Industrial tech

Machine learning smarts are arriving on the factory floor to help with quality control, equipment maintenance, training and the automation of paperwork. For context, Europe’s plants are pretty smart already, full of sensors, robots, 3D printers and other high-tech machinery. All of this stuff creates piles of data that can be tapped for insights into how to speed things up or find bottlenecks, product defects, safety risks and other areas for improvement.

And it’s been a handsome year for those looking to mine manufacturing data and plug AI systems into factories. Germany’s Daedalus, founded by one of OpenAI’s first engineering hires, raised $21m in February to develop its vision for AI-controlled factories. Belgium’s Robovision inked a $42m deal in March to bring computer vision intelligence to industrial machinery, while Switzerland’s EthonAI raised a $16.5m Series A in May for software that predicts maintenance needs and catches quality issues early.

Further evidence of a swell in AI manufacturing can be seen in the $28.5m Series B for UK-founded Oden Technologies, now based in New York, in April, while Apple a month earlier acquired Canadian startup DarwinAI, which visually inspects components during the manufacturing process.

Big manufacturers including BMW, John Deere, Mercedes-Benz and Siemens are using so-called digital twin tech and AI analytics to identify and correct shortcomings in operations before a physical product is born, as well as during production. So-called predictive maintenance startups in Europe are suddenly experiencing VC love. Ai:omatic Solutions — based in Germany, as so many of these manufacturing startups are — raised €2m in January for a system that detects potential machine faults early and helps reduce downtime. Tomorrow Things, also German, raised €1.5m in March for a similar product.

At the same time, we should expect to see more digital assistants enter factories. Stuttgart-based Assemblio creates animated step-by-step assembly guides for workers — the company raised €2.1m in February. Startups are also mining factory data to develop new safety tools: Sweden’s Buddewise raised €3.5m in March for a system that keeps a logbook of events marked urgent in factories, like when a forklift travels into an area it shouldn’t.

If this all sounds like factories are turning into digital cathedrals, well, it’s not the full story. AI manufacturing is in the very early days — somewhere around ChatGPT 0.2 in the development phase. Most of the big plants churn out more data than they know how to manage, while inflation and interest rates are keeping upgrades to a minimum.

Outside of AI, the other big change for factories that can afford it is a new robot coworker or two — see our recent briefing on Europe’s droids. As for 3D printing, the one-time hot innovation, it’s tempting to conclude the hype has worn off. Things have not completely died — France’s 3Deus Dynamics raised €10m in May, for example, but the stagnating industry needs “the shock that only M&A can provide,” as a recent FT article put it.