The world relies on critical infrastructure. Water, power, manufacturing – all are incredibly important to our everyday lives, affecting how we live, how we play, and how we function as a society. Some of these systems are connected to the internet, delivering efficiencies and improvements by unleashing the power of data – but many more are not, due to the cyber security risk in allowing outside connections. There are numerous opportunities to deliver efficiency improvements and better reliability into our infrastructure today – but these systems will never be able to see these efficiencies, because they must be permanently offline.
Solving this challenge – and bringing intelligence to equipment normally too remote or too secure to use the cloud – is exactly what Sentinel Devices was founded to do. Sentinel Devices set out to answer a simple question: “How do we make each and every piece of industrial equipment self-monitoring and self-reporting?” That simple question sparked years of applied creativity, innovation, market research and product development, culminating in Sentinel Devices’ flagship product, OTAware (Operational Technology Aware).
OTAware is focused on identifying early signs of machine degradation or failure, utilizing advanced machine learning algorithms to identify early signs of issues using data taken from the digital controllers (or “digital brains”) used in all industrial machines. From there, OTAware flags these early signs for engineers to examine and decide on – letting engineers know, just in time, if and when something is going wrong, and pointing out root cause. By speeding up troubleshooting efforts, OTAware reduces the time engineers spend fixing an issue by 30% – saving potentially millions of dollars every year.
Sentinel Devices’ unique approach is that OTAware is engineered to do everything on device – data collection, processing, storage, AI training, monitoring, and analysis – entirely offline and without the cloud. This means customers can confidently deploy OTAware immediately to monitor their equipment – since data never leaves their facility, or even their equipment, even the most security-sensitive customers are able to use OTAware platform to monitor their equipment.
Sentinel Devices has expanded the scope and capabilities of its product, and today is providing a solution that is ready for the thousands of customers and millions of machines out there that need to stay offline. Sentinel Devices is the only company that allows these customers to maintain their security stance while delivering operational improvements that can save millions of dollars every year.
The Sentinel Journey – 2020-2021
Established in 2020, in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sentinel Devices started as a cybersecurity company. Founded to identify and defeat “Stuxnet-style” attacks, Sentinel Devices began working on technology that could defeat advanced cyber-physical attacks targeting critical infrastructure. The thinking was simple: if you are running a critical facility, such as a water treatment plant or power plant, you do care if an advanced cyber-attacker has infiltrated your facility. But, right at that moment when you discover you’re being attacked, you care a lot more about whether your facility – which might be producing life-sustaining goods & services for thousands or even millions of people – is about to be affected physically by a cyber-attack. At that moment, your primary goal is to make sure that no one is going to get hurt and the industrial process runs safely.
A cyber-attack that damages equipment isn’t a hypothetical; the Stuxnet attack showed that damaging equipment even in a secured nuclear facility could be done, and it could be done without the attacker ever entering the facility physically. The attackers knew that the facility under attack would be mostly monitored from a remote control room – so they took steps to ensure that any evidence of their attack would be undetected in a centralized control room or monitoring station.
Motivated by this, Sentinel Devices developed a generalized explainable AI system that could be deployed within the equipment itself. The idea was simple: instead of monitoring for suspicious anomalies within the control room, what if we could make the equipment itself self-monitoring and self-reporting? What if the equipment itself could say “Hey, this doesn’t look right, someone should come check on me?” This technology could even detect Stuxnet-style attacks. We knew what we had to do – and Sentinel Devices was off to the races, first proving that the technology could be deployed internally within advanced industrial equipment, and then further refining that concept into what would become our flagship product – a single plug-and-play device called “OTAware”.
The Sentinel Journey – 2021-2023
The work Sentinel Devices was doing – and the promise of how it would revolutionize industrial monitoring – soon caught the eye of one of the most important organizations in deploying, managing, and securing critical infrastructure, the U.S. Department of Energy. This culminated in Sentinel Devices being selected as one of six companies in the country into the prestigious Innovation Crossroads program – a two-year accelerator focused on accelerating hard-technology companies. Innovation Crossroads specifically focuses on helping early-stage technology companies develop and de-risk their technologies, advancing the technology and commercial readiness, and helping them enter and succeed with the developed technologies.
