Artificial intelligence video platform Cerrion AG today announced it has raised $18 million in early-stage funding to expand and scale operations across factories in Europe and the United States.

The Series A round was led by leading early-stage venture firm Creandum, with participation from existing investors Y Combinator, Goat Capital, 10x Founders and Session VC.

Cerrion uses standard cameras combined with visual AI to catch and respond to production line issues instantly. By rapidly discovering breakages, anomalies and other issues, manufacturers can avoid dangerous or costly problems piling up.

According to the True Cost of Downtime 2024 report by Siemens, unscheduled downtime has caused nearly 11% of the annual revenue loss for the world’s 500 largest companies. This compounds to a total of $1.4 trillion. In the automotive industry, every unproductive factory hour can cost manufacturers around $2.3 million; heavy industry has seen even greater losses with a fourfold increase since 2019.

“Global manufacturers are facing mounting pressure from unplanned downtime and rising operational costs, and the demand for solutions that tackle these challenges has never been higher,” said Karim Saleh, co-founder and chief executive of Cerrion.

The company’s agents watch video feeds to support human operators by catching process issues, quality disruptions and safety risks in real time. They trigger alerts, slow or stop machines in progress and update the relevant personnel with immediately actionable information.

Cerrion provides operators with what it calls a “video wall,” powered by real-time, anonymized footage of critical production areas. This dashboard is accessible from anywhere in the factory and ensures the team has monitoring of even the hardest-to-reach locations, allowing them to react quickly when attention is needed.

Coupled with telemetry from the machines themselves, this allows operators to quickly understand what went wrong and resolve issues faster than before. According to Cerrion, this combination of autonomous intervention and human response has enabled manufacturers to resolve issues 50% faster, thereby reducing downtime and losses by half.

Without providing exact numbers, Cerrion said customer growth and adoption have driven a tenfold increase in revenue since 2024. The company said this has been driven by strong demand from customers in the United States, coupled with consistent demand across Europe and Latin America.

The company boasts multiple manufacturing customers across three continents and 15 countries, who have deployed in live production across glass, food, timber and consumer package goods industries. Customers include Unilever, Riedel, Schott Zwiesel and manufacturers that supply products to major global brands such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Pfizer and Novartis.

Cerrion said it plans to use the funding to double its headcount in Europe and the U.S. and expand the platform beyond vision. The expansion will allow the company to support a larger range of manufacturing processes and customers.

Image: Cerrion