Faced with labor shortages, sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence in their automation.
Computer vision startups are trying to take advantage of this opportunity with a range of solutions for both industries. From collecting data to monitoring and harvesting crops, robots with eyes are entering the fields.
A major challenge that remains, however, is implementation: If such solutions are not easy to use, they will not be used.
Belgian startup Robovision he thinks he has found a way to deal with it. The company wants to industrialize its deep learning tools and make them more accessible to businesses that aren’t tech companies at their core. It has created a “codeless” computer vision AI platform that doesn’t require software developers or data scientists to be involved in every step of the process. Robovision doesn’t make robots, but as its name suggests, the company also targets robotics companies that want to develop new machines that support AI-enabled automation.
In practice, this means that Robovision customers can use its platform to upload data, label it, test their model and deploy it to production. The company says its model can be useful for a variety of use cases, including supermarket-scale fruit identification, fault finding in newly manufactured electrical components, and even trimming rose stems.
Image Credits: Robovision
From its base in Belgium, Robovision already serves customers in 45 countries, CEO Thomas Van den Driessche told TechCrunch. Now, thanks to a recent sizable funding round, it’s expanding into the US, drawing on interest from industrial and agribusiness customers in that giant market.
The $42 million Series A round is co-led by Belgian agtech investor Astanor Ventures and Target Global. The latter is a Berlin-based investor, and his involvement in this fundraiser marks a departure from some of his other coverage of late: dispute about her ties to Russian money. Red River West, a French VC that focuses to fund European startups looking to enter North America, also participated in the round.
With a post-money valuation of $180 million, this new round brings the total amount of equity funding Robovision has raised to $65 million, including two notes that have been converted. That still leaves the founders and staff owning more than 50 percent of Robovision, its chief development officer Florian Hendrickx told TechCrunch via email.
What is the point?
One challenge Robovision faces in its expansion is that working with different sectors complicates its messaging and go-to-market strategy. The upside is that lessons and experiments in one app can be applied to another. Robovision, for example, was able to apply some of the 3D deep learning it had developed for detecting disease in tulips to detecting disease in human lungs during the COVID crisis.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” founder Jonathan Berte told TechCrunch. “It was Robovision’s DNA to achieve the fine balance between diversity and focus.”
This DNA comes from Robovision’s history: It was founded in 2012 as a consulting studio and several years passed before it joined the B2B platform approach that also made it more attractive to VCs.
The initial traction Robovision gained was in agtech, which accounts for 50% of its business, Van den Driessche said. Agtech is also where Series A co-lead investor Astanor is from: This company focuses on what it describes as “impact on food agriculture.”
Agtech is a pretty big opportunity because of labor shortages, but also because of Robovision’s track record — helping partner ISO Group plant a billion tulips a year. But other verticals are growing faster for Robovision, Van den Driessche said.
According to Van den Driessche, Robovision sees strong traction in life sciences and technology. For example, Hitachi uses its platform to produce semiconductor wafers. “I don’t think agriculture will be the biggest sector in terms of scale,” said Bao-Y Van Cong, a partner at Target Global. “I think it will be industrialized.”
Apple’s recent decision to acquire DarwinAI, an artificial intelligence startup specializing in component manufacturing supervision, shows growing interest in this space. For Robovision founder Jonathan Berte, it’s also a sign that a toolbox that can support a wide variety of different industrialized applications makes more sense. “Apple would never do that [have bought that] the company if only a solution.”
From Ghent to the world
The convertible notes Robovision raised in 2022 and 2023 after its spin-off came mostly from Dutch and Belgian investors, but it had to look further afield to raise the capital it needed. The amount of capital Robovision raised in the round would have been harder to secure from Benelux or may have needed a bigger cut.
Robovision’s Belgian roots pay off in other ways. “All the first team were very smart people from Ghent University,” Berte said. Van den Driessche became CEO of Robovision in 2022and Berte turned his focus to fundraising, partnerships and global expansion.
Robovision’s technological evolution has extended to rethinking the architecture of computer vision tools in response to customer demand. Because low latency and delivery speed are requirements in some environments, Robovision Edge was released.
In today’s market, doing more with less has become the key to competing globally. “I think the only way to do that is to innovate and become more productive,” Van Cong said.
