Neurala: Looking ahead at 2023
First and foremost, from all of us at Neurala, happy new year and welcome to 2023!
As we end the first month of the year, we wanted to use of first blog post of 2023 to look back and share our summary of 2022:
After 2 testing years in a global pandemic, 2022 brought a sense of new hope for the economy. That is until the war in Ukraine which, like the pandemic, had rippling effects in every sector. The beginning of 2022 was marked by 3 things, the invasion of Ukraine, the Omnicron variant and inflation. One way that manufactures attempted to relieve some of the pains caused by the unique global situation is through greener more sustainable solutions. Products were reused and recycled at higher rates than before. In the Vision AI space, we saw an opportunity to help alleviate some of the stresses in the product inspection process caused by new health and safety regulations. Our Vision Inspection platform’s (VIA) ease of use, no AI experts required, accessible price point and the promise of “no product leaving the factory unchecked” made 2022 a year of growth and significant progress. Below are some of our highlights:
Market Development:
Neurala goes to market through a network of System Integrators and OEM partners. 2022 saw our System Integrator channel expand to almost 40 partners covering over 50 countries and they delivered new deployments in Europe, Asia and the Americas. To our System Integration partners, thank you for your collaboration last year, it has been sincerely appreciated. Our goal for 2023 is to continue to market our products and services in the markets where our integrator partners operate so that, together, we can continue to deliver best-in-class solutions to manufacturers around the world.
Our OEM partners sell versions of VIA that have been pre-integrated or optimized for their products and associated hardware. Examples include vision system provider, Teledyne FLIR and machine builder, IMA. We are extremely grateful and thankful to have worked with a total of 7 OEM partners in 2022 that are each at various stages of productization. We’re excited to share more news about these partnerships in 2023 as they bring these products to market.
To support our partners in 2022 we also participated in several major industry events during the year:
- The Vision Show Boston
- Vision 2022 Stuttgart
- ISC West
- Automate 2022
- SPS Italia
- GSX
Product Enhancements:
- Our engineering team released Detector, on cloud and on premise in 2022, which enables manufacturers to find and identify objects in a field of view. This capability is ideal for location tasks (such as picking or placement) and any use-cases that require counting (such as kitting or completeness checks.)
- We also released additional communication protocols for VIA Inspector. We added EthernetIP as an additional industrial communication mechanism as well as support for C++ plug-ins for those partners seeking more real-time integration with existing image processing pipelines or other software applications.
- Finally, and in addition to many other AI model architecture and product optimizations delivered during the year, we also launched Anomaly HiFi. This is a new feature that extends VIA’s anomaly capabilities to pinpoint the precise pixels in an image that prompted the anomaly prediction and these heatmaps are available at runtime to aid operators in locating the defects or anomalies in the parts being inspected.
Looking Ahead to 2023
The efficiency of factories has never been more crucial and the impact of a defective or poorly made product hitting the market can be substantial. For example, statistics show that the average cost to a food company for a product recall is $10 million and the number of products recalled by the FDA was over 7,000. The EU Recovery Plan has already committed investments of over €806.9 billion to ensure that, in 2023 and beyond, manufacturers transition to cleaner more efficient and sustainable factory floors. Under this plan, and similar initiatives around the world, 2023 will likely see the largest drive for factory automation and digital transformation than we have ever seen in a single year. Early adopters of advanced inspection technologies such as VIA are likely to see accelerating adoption as they ultimately improve the overall inspection process, reduce waste, minimize recalls and reduce manufacturers’ carbon footprint.
2023 looks bright and we’re excited to tackle it with our global partners!