smart-manufacturing
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Amir Ben-Assa Has Spent 30 Years Teaching Factories to See
Before factories could talk about AI agents, Ben-Assa was helping them locate glass carts, mine equipment and missing minutes. His career is a study in making invisible industrial problems legible - and then useful.
The Factory Floor Has a Memory. Senthil Ranganathan Wants It to Think.
After 25-plus years inside manufacturing systems, the Athena founder is betting that factories need fewer passive dashboards and more useful decisions.
Vinay Nathan Has Spent 13 Years Teaching Factories to Tell the Truth
Before factory AI can sound clever, someone has to connect the old machines, clean up the records and prove the software pays. Vinay Nathan built Altizon around that less glamorous - and more useful - work.
Adam Livesay Is Giving Heavy Machines a Service Desk
The Elevāt co-founder spent years listening to machines and the people who repair them. Now, with a $12 million Series A and Europe in view, he is turning industrial data into something a technician can actually use.
Yoochun Kim
Yoochun Kim (Kim Yoo-cheon) is the founder and CEO of YC Corporation, a Seoul-based digital transformation company he started on April 1, 2022. As an authorized Autodesk partner, YC supplies CAD, CAM, MES and PLM software plus hardware to small and mid-sized Korean manufacturers - the metal shops, tool makers and injection molders that most smart-factory programs skip. Kim built the company to over 7 billion won in annual revenue in roughly two years, taking no outside investment and funding growth entirely through solution and service work.
Tareq Aljaber
Tareq Aljaber is the founder and CEO of Averroes.ai, a San Mateo company building no-code AI visual inspection and virtual metrology software for semiconductor and industrial manufacturing. Before founding Averroes in 2021, he spent more than two decades shipping products used by millions at Adobe, Microsoft, Atlassian, and Samsung NEXT, including work that helped scale Adobe Flash and the launch of Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center. He now focuses on making AI-powered defect detection accessible to quality and reliability engineers who have no data science background.
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.
Errette Dunn
Errette Dunn is Co-Founder and CEO of Rever, a San Francisco-based frontline intelligence platform that helps global industrial companies unlock the creative potential of their deskless workers. Drawing on hands-on stints at Toyota and Airbus, he spent a decade coaching operations leaders across 17 countries before co-founding Rever in 2015. Today the company-backed by Y Combinator, Sequoia, Ulu Ventures, and Mundi Ventures-serves world-class manufacturers like Volkswagen, Grupo Bimbo, and Hyundai in more than 70 countries, giving factory floor workers an AI-powered mobile app to photograph problems, build solutions, and earn recognition in minutes.
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.