A symbol of artificial intelligence. Photo: public domain.

CTech – Israeli autonomous AI developer Cortica has announced an $8.5 million joint venture with Hong Kong-headquartered Johnson Electric Group to build an autonomous inspection system aimed at upgrading the quality inspection market. The new venture, named Lean AI, will leverage Johnson Electric’s knowledge and experience in manufacturing processes and Cortica’s autonomous AI technology.

Supervised Deep Learning-based quality assurance systems can currently take weeks, up to months, to deploy. The existing systems are reliant on a data scientist or AI experts and require large manually-tagged training sets with thousands of defect image examples. Lean AI’s technology overcomes those challenges thanks to unsupervised learning, processing information within a fraction of a second, while utilizing unlabeled data, applying predictive quality assurance, and compiling data that increases the speed of deployment and scaling. As an open platform agnostic to camera, defect type, and product, Lean AI can collaborate with any integrators, OEMs, and manufacturers of automation solutions.

“With the power of Cortica’s Autonomous AI technology, and JE’s vast knowledge of the market, Lean AI will deliver a product that reduces the cost of human error when it comes to quality inspection in manufacturing and address the vulnerabilities in the current market,” said Karina Odinaev, CEO of Lean AI and co-founder and CEO of Cortica.

The global machine vision market is currently valued at $11 billion and is forecast to increase to $15.5 billion by 2026.

“Johnson Electric’s deep experience in a wide range of manufacturing processes offers a unique platform for developing this technology for commercial use,” said Austin Wang, Senior Vice President of Johnson Electric. “The joint venture is also opening a new avenue for Johnson Electric to develop and market software offerings. It is therefore both a technological as well as business model innovation for us. There are also opportunities to apply the technology in predictive quality and expert systems as well. This is the second investment of Johnson Electric in Israeli technology and we will continue to assess such relevant opportunities.”

“Cortica has developed self-learning AI that is fundamentally different from traditional deep learning systems,” added Igal Raichelgauz, co-founder and Chairman of Cortica. “Autonomous AI Technology operates like a human brain — it’s not a fixed system; instead, it continuously adapts itself to various scenarios and learns online in real-time. Its technology requires far less computing power, can be deployed at a fraction of the cost, and provides far superior performance outcomes.”