quality-control
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The 63-Year-Old Machine Builder Teaching Factories to See Inside Things
LK Metrology helped turn the coordinate measuring machine into a computerized judge of manufactured parts. Now the Derby company is assembling a broader inspection stack - touch probes, blue lasers, software and X-rays - for factories where a few microns can separate a clean delivery from an expensive problem.
Ram Radhakrishnan Is Fixing the 70% of a Product Journey Brands Rarely See
The Silq founder spent years moving freight. Then he built a company around the quieter problem before the port: knowing what is actually happening on the factory floor.
SiteCapture’s $350-a-Month Fix for the Most Expensive Photo a Solar Crew Forgot to Take
A forgotten inverter label can cost a solar installer a truck roll and a financing delay. SiteCapture built a business around catching that mistake while the crew is still on the roof.
The AI Startup Teaching Machines to Read Matter - Before the Lab Calls Back
HyperSpectral began with a three-hour COVID testing line and a failed ad-tech bet. Now it is building a software layer that promises to turn light into answers - across blood samples, bioreactors, food lines and defense supply chains.
The Startup Teaching Cameras to Catch What Tired Human Eyes Miss on the Assembly Line
Akridata spent years fixing AI's boring, expensive data problem - then pointed the same tools at factory defects and got acquired by DIMAAG in 2026.
Novade Solutions
Novade Solutions is a Singapore-based construction technology company that builds smart field management software for the building and infrastructure industry. Its mobile-first platform digitizes and automates on-site processes - quality control, safety inspections, site diaries, progress reporting, defect management and equipment maintenance - so contractors, developers and owners can capture what happens in the field and turn it into data managers can act on. Founded in 2014 by former Autodesk executive Denis Branthonne, Novade is used across roughly 25 countries and more than 10,000 sites, serving general contractors, real estate developers, trade contractors, home builders and government departments.
AI Clearing
AI Clearing is an Austin- and Warsaw-based construction technology company that turns drone imagery and site data into automated progress tracking, quality control, and field intelligence for large infrastructure projects. Its AI-native platform ingests drone flights, CAD/BIM designs, schedules, and mobile field data into a single source of truth, delivering analyzed progress reports typically within hours rather than weeks. Serving contractors, asset owners, and lenders on utility-scale solar, energy transmission, roads, railways, and earthworks, the company raised a $14M Series A in 2023 and was the first technology firm in the world to certify its AI management system against ISO 42001.
Clarapath
Clarapath is a Hawthorne, New York medical robotics company that automates one of the most manual steps in cancer diagnosis: cutting and transferring paper-thin tissue sections onto slides for pathologists to read. Its flagship system, SectionStar, combines robotics, machine vision and AI to standardize tissue sectioning, cut turnaround times and ease chronic staffing shortages in histology labs. Founded in 2014 out of neuroanatomy research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the company has raised roughly $75 million and works with partners including the Mayo Clinic and Northwell Health.
Gembah
Gembah is an Austin-based product development platform and marketplace that helps entrepreneurs, e-commerce sellers, and small-to-midsize businesses take physical products from idea to shelf. It connects creators with a global network of vetted designers, engineers, and supply chain specialists, and manages design, prototyping, factory sourcing, and production across regions including China, Vietnam, India, Mexico, and Eastern Europe - aiming to demystify and democratize the process of bringing new consumer products to market.
Made Scientific
Made Scientific is a Princeton, New Jersey-based contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) focused exclusively on cell therapies. Formerly BioCentriq, it was rebranded in March 2025 and is backed by South Korea's GC Corporation. The company runs a 60,000 sq. ft. GMP facility with five ISO 7 / Grade B cleanrooms, offering process and analytical development, GMP manufacturing of autologous and allogeneic products, aseptic fill and finish, QC release testing, regulatory consulting, and workforce training, taking cell therapy programs from preclinical development through commercial supply.
