With a $50M Series C, Instrumental looks to expand data-driven manufacturing solution –

Having worked on products like the iPod and Apple Watch for the previous six years, they were intimately familiar with the process for checking on manufacturing quality: You got on a plane to Asia and took a look for yourself. CEO and co-founder Anna-Katrina Shedletsky said that after logging thousands of air miles, she and co-founder Samuel Weiss left Apple in 2015 with an idea for replacing on-site inspections with a software solution, meaning engineers could perform quality control without leaving their offices. So they place eyes on the assembly line in the form of a high-resolution camera to capture key aspects of the product building process in search of anomalies, which typically are a harbinger of a problem. As customers identify issues that matter to them, it helps train the company’s machine models, which should then get better over time at finding the most critical problems. Further, Shedletsky reports it’s a sticky product, meaning customers don’t tend to leave once they start using it, with net revenue retention of 150% in 2021.