Israeli printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturer CADY has successfully raised $3 million USD to develop an AI-based software for inspection of circuit board designs.
The software uses machine learning to compare the components of a circuit board with the design of the board, ensuring that everything is in the right place and that there are no mistakes in the final product. This provides quality control and makes the manufacturing process significantly faster and more efficient.
CADY's CEO Gilad Shapira highlighted the industry's demand for advanced AI-based inspection technology: "Along with the chip market, the electrical circuit market also experiences an immense increase in recent decades in terms of the complexity of the design and the inspection of the schematics. Each circuit made for automotive, computers, cellphones and other electronic devices is becoming much denser and more complex, embedded with more components, and thus harder to inspect."
"Now, more than ever, there is an imminent need for an automatic inspection tool, based on AI technology, to inspect electrical schematics," Shapira added. "The system we developed is first of its kind, able to fuse both electrical board design theory and machine learning disciplines to read electrical components datasheets and inspect electrical schematics immediately and comprehensively."
The latest round of funding was led by Udi Peless, the future chairman of CADY's board of directors, and Pavel Radziviovsky and Vadim Zlotnik of Teramips Technologies, who won the Israel Defense Prize for a project called Visionmap that was eventually acquired by defense technology company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.
Among the participants in this funding round was Tel-Aviv University's venture capital fund TAU Ventures, which has previously invested in the startup.
CADY was founded in 2020 by Shapira, CTO Tal Ben Porath and Head of Research Or Shabtai, three IDF military intelligence veterans.
The startup has collaborated with chip manufacturer Intel and is a part of its startups program.