Toggle Robotics
Toggle Robotics is a New York-based construction-technology company that applies industrial robots, computer vision and software to the pre-assembly and inspection of steel reinforcement (rebar) and other fabricated parts. Founded in 2016 by Daniel Blank and Ian Cohen, Toggle built a full-stack system - robotic hardware plus its Toggle OS software - that turns construction drawings into automated manufacturing programs, cutting labor cost and lifting output on civil infrastructure, energy and high-rise projects. The company has since extended into inline quality control with Toggle QC, which scans fabricated parts on the production line to confirm critical features before parts ship.
Calibra Scientific Inc.
Calibra Scientific Inc. (Hangzhou Calibra Diagnostics Co., Ltd., 凯莱谱) is a clinical mass spectrometry and multi-omics company that builds the full stack of precision diagnostics - instruments, reagent kits, reference materials and central-lab services. Founded in 2016 by Hua-fen Liu, a veteran of SCIEX, Roche and Pfizer, and backed as a DIAN Diagnostics company, Calibra has launched the NMPA-registered CalQuant-S mass spectrometry system, 10+ Class II reagent kits and 300+ clinical assays, serving more than 20,000 hospitals and research institutions across China.
Invisible AI
Invisible AI builds edge-based computer vision systems for manufacturing floors. Its self-contained camera devices - each pairing an Intel RealSense 3D depth camera with an NVIDIA AI chipset and on-board storage - mount to existing factory infrastructure and turn manual assembly work into structured, cycle-level data without sending video to the cloud. Founded in 2018 by veterans of the autonomous-vehicle world, the company helps automakers and aerospace manufacturers such as Toyota spot cycle-time variation, ergonomic risk, and quality defects in real time. In 2026 it launched what it calls the world's first Vision Execution System, built on NVIDIA Metropolis and Cosmos Reason models, to run AI agents that analyze every production cycle at the edge.
Silq
Silq is a QC-powered digital freight forwarder that unifies factory inspections with freight management on a single platform, giving apparel, footwear, home goods and accessory brands real-time visibility from the factory floor to final delivery. Founded in 2020 by ex-Flexport operators, the company pairs 360+ accredited on-the-ground inspectors across Asia with proprietary software so importers can ship with more predictability and fewer surprises.
Michael Mazur
Michael Mazur is co-founder and CEO of AI Clearing, an Austin-based platform that ingests drone imagery, BIM designs, schedules and ground data to produce autonomous progress tracking and quality control for large infrastructure builds. A former PwC partner who ran the firm's global Drone Powered Solutions unit, Mazur left in 2020 with co-founder Adam Wisniewski to spin the idea out as an independent company; in October 2023 the company closed a $14M Series A led by Prudence, on the back of 15x revenue growth.
Averroes.ai
Averroes.ai is a San Mateo-based startup building a no-code AI visual inspection platform that helps manufacturers automatically detect, classify, segment and monitor defects on their production lines. Founded in 2021 by Tareq Aljaber and Omar Altamimi, the company targets semiconductor, electronics, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, and oil and gas producers, promising 99%+ inspection accuracy, deployment in under five days, and models trained on as few as 20-40 images per defect class without writing code or buying new hardware.
Offsight
Offsight is a San Francisco software company building a project management and production platform for the offsite construction, modular and prefab industry. Its mobile-first software helps factories and specialty contractors track production, quality, materials and labor in real time - replacing the spreadsheets that engineered-to-order manufacturers have long relied on. Founded in 2014 by Vikas Murali and Andrew Xue, the company raised a $2.5M seed round and counts large builders like Performance Contracting Inc., McCarthy Building Companies and Z Modular among its customers.
Structured AI
Structured AI builds an AI workforce for construction design engineering. Its computer-vision platform reviews technical drawings and construction documents the way spell-check reviews text - flagging code violations, cross-discipline clashes, and compliance gaps while leaving final calls to humans. Founded in 2025 by Oxford graduates and backed by Y Combinator, the New York company sells QA/QC automation to architecture, engineering, and construction firms.
Tristar AI
Tristar AI puts a pair of eyes on the factory floor that never blink. The Boston-based company builds AI-powered smart cameras and enterprise software that watch production lines in real time, recognize what human workers are doing, and flag defects or skipped steps the instant they happen - before a bad part ships or a machine goes down. Founded in 2022 by a team out of MIT, Harvard, and UT Austin, Tristar serves precision manufacturers in plastics, automotive, and chemicals, promising 95-99% defect-detection accuracy and deployment in about two weeks.
