San Francisco · Manufacturing Intelligence · Est. 2021
Squint.
The factory floor is full of people who know exactly what to do - and almost no way to write it down. Squint is the company that finally caught it.
The factory floor is full of people who know exactly what to do - and almost no way to write it down. Squint is the company that finally caught it.
Somewhere on a packaging line right now, a machine is throwing a fault code nobody on this shift has seen. Downtime on a line like this can run two thousand dollars a minute. The veteran who used to fix it in ninety seconds took her instincts home for good. What's left is a binder, a group chat, and a younger operator holding a phone.
So the operator points the phone at the machine. Squint recognizes the equipment the way your phone recognizes your face - no QR sticker, no CAD file, no scavenger hunt through a 400-page PDF. A question gets typed. A fix comes back, in the operator's own language, with the exact steps the retired veteran would have walked through. The line moves again. Nobody panics. That is the entire pitch, and it is a good one.
Squint calls this Manufacturing Intelligence. The less polite version: it is a backup drive for the human brain, installed on a $7 trillion industry that has been quietly losing its memory as a generation of operators heads for the exit.
"Accelerate human potential by bringing digital knowledge into the real world."— Squint's mission, in plain English
Here is the uncomfortable math. The best operator in any plant carries decades of fixes, shortcuts, and "don't touch that valve before noon" wisdom that was never written anywhere. When they retire, it leaves with them. Hiring a replacement doesn't transfer the knowledge - it just resets the clock to zero.
The old answer was paper: standard operating procedures in binders, laminated checklists, a tribal oral history passed shift to shift. The trouble with tribal knowledge is that tribes forget. Squint's bet is that the phone in every operator's pocket can hold what the binder never could - and, crucially, can hand it back at the exact moment and machine where it's needed.
That timing is the whole trick. Knowledge sitting in a database is trivia. Knowledge that appears the instant you point a camera at the broken thing is a tool.
Record what your best people do, and Squint turns it into structured, searchable procedures. Data entry gets automated; custom work instructions get generated. The veteran's head becomes a document - while the veteran is still around to check it.
Mobile-first AR guidance built for greasy, loud, industrial reality - not a clean demo. Every operator runs the same step, the same way, so "standard work" stops being a poster on the wall.
Point the phone, ask the question, get the fix. Squint recognizes the machine itself - no QR codes, no CAD models - and walks anyone through the repair the experts already solved.
Adaptive, on-the-job training that tracks operator progress and feeds real-time performance data up to supervisors and executives. New hires get productive in weeks, not quarters.
"I run a machine where downtime costs $2,000 a minute. With Squint, anyone can point their phone, ask a question, and get the fix instantly."— A Squint operator, on what it changed
Founder and CEO Devin Bhushan led augmented-reality projects at Splunk before deciding the technology belonged somewhere louder and more useful than a dashboard demo - the factory floor.
The Series B isn't just a bigger number - it's a mandate. Squint says the fresh capital goes toward leading the "Agentic Manufacturing" wave and pushing past the factory into energy, logistics, and field services. Translation: the same trick that fixes a packaging line should fix a wind turbine.
Two minutes after the fault code, the machine is running again. The younger operator slides the phone back into a pocket. Nobody called the one person who knew the fix, because the fix was already in everyone's hand - typed up, in plain language, exactly where it was needed.
That's the quiet thing Squint actually changed. Not the technology - phones and cameras and AI are everywhere now. What changed is that the smartest person on the floor no longer has to be in the building. Their knowledge is. And when the next veteran retires, the floor keeps her wisdom and waves goodbye to the binder.
A $7 trillion industry spent decades watching its memory walk out the door at retirement age. Squint built the thing that asks it to stay.