Advex AI Raises $3.5M Seed, Launches GenAI Synthetic Data Platform for AI Vision in Manufacturing
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 4, 2024 -- Advex AI, a startup tackling the critical data problem in AI Vision for manufacturing, today announced their $3.5 million seed funding round led by Construct Capital, with participation from Pear VC, Emerson Collective, and notable angel investors Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox founding CTO) and Ankit Jain (Infinitus CEO). The company also revealed its selection as a top 20 Finalist at this year's TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield.
“We chose Advex for PearX, our accelerator for early-stage founders, because they showed remarkable technical expertise and a clear vision for tackling one of AI’s toughest challenges,” says Arash Afrakhteh, Partner at Pear VC. “From day one, they’ve proven themselves as top-tier founders with an innovative approach.”
Challenging the Traditional AI Workflow
Advex’s platform represents a radical shift in how enterprises develop production-grade AI Vision models. Instead of undergoing months of expensive data collection cycles, AI and automation teams can reduce the time to hours by leveraging Advex’s GenAI platform to automatically figure out what data is missing, then synthetically creating that missing data using advanced diffusion models.
By combining data collected from the real world with use-case specific synthetic data, Advex ensures that AI Vision models are trained on comprehensive and balanced datasets, dramatically improving AI’s performance and reliability in real-world environments. And when the real-world changes, Advex can quickly generate relevant synthetic data and keep AI Vision models at production-level accuracy.
Manufacturers and other critical industries can now implement and maintain production-grade AI Vision solutions in days rather than months, addressing the urgent need for automation to drive speed, effectiveness, and efficiency amidst a growing labor shortage.
"AI adoption is no longer optional for manufacturers, yet the lack of usable data creates ROI barriers that make most automation projects uninvestable," said Dayna Grayson, Co-Founder and General Partner at Construct Capital. "Advex fundamentally changes this dynamic - providing immediate value in automating manufacturers' processes and turning months-long projects into days. We believe they'll become the foundation for how the global manufacturing industry automates."
"We're tackling a major problem - the labor shortage - by unlocking fast and high-ROI automation in the world's most fundamental industries," says Advex Co-Founder and CEO, Pedro Pachuca, who previously researched computer vision with Google Brain and led a consumer electronics startup.
Rapid Adoption and Proven Results with Global Manufacturers
Seven of the world’s largest manufacturers already use Advex’s Vision technology, with over 25 additional billion-dollar companies currently adopting Advex’s breakthrough capabilities. Customers routinely benefit from a 50%+ improvement in visual automation performance in just a few days - a feat which would normally take many months, if not years, to achieve.
Automotive, aerospace, and consumer electronics industries are strong adopters, leveraging Advex’s technology for a multitude of use cases including surface defect detection and vision-guided robotics.
Advex, an NVIDIA Inception program member, also partners with leading machine vision providers to quickly reach customers and integrate deeply into customer workflows.
By focusing on the industrial sector, Advex is able to amass real and synthetic industrial data that is impossible to find on the internet. This, combined with real-world production feedback, enables Advex to develop the best synthetic data and AI models for industrial applications.
Expanding the Team to Tackle AI Vision's Greatest Challenge
To support rapidly increasing demand from global manufacturers, Advex AI is actively hiring across various roles.
“Data is the biggest problem in all of AI - if you have the right data, you have AI. In the past, I’ve worked on AI for chip design and drug discovery applications. And the number one reason why it took forever to productionize AI models was how quickly I could collect high quality data. By solving data, you solve AI!” says Advex Co-Founder and CTO, Qasim Wani who previously worked on deep learning with Qualcomm and PathAI and built products used over 50M times.
About Advex AI
Advex creates self-healing AI Vision models for industrial applications by leveraging diffusion-based synthetic data. Advex researches representation learning and diffusion models to solve the out-of-distribution generalization problem. For more information about Advex AI and open positions, visit www.advexai.com.
Source: Advex AI