SirenOpt
SirenOpt is a San Leandro deep-tech company turning measurement blind spots in advanced manufacturing into real-time intelligence. Its PlasmaSens platform uses cold atmospheric plasma plus machine learning to non-destructively fingerprint materials on the production line, helping battery, semiconductor, aerospace, and power generation makers see what was previously invisible.
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.
FloVision Solutions
FloVision Solutions builds AI-powered sensors that bolt onto food processing lines to measure yield, monitor quality, and track staff performance in real time. Founded in 2020 by Rian McDonnell and Elise Weimholt, the South Bend, Indiana company helps beef and poultry processors recover lost yield and cut waste at the source. Its compact vision, depth, and load-cell sensors have scanned over 23.2 million kilograms of food across North America, Europe, and Australia, with customers reporting up to 1.5% yield recovery and as much as 15x ROI. In July 2025 it raised an $8.7M Series A led by Insight Partners.
Voltaiq
Voltaiq is a Berkeley-based enterprise software company that pioneered the category of 'battery intelligence.' Its Enterprise Battery Intelligence (EBI) platform automatically collects, cleans, and harmonizes data from battery test and production equipment, then surfaces the performance, quality, health, and safety insights engineers need to build better batteries faster. Founded in 2012 by UC Berkeley PhDs Tal Sholklapper and Eli Leland, Voltaiq is used by automakers, consumer-electronics giants, and energy-storage companies including Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Amazon, Meta, and Sila to accelerate product development and catch defects weeks earlier than traditional QC.
Titan Advanced Energy Solutions
Titan Advanced Energy Solutions is a Salem, Massachusetts battery-tech company that uses non-destructive ultrasound and industrial AI to inspect lithium-ion cells at production speed. Its IonSight Digital Teardown platform images the inside of every cell on a manufacturing line - catching layer misalignment, contamination, dry zones, and other hidden defects that CT sampling and electrical tests miss - to improve battery quality, safety, and yield for EVs, grid storage, and consumer electronics.
Instrumental Inc.
Instrumental is a manufacturing AI and data platform that helps brands like Meta, NVIDIA, Cisco, and Bose catch defects on the factory floor by aggregating images and signals from production lines and running discovery-driven machine learning on them. Founded by ex-Apple engineers, the company turns the noisy, siloed world of high-mix electronics assembly into a searchable, controllable dataset.
Overview AI
Overview AI builds AI vision sensors and edge-deployed software that catch manufacturing defects traditional rule-based vision systems miss. Founded by ex-Tesla engineers, the San Francisco company combines custom smart cameras, on-device deep learning, and fleet management software used by manufacturers including Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, Tyson, and Clorox.
UnitX
UnitX builds AI-powered visual inspection systems for manufacturers who can't afford to ship defective products. Their flagship platform - combining OptiX (software-defined imaging), CorteX (AI edge computing), GenX (synthetic defect generation), and FleX (the full integrated system) - cuts defect escape rates by 9x and deploys in about a week. With 820+ systems running across 170+ factories globally, UnitX has inspected over $6.1 billion worth of goods and counts five of the world's top ten automotive tier-1 suppliers among its customers.
Jared O'Leary
Jared O'Leary is the Co-Founder and CEO of SirenOpt, a deep-tech startup commercializing PlasmaSens - a manufacturing intelligence platform that uses cold atmospheric plasma and AI to perform real-time, non-destructive materials characterization. A Stanford Chemical Engineering graduate with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, O'Leary spun SirenOpt out of his doctoral research with advisor Professor Ali Mesbah in 2022. The platform can generate 213,000 data points per measurement in milliseconds without destroying the sample, targeting battery manufacturing, aerospace, semiconductors, and other advanced manufacturing sectors. SirenOpt has raised $16.1M total, including a $6.5M strategic round led by Hitachi Ventures and JLR's InMotion Ventures in 2025, plus a $2.4M California Energy Commission BRIDGE grant for battery electrode applications.
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.