down with legacy systems.”

Hands-on prototyping was made possible through an Innovation Transfer Grant from the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy in 2017.

“TomKat has been just fantastic to work with, and they were the very, very, very first backers of Guidewheel.”

As the venture started to expand into new emerging markets, the 2020 global pandemic forced a rapid pivot. The team returned to the United States and figured out how to launch a remote-first company.  

By 2024, Guidewheel had scaled up to support more than 250 manufacturers, with 60 employees globally and a headquarters in San Francisco. From launching enterprise partnerships with large multinational corporations to doubling down on the efficacy of AI technology, the venture is expanding the data insights available through the platform.

As for what’s next? Lauren Dunford is hoping for a resurgence in American manufacturing. And that takes fresh talent.

“If we can get even a couple of students reading this article and deciding that they want to become part of how we build sustainable, local American manufacturing—that would be pretty darn cool.”

This article is part of the TomKat Center Spotlight series designed to highlight the impact and trajectory of the work of faculty and students who received funding through our Innovation Transfer Program, TomKat Solutions, and Graduate Fellowships. Stanford University does not endorse any non-Stanford entities, programs, products, or services listed in the article. 

[1]Source: Breakthrough Energy