Cognyx

Deon and I are thrilled to announce that Cognyx just closed a 1.7m€ Pre-Seed to help manufacturers design hardware at software speed! The round is led by Bpifrance's VC team Digital Ventures, and features some of the most prominent business angels of the French & German startup scenes. “Hardware is hard”? Let's make it easier and faster to engineer. Our journey started only 8 months ago, when we decided to join forces with OSS Ventures. Using the studio’s robust co-design methodology, we uncovered a massive opportunity in the manufacturing space: engineering R&D cycles are often very slow, mostly because technical and product data lies disseminated across siloed IT systems. Engineers and stakeholders spend weeks identifying dependencies and solving conflicts between design, manufacturing or supply constraints. In particular, the industry’s most central R&D deliverable, the BOM (Bill of Materials) and its many variants, takes forever to align over several departments and scattered data sets. What first sounds like a technical problem actually has a direct impact to a manufacturing company’s core competitiveness: it slows down innovation cycles, extends Time to Market, makes it really hard to optimize products for a set of conflicting constraints, and eventually leads to serious quality issues on the production line. The problem sizes in dozens of millions for most large manufacturers. Cognyx intends to fix this, leveraging the latest available technologies. Using knowledge graphs, the data layer we built already bridges the gap between historical manufacturing softwares (ERP, PLM, MES…). All engineers and stakeholders can now contribute in real time on a unique "super-BOM", solving technical conflicts in real-time. The resulting acceleration of engineering workflows is already massive and… we’re only getting started with #AI! (stay tuned :) We’re incredibly excited by what lies ahead of us, and very grateful to a whole crowd of people for believing in our vision from the very early days! First and foremost our OSS team : Renan, Léopold, Quentin, Jean-Philippe, Guillaume, Elise, Ashok, Pierre, Aurore, Alexandre, Maroussia... many of whom are also angels. My friends, your support was been nothing short of outstanding to get this company off the ground. Then, a very special thanks to our early Design Partners and early-adopter clients (more on this soon ;). And last but not least, to our investors Quentin Mayolle & Ugo Varrasso and to our incredible team of Tech B.A.'s, just to name a few: Roxanne Varza, Christophe Raynaud, Thibault Renouf, Simon Dawlat, Ning Li... Manufacturing experts such as Arno Zinke, Laurent Fiard... not forgetting Laurent, Tom, Jaume and many other members of the Bonial France mafia. Now let’s get to work and build the future of hardware engineering! 📝 Merci à Adrien Lelièvre, Les Echos https://lnkd.in/epxPfmv7