Through Innovation Crossroads, Sentinel Devices began working with scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, developing research testbeds and evaluating the company’s technology. Many lessons were learned, lessons that could only be taught in one of the nation’s foremost laboratories. However, one fact became apparent: there was strong value and uniqueness in Sentinel’s approach to cybersecurity, but what customers were asking for – and frequently – was maintenance monitoring. “If you’re monitoring for something going wrong,” one customer said, “there’s a lot that can go wrong besides a cyber-attack that we have to fix. Can you help us monitor for that?” This was the genesis of the company’s current mission – monitoring machine signals for signs of deviation, which could indicate an advanced cyber-attack, but could also indicate that a degrading motor needs repair or a failing valve needs to be replaced. For an industrial facility, either one can be bad – and Sentinel’s technology could monitor for, and catch, both much earlier.
Sentinel Devices didn’t just spend these years developing its technology; the company aggressively showed its progress and product at conferences, trade shows, and expos, evangelizing and demonstrating early versions of the technology and taking every opportunity to understand how different industries think about operations & maintenance and cybersecurity. They also won multiple awards; Sentinel Devices won the Defense Innovation Award at Defense TechConnect and was voted Top 40 Innovative Companies in Georgia. Sentinel has continued to refine its product based on customer feedback, conducting deployments of the technology within beer production facilities, test loops, and material stress-testing facilities to show value to customers and understand how the company needs to grow to meet customer needs.
The Sentinel Journey – Today
After graduating from the Innovation Crossroads program in 2023 and being accepted into the Northrop Grumman Technology Accelerator, Sentinel Devices was selected to the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC). With 150+ portfolio companies, and a 40-year history of accelerating startups in the Southeast, ATDC is the premier startup accelerator for hard-technology companies. After opening their second office in ATDC, Sentinel Devices quickly connected with the Atlanta ecosystem, integrating with ATDC’s vibrant start-up environment, mentors and resources, and presenting to the accelerator’s defense-focused sponsors. Sentinel Devices’ technology also gained great interest from the defense side. They were awarded a “Phase I” Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) investment from the Department of Defense to identify DoD customers that could use the fundamental capabilities of OTAware. Through this award, Sentinel Devices worked to interview and understand the market need for the technology across the U.S. – identifying multiple installations and use cases as good candidates and developing relationships across the enterprise. Sentinel Devices then was awarded a follow-on Phase II investment of 1.21 million dollars in early 2024 to iterate on and refine their technology specifically for these identified customers to monitor and protect security-sensitive assets and machinery.
The Future of Sentinel Devices
Since its founding, Sentinel Devices has remained focused on the mission of making every single machine self-monitoring and self-reporting. Through their DOE and DoD funding, they have developed technology that is on the cutting edge of both anomaly detection and data collection. They are not only unlocking data from millions of machines that normally go unmonitored – they are delivering insights to machinery and facilities that were previously unreachable, and are doing that while increasing the security of these facilities. Sentinel Devices is working on technology that applies to infrastructure and machinery around the world – machines that keep the lights running and water flowing for billions of people. And Sentinel Devices is doing it all from the heart of ATL.
A Thought Leader – Dr. Forrest Shriver, Founder & CEO of Sentinel Devices
Having earned his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Florida at just 25 years old, Dr. Forrest Shriver is a remarkable startup leader. During his Ph.D., he utilized high-performance computing and AI to predict burnup and composition in reactor cores, with a commitment to using HPC to tackle the most challenging nuclear engineering problems. His entrepreneurial spirit was ignited in 2019 when he met his role model, Jensen Huang. Driven by a passion to innovate, he realized that while being a nuclear scientist allowed him to contribute significantly to the world, being an entrepreneur enabled him to solve everyday problems, ensure smooth operations, and create jobs for others. Embracing this journey, he started his venture and has never looked back.
