John Younes

Co-Founder & COO Litmus

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

John Younes is a co-founder and the Chief Operating Officer of Litmus, the Silicon Valley company behind Litmus Edge, an industrial data platform that sits between the factory floor and everything downstream of it. The problem Litmus exists to solve is that a manufacturing plant is a museum of incompatible equipment: programmable logic controllers from the 1990s running alongside modern robotics, each speaking its own protocol, each holding data that is valuable and effectively unreachable. Litmus Edge connects to that equipment through more than 250 pre-built native connectors, normalises what comes back, and makes it available for real-time analytics, cloud pipelines into Azure, Google Cloud or AWS, and increasingly for AI models doing predictive maintenance and process optimisation. Younes owns operations and growth — the commercial and organisational side of turning that capability into a business serving Fortune 500 industrial and automotive customers.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Litmus, originally Litmus Automation, and has served as Chief Operating Officer throughout, responsible for operations and growth.
• Helped close a $30 million Series B in September 2022 led by Belden, taking total funding from $12.6 million to $42.6 million and bringing in a strategic partner from industrial connectivity hardware rather than a purely financial investor.
• Secured further strategic investment in November 2025 led by Insight Partners, with Munich Re Ventures participating via HSB Fund II, aimed at industrial AI; the amount was not disclosed.
• Grew the Litmus Edge connector library past 250 native connectors covering both legacy and modern factory equipment, with direct integrations to the three major cloud platforms.
• Built a customer and partner roster including Nissan, Renault, HPE and Intel.
• Sustained a public presence in the industrial DataOps field as an IIoT World contributor and conference speaker; in 2026 his talks have focused on agentic AI driving autonomous operations and workflow execution on the plant floor.

Professional Journey

Younes studied management at the University of Western Ontario and then took a master’s in management at EM Lyon Business School, specialising in global entrepreneurship. His own account of the years that followed is framed around start-ups and early-stage companies rather than a named employer, and no source located identifies one.

He co-founded Litmus Automation with Vatsal Shah, who became CEO, and Sacha Sawaya. The founding insight, as Shah has described it, was that the information a factory generates is trapped in silos — hard to access, hard to trust, and harder still to operationalise. The company’s answer was to build at the edge rather than in the cloud: get a normalised, trustworthy data layer running inside the plant, close to the machines, and only then worry about where the data goes next. Younes took the operating role from the start.

The company spent its first several years in the industrial IoT market’s long proving period, accumulating reference deployments with large automotive and industrial manufacturers. That work paid off in September 2022 with a $30 million Series B led by Belden. The choice of lead investor was strategic rather than incidental: Belden builds industrial networking and connectivity hardware, and the round was explicitly framed around expanding the reach of both companies’ edge solutions, alongside growth in EMEA and APAC and support for a set of fast-growing OEM relationships. The round roughly quadrupled the company’s cumulative funding, from $12.6 million to $42.6 million.

Litmus then repositioned from “industrial IoT platform” toward “industrial edge data platform” and, more recently, toward industrial AI — a shift that reflects where the value moved. Once the data is normalised and contextualised, the interesting question stops being connectivity and becomes what a model can do with it. In November 2025 the company announced additional strategic investment led by Insight Partners, with Munich Re Ventures participating through HSB Fund II, explicitly to accelerate that direction. Younes has been the public voice of the operational side of this shift, speaking in 2026 on agentic AI applied to autonomous operations — systems that do not just flag an anomaly but execute the resulting workflow.

Education

University of Western Ontario

Bachelor, Management

EM Lyon Business School

Master, Management, specialising in Global Entrepreneurship