Faced with labor shortages, sectors corresponding to manufacturing and agriculture are increasingly adopting AI of their automation.
Computer vision startups want to jump on that chance with a spread of point solutions for each industries. From data collection to crop monitoring and harvesting, robots with eyes are entering the fields.
One big challenge that continues to be, nonetheless, is implementation: If such solutions usually are not easy to make use of, they won’t be used.
Belgian startup Robovision believes it has found a way around that. The corporate desires to industrialize deep learning tools and make them more accessible to businesses that usually are not tech corporations at their core. It has built a “no-code” computer vision AI platform that doesn’t require software developers or data scientists to be involved at every step of the method. Robovision doesn’t make robots, but as its name suggests, the corporate also targets robotics corporations that need to develop recent machines that support AI-enabled automation.
In practice, this implies Robovision customers can use its platform to upload data, label it, test their model and deploy it in production. The corporate says its model could be useful for a wide range of use cases corresponding to recognizing fruit at supermarket scale, identifying faults in newly made electrical components and even cutting rose stems.
Image Credits: Robovision
Out of its base in Belgium, Robovision already serves customers in 45 countries, CEO Thomas Van den Driessche told TechCrunch in an interview. Now, because of a recent sizable funding round, it’s expanding to the U.S., banking on interest from industrial and agribusiness customers in that massive market.
The Series A round of $42 million is being co-led by Belgian agtech investor Astanor Ventures and Goal Global. The latter is a Berlin-based investor and its participation on this fundraise marks a departure from among the other coverage it’s had of late: controversy over its ties to Russian money. Red River West, a French VC that focuses on funding European startups trying to break into North America, also participated within the round.
With a post-money valuation of $180 million, this recent round brings the overall amount of equity funding raised by Robovision to $65 million, including two converted notes. This still leaves the founders along with the staff owning greater than 50% of Robovision, its chief growth officer, Florian Hendrickx, told TechCrunch via email.
What’s the point?
One challenge that Robovision faces in its expansion is that working with different sectors complicates messaging and its go-to-market strategy. On the plus side, learnings and experiments in a single application could be applied to a different. Robovision, for instance, was capable of apply among the 3D deep learning it had developed for disease detection in tulips to disease detection in human lungs throughout the COVID crisis.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” founder Jonathan Berte told TechCrunch. “It has been the DNA of Robovision of striking the fragile balance between diversity and focus.”
That DNA comes from Robovision’s history: It was founded in 2012 as a consultancy studio, and it was several years before it pivoted into the B2B platform approach that also made it more attractive to VCs.
The initial traction Robovision gained was in agtech, which represents 50% of its activities, Van den Driessche said. Agtech can be where its Series A’s co-lead investor, Astanor, comes from: That company focuses on what it describes as “impact agrifood.”
Agtech is a large opportunity due to labor shortages, and in addition on account of Robovision’s track record — it helps its partner ISO Group plant a billion tulips annually. But other verticals are growing faster for Robovision, Van den Driessche said.
In keeping with Van den Driessche, Robovision is seeing strong traction in life sciences and tech. As an illustration, Hitachi uses its platform to supply semiconductor wafers. “I don’t think agriculture goes to be the biggest sector at scale,” said Bao-Y Van Cong, a partner at Goal Global. “I feel it’s going to be industrial manufacturing.”
Apple’s recent decision to accumulate DarwinAI, an AI startup specializing in overseeing the manufacturing of components, shows rising interest on this space. For Robovision founder Jonathan Berte, it is usually an indication that a toolbox that may support a wide range of various industrialized applications makes more sense. “Apple would never [have bought that] company if it were only a degree solution.”
From Ghent to the world
The convertible notes that Robovision raised in 2022 and 2023 following its pivot mostly got here from Dutch and Belgian investors, but it surely needed to look further afield to boost the capital it needed. The quantity of capital that Robovision raised within the round would have been harder to secure from Benelux, or could have required more dilution.
Robovision’s Belgian roots are paying off in other ways. “The entire early team was very smart people from Ghent university,” Berte said. Van den Driessche became Robovision’s CEO in 2022, and Berte moved his focus to fundraising, partnerships and global expansion.
Robovision’s tech evolution has prolonged to rethinking the architecture of its computer vision tools in response to customer demand. Because low latency and delivery speed are requirements in certain environments, it launched Robovision Edge.
In today’s market, doing more with less has turn into key to competing globally. “I feel the one method to try this is to innovate and to turn into more productive,” Van Cong said.
