NVIDIA Programs Attracting Companies from Gamut of Vision Space

NVIDIA’s Inception and Metropolis programs have attracted multiple vision-focused startups and companies, including Covision Quality, Deci, Hayden AI, and Seeed Studio. Semiconductor technology company Newsight Imaging is among the latest to join NVIDIA’s Inception program, of which Covision Quality is also a member. Covision joined Inception last year and joined the Metropolis program in July.

Covision Quality’s interface from the perspective of the end-of-line quality control operator. The red border on the image of the manufactured part indicates that the part is 'not OK,' thus cannot be sent to the end customer and needs to be discarded. Courtesy of Covision Quality.

The Inception program is designed to nurture startups with innovative technological advancements by supporting them during critical stages of product development, prototyping, and deployment. Members of the program get a custom set of ongoing benefits, such as NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute credits, marketing support, and technology assistance.

For Newsight Imaging, which develops 3D machine vision sensors and spectral vision chips, membership in Inception will enable the company to expand its approach to the automotive depth-vision ecosystem, which includes makers of lidars, advanced driver-assistance systems, and autonomous vehicle-safety technology, as well as to support customers wishing to build products based on Newsight’s sensors and the NVIDIA AI platform. Inception will also provide Newsight the opportunity to collaborate with industry-leading experts and other AI-driven organizations, the company said.

NVIDIA Metropolis is a partner program, application framework, and set of developer tools designed to help usher in a new generation of vision AI applications. The platform is used to make sense of vast quantities of data created by sensor technologies across a range of industries, including retail, manufacturing, traffic infrastructure, and health care facilities.

Members of the program can gain early access to NVIDIA platform updates to further enhance and accelerate their AI application development efforts. The program also offers the opportunity for members to collaborate with industry-leading experts and other AI-driven organizations.

Covision Quality is a spinoff of Covision Lab, a computer vision and machine learning application center and company builder. Covision Quality licenses its visual inspection software product to manufacturing companies in several industries, ranging from metal manufacturing to packaging. Thanks to its unsupervised machine learning technology, the company’s software can be trained in an hour on average and generates reduction of pseudo-scrap rates by up to 90% for its customers. Its workstations deployed at customer sites harness the power of NVIDIA RTX A5000 GPU-accelerated computing, which allows the software to run in real time — processing images, inspecting components, and more.

“We expect that NVIDIA Metropolis, which sits at the heart of many developments that are happening in the industry today, will give us a boost in our go-to-market efforts and support us in connecting to customers and system integrators,” said Franz Tschimben, CEO of Covision Quality.