Today EthonAI, an industrial tech spin-off from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, has secured a $6.8 million seed round co-led by Earlybird Venture Capital and La Famiglia, Wingman Ventures and Acequia Capital (AceCap) are also taking part in the seed round. The funding will help to develop EthonAI’s technology further and bring its products to a wider market.
EthonAI is an AI-powered platform that helps manufacturers boost performance by detecting, monitoring, and preventing quality losses at scale. The software integrates with a facility’s existing camera systems or off-the-shelf industrial cameras.
The platform offers no-code software tools for vision-based defect detection, process monitoring, and root cause analysis. This improves manufacturers’ financial performance and helps reduce environmental impact by reducing waste, rework, and defects.
To use the software, you don’t need to be a data scientist. Thanks to the no-code interface, it’s designed for manufacturing experts, like test engineers, process engineers and operators. EthonAI’s customers include leading manufacturers like Siemens, Roche, and Lindt & Sprüngl.
Poor quality costs companies time, money, and reputation. Dr Julian Senorer CEO of EthonAI explained that poor quality is a massive cost driver in all manufacturing industries. According to Senoner, manufacturers are throwing away many products:
“If you look into semiconductor manufacturing, for example, it is not uncommon that they throw away 10 to 20% of the products they produce, which is a massive financial waste, but also harms the environment because you need to throw away these products at a cost and recycle them.” EthonAI can produce mass efficiencies at scale. Traditional visual inspection relies on human inspection or cumbersome, time-consuming rule-based systems.
“Historically, you need hours or even days to develop a computer vision job for a particular product. If you develop 200 different product variants, it becomes an infeasible job. However, with our computer vision software, essentially, in five minutes, you can train a new computer vision model and put it out into the production line.”
By aggregating process and quality data into a single platform, manufacturers can use EthonAI’s advanced AI methods to analyse and improve the quality of their products and processes. Using EthonAI, manufacturers have seen significant increases in productivity and over 50% reduction in quality losses.
Many providers develop isolated solutions that fail to scale across factories at a time when manufacturers are looking for a solution where they can build something horizontally around that. As a result, EthonAI focuses on not only visual inspection but also root cause analysis.
