Cerrion, a Swiss-founded industrial AI company, has secured $18 million in Series A funding to accelerate the deployment of its AI video agents across global manufacturing. The fresh capital comes at a time when producers are under intense pressure to curb costly downtime and waste while maintaining safe, resilient operations. Cerrion’s platform aims to tackle these problems directly by turning standard factory cameras into intelligent, always-on production monitors.
Funding Round and Investor Lineup
The $18 million Series A round is led by Creandum, a well-known early-stage investor in technology-driven scaling companies. Existing backers Y Combinator, Goat Capital, 10x Founders and Session VC also joined the round, underscoring continued conviction in Cerrion’s trajectory. The company additionally attracted notable angel investors, including Harry Stebbings of 20VC, Oskar Hjertonsson, Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face and Garret Langley of Flock Safety.
The Scale of Factory Downtime
Unplanned downtime is a massive drag on global manufacturing performance, with annual losses estimated at roughly $1.4 trillion worldwide. Rising energy costs and increasingly intricate supply chains have pushed related expenses up sharply, with some estimates indicating more than a threefold increase since 2019. In this environment, even small production interruptions or quality slips can translate into substantial financial and operational setbacks.
How Cerrion’s AI Video Agents Work
Cerrion’s platform uses AI video agents that plug into existing factory camera infrastructure, avoiding the need for specialized hardware. These agents continuously monitor critical production zones, tracking process flows, quality indicators and operator safety conditions in real time. When they detect anomalies, they can automatically trigger alerts, slow or stop machines and notify relevant teams to intervene before issues escalate.
Cutting Downtime and Scrap
By combining automated intervention with human oversight, Cerrion aims to shorten the time between incident detection and resolution on the factory floor. The company reports that customers are resolving problems up to 50 percent faster after deploying its technology, which translates into significantly less downtime. At the same time, manufacturers are seeing scrap and waste cut by as much as half, directly improving margins and resource efficiency.
Adoption Across Industries and Customers
Cerrion is already in live production with a range of manufacturers across glass, food, timber and consumer packaged goods. Clients include names such as Unilever, Riedel, Schott Zwiesel, Stölzle Lausitz, Sisecam and Verallia, whose facilities supply major global brands like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Pfizer and Novartis. Many customers are moving quickly from single-site pilots to broader rollouts across multiple plants once initial results are demonstrated.
Market Context and Competitive Position
Manufacturers worldwide are searching for practical ways to embed AI-driven automation into legacy operations without disrupting existing infrastructure. Cerrion’s approach, which layers software intelligence on top of standard cameras, is designed to be deployed rapidly and scaled across sites with minimal friction. This positions the company as a key enabler for factories that want tangible performance gains rather than experimental proofs of concept.
Expansion Plans and Technical Roadmap
With the new funding, Cerrion plans to expand its presence in the United States and Europe, where demand for operational resilience and safety improvements is rising. The company intends to double its headcount across these regions, bolstering engineering, product and go-to-market teams. It also aims to broaden its platform beyond computer vision, integrating additional data streams to cover a wider spectrum of manufacturing processes and use cases.
Leadership and Talent Base
Cerrion’s team brings together expertise from institutions such as ETH Zurich and EPFL, alongside experience from companies like Google. This mix of academic and industry backgrounds underpins the company’s focus on building robust, production-ready AI systems rather than purely experimental technology. Co-founder and CEO Karim Saleh has emphasized that the goal is to give frontline operators tools that make their work safer, less stressful and more efficient.
The Series A funding marks a significant milestone for Cerrion as it scales its AI video agents into more factories and production lines worldwide. By reducing downtime, cutting scrap and strengthening safety through real-time monitoring and intervention, the company aims to address some of manufacturing’s most persistent pain points. As industrial players continue to digitize and automate, Cerrion is positioning itself as a core infrastructure provider for the next generation of smart factories.