As factories and manufacturing facilities have become “smarter” through sensors, robotics and other connected technologies, this has created a potential treasure trove of data that can be leveraged for bottleneck insights throttling and other areas for improvement. Or maybe even just to speed up processes that would otherwise require significant manual labor.
But much of this generated data is unstructured and difficult to leverage from the start. Although big data analytics has been a mainstay of industries like finance and logistics for years, it has yet to fully catch on in manufacturing. This has created an untapped goldmine of information and, more recently, a burgeoning market for technologies designed to both capture and make sense of a vast range of manufacturing data.
Last month, British company Oden Technologies, now based in New York, raised a $28.5 million Series B round to drive growth of its data analytics platform for manufacturers. German company Daedalus has raised $21 million to apply AI to precision manufacturing plants. And Belgian company Robovision got $42 million to bring computer vision intelligence to industrial machines.
Now it’s EthonAI’s turn, as the Swiss startup announced on Thursday that it had raised 15 million francs ($16.5 million) in a Series A funding round led by Index Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Earlybird and Founderful.
EthonAI finds product defects
Founded in Zurich in 2021 by CEO Julian Senoner and CTO Bernhard Kratzwald, EthonAI can train AI models for specific use cases, for example in electronics manufacturing where the customer provides defect-free product images and the EthonAI’s Inspector software can then identify surface defects. in products during the manufacturing and assembly process. Apple recently acquired a company called DarwinAI that has a similar goal, in terms of automating the visual quality management process in component manufacturing.
More broadly, however, EthonAI can combine data from a company’s entire manufacturing setup, from sensors to line stops, and build a picture of where things are and aren’t working well – and even compare the performance of multiple installations to see where they might be. room for improvement.
During its three years of existence, EthonAI has gathered quite prestigious clients, including Siemens and the chocolatier Lindt.
Analysis of EthonAI’s target markets reveals that semiconductor manufacturing is a particular area of interest, although the company has not disclosed any specific customers in this area. However, low yield is a known problem in the chip industry, where defects in silicon wafers can affect the number of chips that are actually usable after production. Notably, Apple reportedly struck a deal last year with chipmaker TSMC that apparently had particularly low rates of return (only 55% at the time), with Apple striking a deal to only pay for known good tranches , thus saving billions of dollars.
EthonAI, for its part, says it works with a “leading semiconductor producer” that uses its platform to merge multiple data sets to conduct analyzes and identify previously unknown relationships between processes, equipment and efficiency rates.
“The manufacturing industry is at a critical juncture, and companies that fail to adapt to AI risk falling behind,” Senoner said in a press release. “Factories produce mountains of data and AI is the key to gaining insights to achieve operational excellence. »
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