OTee raised €5.3 million to build virtual controllers for industrial automation—a bet that decades of proven hardware are ready for a cloud-native rethink.
For more than forty years, the machines that run oil platforms, water treatment plants, and factory assembly lines have depended on a particular breed of specialized hardware: programmable logic controllers, or PLCs. These rugged devices are designed to survive extreme temperatures, vibration, and the kind of electromagnetic interference that would fry a standard computer. They've also been, in many ways, immune to the software revolution that reshaped most other corners of enterprise technology.
OTee, a startup operating from a co-working space in Lysaker, just outside Oslo, thinks that's about to change.
The three-year-old company closed a €5.3 million seed round on April 28, 2026, with North Ventures leading and Milan-based Atlas SGR joining as a new investor. Existing backers RunwayFBU, Superangel, and Antler participated. It's the kind of capital that suggests investors see an opening—however narrow—to challenge the hardware incumbents that have dominated industrial control for generations.
OTee's pitch is straightforward, if ambitious: replace those proprietary metal boxes with software that runs on commodity Linux servers. The platform executes virtual PLCs inside Docker containers, using the IEC 61131-3 Structured Text standard that control engineers already know. Engineers write logic in a browser-based development environment; data flows through MQTT, OPC UA, and NATS protocols. There's role-based access, zero-trust security architecture, centralized fleet management. And, inevitably, an AI assistant—this one named Martha—for code generation and quality checks.
Whether plant operators accustomed to equipment that runs for decades with minimal intervention will trust critical infrastructure to software remains an open question.
The Industry Context, Such As It Is
The timing isn't random. Siemens introduced its SIMATIC S7-1500V virtual PLC at Hannover Messe in May 2023, a signal that even the entrenched players sense something shifting. McKinsey flagged "soft PLCs" as one of ten game-changing automation technologies in a June 2023 report that made the rounds in industrial circles. And a January 2025 analysis from PAC, a European market research firm, predicted virtual PLC adoption would begin in earnest that year—though it qualified that forecast with the caveat that early deployments would likely stay confined to specific use cases.
OTee, which formally incorporated as OTee AS in December 2022, had previously raised €1.25 million in February 2024 in a round co-led by RunwayFBU and Superangel. The new funding is meant to accelerate product development, push into new geographies, and scale partnerships with systems integrators and hardware vendors—the kind of channel relationships that matter when you're trying to crack a market where switching costs are high and reliability is non-negotiable.
The company's most visible deployment so far is with Aker BP, a Norwegian energy producer. In April, Aker BP's Chief Digital Officer, Paula Doyle, offered a public endorsement, and OTee referenced subsea control applications—exactly the sort of high-stakes environment where virtual PLCs would need to prove themselves.
The startup also claims some eye-catching performance numbers: 15x higher tag capacity, 455x better data resolution, 75% faster scan frequency. Hardware capital expenditure supposedly drops 50%, and operating costs for PLC management fall 75%. Those figures, though, come from OTee's own technical documentation and customer examples, the kind of vendor-supplied metrics that warrant a degree of skepticism until validated by third parties.
Beyond Aker BP, OTee says it has deployments across energy infrastructure, water and wastewater systems, and discrete manufacturing. It announced a partnership with Edgenaut, a U.S.-based solutions provider, in a LinkedIn post roughly nine months back—a move that signals intent to expand beyond Scandinavia, even if the details remain thin.
Who's Building This, and What Comes Next
Henrik Pedersen, OTee's co-founder and CEO, and Radek Janik, co-founder and CTO, are leading a team that's still small but hiring. The company posted an opening for a Lead AI Engineer in April, according to its careers page. Employee headcount is a bit murky—LinkedIn lists the range as 11 to 50, last updated nine months ago, while Fundup AI, a third-party data aggregator, pegged the number at around 21 in late April. Either way, it's the kind of lean operation that needs to move quickly if it's going to carve out space against incumbents like Siemens, Rockwell Automation, and Schneider Electric.
Those giants are already pivoting toward software and services revenue, a shift that may help or hinder a company like OTee depending on how fast the market actually moves. Virtual PLCs face real hurdles: safety certifications, integration friction with legacy systems, and the challenge of convincing plant operators to swap out hardware that's been running without incident for twenty years.
Perhaps the bigger question isn't whether virtual PLCs make technical sense—most experts seem to agree they do, at least in principle—but whether the industry is willing to make the leap. OTee's bet is that the answer is yes, or at least yes enough to build a sustainable business. The funding gives them runway to find out.
