Singapore-based FireVisor aims to reduce the huge cost of product failure and defects that manufacturing companies bear

(R-L) Vishal Harnal, General Partner at 500 Startups; Surbhi Krishna Singh and Long Hoang (Co-founders of FireVisor); and Becky Kux, Portfolio Manager at 500 Startups

FireVisor​, a Singapore-based Artificial Intelligence startup that provides software solutions to large manufacturing companies, has raised close to SGD1 million (US$740,000) in seed round of funding, led by 500 Startups Durians II Fund and Acequia Capital.

SGInnovate, along with Entrepreneur First, also joined the round.

Launched 2018 by Surbhi Krishna Singh (CEO) and Long Hoang (CTO), FireVisor provides AI-based software solutions to manufacturing firms. It has built a machine learning-enabled analytics platform that connects to data sources in the manufacturing line, and automatically performs engineering failure analysis in real-time.

The startup’s aim is to reduce the huge cost of product failure and defects companies bear.

According to the founders, the industry has been focusing for too long on simple ‘if-else’ based automation which provides little improvement potential for today’s factories. As an alternative, FireVisor provides cognitive solutions that are powered with AI.

“Today, an army of human inspectors are needed to make sure no fault escapes the production line, while process control engineers constantly tweak and monitor machines. The machines, on the other hand, produce an abundance of valuable data but these vast amounts of data are unused and simply get discarded. FireVisor is on a mission to bring the power of data science to the manufacturing floor, and in the hands of humans with a few clicks,” said Singh.

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“Our secret weapon is our capability in dealing with data,” added Hoang. “Manufacturing data spread out in different systems have gaps, and contain false information. Our machine learning models work so well because we are able to clean the data, fill in the missing information and then bring them all together in one platform.”

FireVisor claims it already has a large client base in Southeast Asia, India and China, including manufacturing giants like REC Solar. It has more than 1.3 million parts in its industrial dataset and boasts of accuracy above 98.5 per cent when making decisions with manufacturing data. While this saves 45 per cent engineering time, it also helps manufacturing companies save costs otherwise lost on product failures and quality issues.

“While most innovation on the factory floor has been in data collection and automation, FireVisor goes much further by giving learning and predictive capabilities to manufacturing lines across any industry. Their early customers in the solar sector have already benefited from significant cost reductions and surgical insights on improving their processes,” said Vishal Harnal, General Partner at 500 Startups.

Apart from the investors, FireVisor is also supported by NVIDIA and NUS Enterprise and was very recently adjudged one of the ​top 25 startups​ in the ​Vizag Million Dollar Challenge​.

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