He grew up watching yield slip away on an Irish kill floor. Now his cameras catch it the instant it happens - on conveyor belts in beef and poultry plants across three continents.
Clip the FloVision Nano onto a moving conveyor belt and it starts doing the one thing a busy plant floor never has time for: paying attention. Vision, depth, and weight, frame after frame, every chicken breast and beef trim that slides past. It measures. It spots defects. It flags the yield bleeding out of an operation one knife-stroke at a time. Rian Mc Donnell built it because, in his words, the food industry has been slow to innovate - and he had the receipts to prove it.
Today Mc Donnell runs FloVision Solutions from South Bend, Indiana, an Irish company that crossed the Atlantic and put down roots in the American Midwest. In July 2025 the company closed an $8.7 million Series A led by Insight Partners, the kind of round that turns a clever idea into an industrial standard. The platform has already analyzed more than 23.2 million kilograms of food. Customers report up to 15x returns. One beef processor saw trimming speed jump 6.7%. None of that is hypothetical. It is running, right now, on real production floors.
The pitch is almost rude in its simplicity: the same animal, the same line, the same crew - and up to 1.5% more usable product, because someone finally pointed a smart enough eye at where it was being lost.
I saw firsthand how yield loss and quality inconsistencies impact processors. These experiences shaped my belief that technology could revolutionise an industry that has been slow to innovate.- Rian Mc Donnell, founder & CEO, FloVision Solutions
The detail that explains everything: Mc Donnell's family worked in beef processing in rural Ireland. He grew up near the floor, absorbing the rhythm and the waste of protein production before he had the vocabulary for either. Yield loss was not a slide in a pitch deck. It was the family business.
He took that to Trinity College Dublin, earned a bachelor's and master's (MAI) in Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering by 2019, and spent an exchange year at UC Berkeley elbow-deep in graphene and 2D materials research - plus a stint as a Siemens research intern. Somewhere between the autonomous racing car project and a fall-detection smartwatch, his dissertation turned toward food waste. The idea that became FloVision hatched inside Trinity's "Innovation in Product Development" module and grew up through the LaunchBox incubator and TU Dublin's New Frontiers program.
It started life as FloWaste, pointed at cafeterias and portion sizing. By 2021 it had $270K in pre-seed and seven pilots lined up - including Ireland's largest beef processor and major fast-food chains. Then came the pivot that mattered: from trays in a canteen to trim on a kill floor. Notre Dame's ESTEEM entrepreneurship master's and SOSV's IndieBio brought the company to the United States, and the protein line became the whole game.
Graphene and 2D-materials research at UC Berkeley; research intern at Siemens.
Graduates Trinity College Dublin with an MAI in Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering.
Founds the company as FloWaste out of a Trinity student project; incubated via LaunchBox and New Frontiers.
Raises ~$270K pre-seed. Lines up pilots including Ireland's largest beef processor and major fast-food chains.
Pivots from cafeteria food service to protein processing. Launches FloVision Nano and FloVision Pro.
Scales deployments across beef and poultry plants in North America, Europe and Australia.
Closes $8.7M Series A led by Insight Partners. Total funding reaches roughly $11.6M.
FloVision sells cameras and sensors that bolt onto existing lines and feed a dashboard supervisors actually read. No rip-and-replace. Just eyes where there were none.
A compact camera system that mounts to a conveyor belt and captures vision, depth and weight together. It measures products, spots defects and analyzes volumes without disrupting the line.
A three-camera rig with dynamic laser projection that watches a worker trim at a station, tracks yield and quality, and feeds real-time guidance back to the operator. The dashboard benchmarks shifts and sharpens labor efficiency.
Computer vision is a fundamental component of our offering.- and it runs on edge hardware right on the plant floor: NVIDIA Jetson, Raspberry Pi, the works.
Initially, I was skeptical about needing an accelerator, thinking perhaps we were beyond that stage.- before going through IndieBio, Rockstart and Notre Dame's ESTEEM
Seeing our work result in improved yields and less waste from the industry is gratifying on many levels.- Rian Mc Donnell
This funding unlocks a whole new world of food production tech.- on the 2025 Series A
We're looking for people who want to solve real-world problems in food.- hiring, post-raise
The next three to five years are about deepening our product capabilities and expanding globally to more protein processors.- The long game: become the largest AI-enabled hardware-and-services provider to the global food industry, and shave 1% off global greenhouse emissions by killing waste at the source.
See the cameras in action and hear Mc Donnell talk shop.