[Press release] Digiclean Closes EUR 2.5M Seed Round to Cut Chemical Waste and Optimise Cleaning Operations Across Manufacturing Industries
Digiclean Closes EUR 2.5M Seed Round Led by Unconventional Ventures and Almi Invest GreenTech to Cut Chemical Waste and Optimise Cleaning Operations Across Manufacturing Industries
Gothenburg, Sweden – Digiclean has secured new funding from Unconventional Ventures and Almi Invest GreenTech, who co-led the Seed Round, to advance its platform for industrial cleaning and maintenance optimisation. The round also included participation from S-E Bankens Utvecklingsstiftelse, Impact Shakers and Feminvest Ventures. The investment will support continued product development and commercial scaling across Sweden and key European industrial markets.
Industrial washing processes are a mission-critical function in asset-intensive industries, directly affecting equipment performance, component quality, production uptime, regulatory compliance, and worker safety. Despite its importance, the category remains almost entirely manual, reactive, and difficult to measure.
Before a component can be coated, painted or assembled, it must be perfectly clean. Factories wash parts in large cleaning machines, and the chemistry in those processes determines product quality, uptime and cost. Process chemistry is one of the last unmeasured systems in modern manufacturing. While machines, energy and logistics have been digitised, the chemistry that determines component quality and uptime is still managed by manual sampling
and intuition.
The Digiclean platform is already deployed across more than 20 industrial sites in Sweden, including installations with leading automotive and manufacturing companies. Digiclean addresses this through a plug-and-play IoT sensor and AI model that continuously monitors cleaning bath chemistry and automates chemical dosing, replacing manual sampling with real-time data. The platform allows customers to significantly reduce unplanned downtime, optimise resource use across water, chemicals and labour, and improve traceability and compliance. Every process fluid in a factory continuously carries information about product quality, equipment condition and chemical consumption. Digiclean captures it in real time, making a previously invisible layer of production data measurable and actionable.
Founder perspective
"Industrial cleaning is a fundamental part of how factories operate, yet it has remained largely unchanged for decades. We are building the tools needed to make it measurable, optimisable, and aligned with modern efficiency and sustainability requirements. With the incredible support and belief of Unconventional Ventures and Almi Invest GreenTech, we can accelerate this transition across industries." – Charlotte Stigen Låstberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Digiclean
From an environmental perspective, inefficient cleaning processes contribute to unnecessary chemical waste, excess resource consumption, and avoidable emissions. Digiclean’s approach enables more targeted interventions and supports customers in reducing their operational footprint while maintaining high performance standards.
"At Unconventional Ventures, we look for companies working in places that have been overlooked — where the problem is real, the founder has lived it, and the commercial logic is inseparable from the impact case. Digiclean is all three. Charlotte grew up inside the industrial chemical industry. She knows the problem from the inside out. And every sensor her team installs reduces chemical consumption, wastewater, and CO2 while generating recurring revenue — impact and returns are not in tension here, they are the same thing. That is exactly the kind of company Unconventional Ventures was built to back." – Alexis Horowitz-Burdick, Partner, Unconventional Ventures.
"Digiclean has done something most early-stage companies struggle with: they have built a technically differentiated product and secured validation from leading industrial customers. The team's ability to translate a complex technical solution into commercial traction at such an early stage is particularly impressive. Combined with strong unit economics, favourable regulatory tailwinds, and deep domain expertise, we believe Digiclean is exceptionally well positioned to capitalise on a significant market opportunity." – Jonathan Lannö, Investment Manager, Almi Invest GreenTech