Evansville-based Quarion Technology Secures Funding to Grow Team, Increase Marketing Efforts

January 28, 2019

Company uses Internet of Things (IoT) technology to improve forklift safety

Evansville, Ind. — Quarion Technology, an Evansville company that develops precision location technology for forklifts and personnel, has raised $700,000 in seed funding from investors including Elevate Ventures.

Quarion enables employers and managers to track and log positions and the location histories of employees and forklifts to improve employee safety and forklift efficiency.

President and CEO Aric Pryor founded Quarion in 2015 to prevent mobile equipment accidents. Nearly 100 workers are killed and another 20,000 are seriously injured annually in forklift accidents, the company says.

Pryor, who has nearly 30 years of experience in engineering, says Quarion’s real-time location system is designed to track forklifts indoors with better precision than global positioning systems are able to outdoors.

Pryor has used the funding to hire two key employees—one in software and one in operations. Quarion will also focus more attention on ensuring it is marketing the right product to the right customer. He credited Elevate Ventures, an Indianapolis-based venture capital firm, and Elevate’s southwest Indiana Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Eric Steele for the funding and guidance.

“Eric Steele and Elevate have been great resources for me for the past year and a half and I am excited that they played a major role in my first funding round,” Pryor said. “This funding is going to allow us to further develop our data and cloud platform as well as increase our focus on marketing. I’m really looking forward to 2020 and beyond.”

Quarion is supported by a partnership between Elevate Ventures and the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana. This partnership, known as Elevate Southwest Indiana, has a long-term goal of developing a culture and infrastructure of sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship in the Southwest Indiana region.