Matta, an industrial AI startup offering data insights to factories, has secured a $14m (£10.5m) seed funding round.
Founded with a mission to build “sentient factories”, Matta’s AI technology provides factories with insights on production lines and can spot defects and their trace routes to help fix issues before they become overly costly.
Matta described its technology as highly adaptable, being capable of working across sectors from electronics to automotive to defence to apparel.
“Everything around us is manufactured, from the mug on your desk to the optical cables carrying our Netflix binges. Everyone talks about the glamorous side of manufacturing: generative design, material discovery, digital twins, but few spend time on the factory floor,” said Matta boss Doug Brion.
“The hard part isn’t dreaming things up inside a computer; it is making them work at scale. Manufacturing still runs on human know-how, the kind that lets someone on the line kick a machine just right, or run a finger over a scratch, and say, ‘that’s thirty-four microns wide.’
“We’re using AI to capture and scale that tacit knowledge, so engineers can design things that actually work in the real world. It’s time to manufacture the impossible.”
The investment round was led by Lakestar and Giant Ventures along with RedSeed VC, InMotion Ventures, 1st Kind (Peugeot family), Unruly Capital, and Boost VC, as well as grant support from Innovate UK and the Royal Academy of Engineering.
“Doug and the team have developed a transformative approach to rapidly training factory-ready AI with minimal data, which has the potential to reshape how products are made,” said Madelene Larsson of Giant Ventures.
“We’re excited to back the team as they sprint towards a future defined by autonomous manufacturing and inverse design.”
