defect-detection
(6)
Mark Chiappetta
Mark Chiappetta is the president and CEO of Oxipital AI, a Bedford, Massachusetts company that builds AI-driven machine vision for factory lines that pick, count, and inspect food. He is an electrical engineer who spent 30-plus years in robotics, including a run as a corporate VP at iRobot and eight years growing Soft Robotics from an early gripper startup. In 2024 he took the top job at Soft Robotics, then engineered the pivot that spun the company's 3D vision and AI software into Oxipital AI while the gripper hardware business was sold off. His pitch is that food processors will not rip out human lines for robots overnight, so Oxipital sells the eyes and brains first and the hands later.
Salem Karani
Salem Karani is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Tristar AI, a Boston-based startup building an AI-native computer vision platform for real-time quality monitoring and human-machine interaction on factory floors. Raised inside his family's plastic film manufacturing business, he turned a childhood spent around production lines into a company that helps manufacturers cut scrap, reduce waste, and improve uptime. Tristar's models read human motion at a kinematic level, letting them drop into new factories without retraining. The company raised a $3.15M seed in June 2024 led by Las Olas Venture Capital and TenOneTen Ventures.
Kemal Levi
Kemal Levi is the founder and CEO of Relimetrics, an industrial AI company splitting its headquarters between Sunnyvale and Berlin. A Stanford-trained materials scientist who once measured how skin behaves under stress for the cosmetics industry, he now builds ReliVision, a no-code, GenAI-powered platform that lets factories teach machines to spot their own defects. He has spent more than fifteen years turning non-destructive testing and computer vision into shop-floor software, and counts NVIDIA's Inception program among Relimetrics' backers.
Chris Dyke
Christopher Van Dyke is the Co-Founder and CEO of Overview AI, a San Francisco-based industrial machine vision company using deep learning to catch manufacturing defects before they cost factories millions. A Stanford-educated mechanical engineer who spent eight-plus years at Tesla launching the Supercharger network and scaling the Model 3 battery program, Van Dyke founded Overview in 2018 with a simple premise: manual inspection costs manufacturers an estimated $300 billion a year, and AI can fix that. Overview's smart cameras - running NVIDIA GPUs at the edge - now serve over 100 manufacturers across 15 countries, including Toyota, Honda, and Tyson Foods, typically delivering ROI within three to six months.
Anna-Katrina Shedletsky
Anna-Katrina Shedletsky is the CEO and co-founder of Instrumental Inc., a Palo Alto-based AI manufacturing software company she founded in 2015 after six years at Apple—where she spent 300+ days in Chinese factories debugging manufacturing issues for the iPod and led product design for the original Apple Watch. At Instrumental, she is converting those factory-floor battle scars into software that uses AI and cameras to find defects and eliminate waste on electronics assembly lines, with customers including Cisco, Honeywell, Bose, Meta, and Lenovo. The company has raised $80.3M in total funding and was named Fast Company's #2 Most Innovative Manufacturing Company in 2021. She also founded the Women in STEM Mentorship Program (WISMP) at Stanford in 2013, which now spans multiple universities.
Keven Wang
Keven Wang is the Co-Founder and CEO of UnitX, a Santa Clara-based AI robotics company transforming industrial quality control through machine vision. A Stanford computer science alumnus with roots in SalesforceIQ engineering, Wang founded UnitX in 2018 alongside Adam Yang and Weixiong Zheng. The company has since deployed 820+ AI inspection systems across 135+ factories worldwide - inspecting $6.1B worth of products annually - and raised $92M in total funding. UnitX's flagship platforms (FleX, GenX, OptiX) help automotive, EV battery, and electronics manufacturers cut defect escapes by 9x and reduce scrap rates by up to 50%, with a philosophy Wang distills as: 'automate everything and maximize human intellect.'