Posted to News on 15th Oct 2018, 15:14
Major multinationals invest in autonomous machine vision
Leading multinational industrial companies from Germany and Switzerland have invested more than USD 10million into Inspekto. The company is the founder and developer of the Autonomous Machine Vision category - a visual system that allows manufacturers to set up, install and detect defects in production in minutes, without the help of any external experts or systems integrators. The start-up will meet the needs of a yearly multi-billion-dollar market across a broad range of vertical manufacturing sectors, including automotive and electronics.
The USD10 million injected comes from leading industrial players, as well as expert financial investors. Inspekto's investors include: Grazia Equity, ZFHN, Mahle, Planven, THI Investments and Steinbeis. The company's valuation post investment is in the region of USD60 million.
This funding is for Inspekto's launch activities of Plug & Inspect technology driving its main product, the INSPEKTO S70. During research and development (R&D), Inspekto collaborated with tens of DACH manufacturers to ensure the product is aligned with market needs and requirements. The company is now heading to its official launch at VISION 2018 in Stuttgart, where it will hold live product demonstrations and make its product available for general sale to manufacturing plants worldwide.
Harel Boren, CEO of Inspekto explains: "The INSPEKTO S70 is the world's first ever Autonomous Machine Vision product, which will reinvent machine vision QA. Leading players chose to invest in Inspekto because of its huge expected impact on industry. This financial support offers a vote of confidence in the expected impact of Autonomous Machine Vision on the quality assurance (QA) industry - a multi-billion-dollar market. Inspekto's mission is to make quality assurance managers love their jobs, by giving them complete control of where, when and how visual QA can be conducted."
Yonatan Hyatt, CTO of Inspekto adds: "Inspekto's research team aspires to explore and push the boundaries of computer vision and artificial intelligence to allow autonomous machine-vision solutions for industrial manufacturers. Our introduction of zero-friction setup of inspection units throughout entire production lines is bringing factories to peak levels of efficiency and ensuring immediate detection of defects right as they appear in the manufacturing process. The current financing will allow us to further deepen our domain-specific research, alleviating major points of pain in the industrial domain."
Johannes Diem, Corporate Planning, Corporate Strategy, Venture Capital and M&A Strategy at MAHLE International GmbH says: "As one of the largest automotive suppliers worldwide, we identified early on the enormous potential impact of Autonomous Machine Vision on production, performance and competitive edge. Inspekto's work with our plants has been consistently useful and led us to make our first-ever direct investment in a start-up company."
Uwe Haug, Member of the Board of Directors of Steinbeis GmbH & Co. KG fr Technologietransfer explains: "Steinbeis has a long history of working closely with German industrial manufacturers. We identified early on the strategic impact that Inspekto brings to German industry, across any vertical and vendor size, which is what drove us to make our investment in the company."
The company will officially launch at VISION 2018 in Stuttgart on November 6, when the product will be unveiled and become available for purchase. Inspekto's S70 system is a small, smart, standalone visual QA product, which can be installed up to 1000 times faster than a traditional system, and at 1/10th of the cost. For more information, visit www.inspekto.com.
