An AI search tool is helping everyone from production plant technicians to DIY-ers fixing their lawn mowers find the right parts for their job. And it just raised funding to bring its tech to more businesses.
Partium, a startup that’s created an artificial intelligence tool that helps technicians find parts for their systems quicker and more efficiently, recently raised $15 million in a Series A round. Its investors include TechNexus Venture Collaborative, Trestle Partners, Anzu Capital Partners and others.
The startup was formed in 2020 to provide a faster and more reliable part search experience. Partium helps companies in large industrial environments — think energy facilities, production plants, and mining companies — save time by simplifying the process of identifying spare parts.
For companies like wind energy firms, technicians have thousands of different parts they are responsible for, Partium CEO Philipp Descovich (pictured) said. And it can take anywhere between 15 minutes to several hours to identify the correct one, he said.
With Partium, technicians can take a photo, scan a barcode or enter text to find the exact part they’re looking for in just 15 seconds, Descovich said.

“If you work on the maintenance team of a mining corporation, those mines are very remote,” Descovich said. “And if you order the wrong part, it's really bad. You create a lot of costs and you lose a lot of time.”
In addition to working with large industrial companies, Partium also partners with The Home Depot. Its technology powers a feature of The Home Depot app that allows users to snap a picture of a part and get instant information on how to replace it. The Home Depot’s app has more than 8 million downloads.
With the new funding, Descovich said Partium will look to expand across North America and Europe. Having a partner like TechNexus has been invaluable, Descovich explained, given that TechNexus’s LPs are the same type of customers that Partium targets. TechNexus was also among the first outside investors to back Partium.
“That's why we’re really happy about TechNexus being on board with us because it's hard to find such partners [with industrial experience]," he said.