Factories and manufacturing facilities are becoming “smart” through sensors, robotics and other connected technologies, creating a treasure trove of potential data that can be mined for insights into bottlenecks and other improvements, or even to speed up processes that would otherwise require a lot of manual labor.
However, much of the data generated is unstructured and not easy to put to immediate use. While big data analytics has long been a mainstay in industries such as finance and logistics, it has yet to fully penetrate the manufacturing sector. This has created a gold mine of untapped insights and, more recently, an emerging market for technologies designed to capture and make sense of vast amounts of manufacturing data.
Last month, Oden Technologies, founded in the UK and now based in New York, raised $28.5 million in a Series B round to fuel the growth of its data analytics platform for manufacturing, Germany's Daedalus raised $21 million to apply AI to precision manufacturing factories, and Belgium's RoboVision secured $42 million to bring computer vision intelligence to industrial machines.
Now it's EthonAI's turn. The Swiss startup announced on Thursday that it had raised 15 million Swiss francs ($16.5 million) in a Series A funding round led by Index Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Earlybird and Founderful.
EthonAI co-founders Julian Senoner (CEO, left) and Bernhard Kratzwald (CTO) at the Siemens factory in Zug, Switzerland. Image courtesy of EthonAI Image courtesy of EthonAI
EthonAI finds product defects
Founded in Zurich in 2021 by CEO Julien Senoner and CTO Bernhard Kratzwald, EthonAI can train AI models for specific use cases. For example, in electronics manufacturing, customers can provide images of defect-free products and EthonAI's Inspector software can identify surface defects on the products during the manufacturing and assembly process. Apple recently acquired a company called DarwinAI, which serves a similar purpose in automating visual quality control processes in parts manufacturing.
But more broadly, EthonAI can integrate data from across a company's manufacturing facilities, from sensors to line stoppages, to understand where things are working well and where they're not, and even compare performance across multiple facilities to find areas for improvement.
In its three-year history, EthonAI has secured some pretty high-profile clients, including Siemens and chocolate maker Lindt.
Digging deeper into EthonAI's target market reveals that semiconductor manufacturing is a particular focus, though the company hasn't revealed any specific customers in this area. But low yields are known to be a concern in the chip space, where defects in silicon wafers can affect the number of actual usable chips after production. Notably, Apple reportedly reached a settlement last year with chipmaker TSMC, which had a particularly low yield rate (just 55% at the time), in which Apple would only pay for wafers that were known to be good, saving billions of dollars in the process.
Meanwhile, EthonAI says it is partnering with “major semiconductor manufacturers” that are using its platform to integrate multiple data sets and perform analytics to find previously unknown relationships between processes, equipment and yield rates.
“Manufacturing is at a critical crossroads, and companies that fail to adapt to AI risk falling behind,” Senoner said in a press release. “Factories produce massive amounts of data, and AI is key to unlocking insights to drive operational excellence.”
We're launching our AI newsletter: Sign up here to start receiving it in your inbox starting June 5th.