UnitX raised a $5 million investment from SE Ventures that will help the company expand its geographic reach.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—A Silicon Valley robotics company is pioneering next-generation AI vision systems that improve manufacturing yield and quality by automating visual detection of part defects. The company, UnitX, recently reported that it received a $5 million investment from SE Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture fund backed by global energy and automation giant Schneider Electric.

UnitX, through its software-defined vision system, OptiX, and its edge AI compute platform, CorteX, delivers what it described in a release as “unparalleled inspection and defect detection capabilities to manufacturing customers.” Its technology is said to be capable of driving “step-change improvements in the detection of visual defects that often escape error-prone and overworked human inspectors or legacy machine vision systems.”

By partnering with UnitX, customers can significantly reduce scrap, improve yield, and maintain the highest quality standards, the company said in the release.

“We have looked at every major startup in this category in the past two years, and it is clear to us that UnitX has cracked the right product and go-to-market approach to quickly deliver significant ROI to large enterprise customers,” said Varun Jain, general partner at SE Ventures, in a statement. “Moreover, they are focused on large, yet underserved market segments, like electric vehicle and lithium-ion battery manufacturing, that are going to see a significant capacity expansion in the near future.”

The investment will also help UnitX expand its geographic reach and accelerate its mission to radically elevate quality, traceability, and profitability of manufacturing operations.

“UnitX is one of the fastest growing players in our category, and our systems are running on the production lines of the world’s top manufacturers in Li battery and automotive,” said UnitX CEO and Co-founder Keven Wang, in the release. “That said, the deep domain knowledge of the SE Ventures team, coupled with the complementary offerings [of] Schneider Electric’s market leading automation and software solutions, will enable UnitX to deliver value to manufacturers on a larger scale.”