Elementary Robotics raises $13 million for its machine learning and computer vision offerings to industry
Elementary Robotics, a Los Angeles-based robotics startup, has raised $12.7 million in its Series A funding round led by Threshold Ventures, an early-stage investor in technology companies.
Founded in 2017, Elementary has built a hardware and software platform for applying machine learning and computer vision to the industrial world for intelligent automation of quality and traceability workflows.
The new capital, which also had participation from existing investors Fika Ventures, Fathom Capital and Toyota AI Ventures, is being used to allow Elementary Robotics to continue developing and installing its automation products at scale.
With this round, Threshold Ventures partner Mo Islam has joined the Elementary Robotics board of directors.
Manufacturers today are dealing with an array of challenges to keep up, including securing and retaining skilled labor, producing high quality products at larger volumes and lower prices, and implementing remote production monitoring.
Today’s challenges also require evolving strategies to support employee health and safety, such as integrating proper social distancing into factories.
Visual inspection and traceability have traditionally been especially difficult to automate, often resulting in lower throughput, added headcount, high turnover, inconsistent results, and low data tracking.
Elementary Robotics’ products automate inspections and help customers achieve value across the production line by using deep learning to find defects, including ones that manufacturers didn’t even know to look for.
The Elementary platform delivers inspections that are easy to set up, traceable in the cloud, and allow for human inspectors to be kept in the loop to further train the system over time.
Elementary Robotics is working with a number of world class manufacturing and logistics companies, including Toyota, where the solution has delivered the following benefits:
- Transition to 100 percent inspection where previously only sample-based inspection occurred
- Remote visibility into quality and production lines
- Automation of known visual inspections and discovery of new defects, resulting in decreased scrap rates
- Standardization of inspection tasks and ease of duplication across different factories and production lines in an affordable manner
Mo Islam, partner, Threshold Ventures, says: “Elementary Robotics is one of a handful of ‘new wave’ intelligent automation companies contending that the application of AI and robotics will enable a novel set of functions that legacy providers are ill-equipped to address.
“We were immediately impressed with Elementary’s true software-first approach and its ability to deliver on it.”
Arye Barnehama, founder and CEO of Elementary Robotics, says: “Building Elementary has been a fantastic journey over the past three years, and I’ve enjoyed working with our world-class partners to develop scalable solutions to their problems, which our team is well-suited to solve.
“I’m extremely excited to go public with what we’re building, continue to support more companies with their quality and traceability needs, and grow the Elementary team to expand and deploy our innovative platform.”