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Investing in Overview and Manufacturing Optimization

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By Stanton Green, Senior Director, and Brad Jones, Senior Associate at Blumberg Capital 

We are proud to announce our investment in Overview and its mission to transform quality control operations at manufacturing facilities. Deep learning is revolutionizing the way in which computer vision can benefit factories. These algorithms allow for higher accuracy, lower-cost deployments that can be implemented in a fraction of the time it takes to deploy traditional quality control systems. Overview has leveraged this development to help manufacturers radically reduce defects and waste.

Why We’ve Invested in Overview’s Manufacturing Solutions

While building the Tesla Gigafactory, co-founders Chris Van Dyke and Austin Appel lacked access to the data they needed to deploy effective quality control processes. As we got to know Chris and Austin, it was evident that these challenges impact most manufacturers, regardless of size or industry. Their depth of knowledge, synergistic skill sets, and passion for solving this difficult problem gave us conviction that they were the right team for the job.

Our investment in Overview was also driven by a number of other factors including:

  • A solution that enables optimized manufacturing and reduces supply chain inefficiencies that lead to waste and burdensome costs – a timely AI use case consistent with our investment thesis and portfolio successes
  • Disruption of an antiquated manufacturing industry that accounts for 11% of US GDP (over $2.3 trillion in output)
  • The potential to bring defect detection accuracy to ~99.9% while decreasing cost of system ownership by orders of magnitude 
  • A fragmented competitive landscape that features sub-par industry incumbents 

Leading Overview’s Series A Funding Round

Overview has realized early traction with blue-chip customers across a wide variety of industries, including food, semiconductor, and medical device production Under the leadership of Chris and Austin, who bring unique and relevant backgrounds to the problem at hand, Overview has an exciting road ahead. We are proud to join Overview’s journey and lead the company’s Series A round in partnership with Google Ventures, Momenta Partners, AME Cloud, Bain Capital and Homebrew. 

The Manufacturing Market & How Overview Fits In

The US manufacturing industry accounted for over $2.3 trillion of output in 2020, equating to 11% of the country’s GDP. While over 12 million people in the US are employed by manufacturers, waste and mistakes occurring from manual inspection processes continue to cost manufacturers upwards of $300 billion per year. 

About Overview’s Machine Learning-Driven Manufacturing Quality Control Platform

Overview is on a mission to tackle this problem and transform the way quality control is conducted at factories. The company has created a platform that uses computer vision to detect defects on factory lines and collect data to improve underlying manufacturing operations. Overview offers a software-first approach to automated visual inspection that leverages machine learning, cloud data infrastructure, and interoperability that allows the company’s systems to operate with any off-the-shelf hardware. These systems can be implemented without additional staff or computer vision expertise, making Overview’s software relevant to large and small factories alike. 

Overview’s computer vision is powered by deep learning technology, which enables the company to find mistakes more consistently and in a wider variety of situations. Intuitive UI empowers users to easily train algorithms that outperform competitors by a factor of 100x (i.e. Overview would miss 5 defects when existing players miss 500). Overview’s platform also stores image data in a centralized cloud environment, enabling unique workflow automation and analytical features that drive manufacturing optimization. This ability to reference image data has compelling effects downstream. For example, if a product is damaged after it leaves the factory, manufactures can show proof that the damage was no fault of their own. 

Overview and the Future of Manufacturing Workflow Management

Overview is disrupting centralized access to quality control data, positioning the company to dig deep into quality workflow for manufacturers. We believe they are well on their way to building an end-to-end quality control platform that facilitates workflow automation for any factory. 

Through our investment, Overview joins Blumberg Capital’s community of visionary founders and transformative, AI-driven software companies. Please follow updates from the founding team Chris, Austin, Russell Nibbelink, Xiaoyang Kao and Overview here and on LinkedIn.

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