Neurala Honored in Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards

For many companies, just making it through 2020 was a herculean effort. At Neurala, we were fortunate to be able to achieve many of the goals we set for ourselves, including the successful launch of our VIA software, a vision AI solution that’s helping manufacturers improve quality inspections. Our team worked tirelessly to ensure that VIA had a smooth launch, so we are super excited that VIA has received Honorable Mention in the Data + AI category of Fast Company’s annual World Changing Ideas awards program. These awards honor products, concepts, companies, and designs that are pursuing innovation for the good of society and the planet.

Manufacturing around the world was severely impacted by the pandemic, with supply chain disruptions, wildly fluctuating consumer demand, and workforce constraints. For most manufacturers, it caused them to rethink the way they operated their production lines. The adoption of technology became a necessary next step to face the many challenges they were encountering, including how they were inspecting products to ensure safe and defect-free products.

Quality inspections in manufacturing are often performed by humans on the line, a tedious and time-consuming process for human workers, and one that became very difficult to maintain with social distancing mandates. In June 2020 we launched VIA, enabling manufacturers to increase inspection rates while decreasing reliance on human inspectors. VIA also allows manufacturers the flexibility to quickly adjust to product line changeovers, all while improving their ability to identify defects.

Since its inception, Neurala has been on a mission to make AI more accessible and applicable in real world applications. Using our patented Lifelong-DNN (L-DNN) technology, our VIA software
removes the barriers to AI adoption for manufacturers: AI experts are not needed, new hardware investments are unnecessary, only small amounts of data are required to build models, it adjusts to its environment in real-time rather than needing to be retrained for every scenario, and it does not rely on internet access or connectivity to the cloud. By making VIA fast and easy to implement, manufacturers can realize an ROI in months, not years, when automating their quality inspection process.

 

We are thankful to be recognized by Fast Company as a World Changing Idea in 2021 – and we agree: this technology definitely has the potential to change the world. VIA levels the playing field for AI adoption and empowers manufacturers to maintain their competitive advantage to meet future challenges …….whatever they might be.