Hexagon Recognizes Manufacturing Start-Ups

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence has named RIIICO and SmartParts the winners of its first cohort of start ups, which were selected to help the manufacturing industry operate more sustainably and efficiently. 

The company launched its Sixth Sense open innovation platform in January 2022, to challenge how nations around the world approach innovation and help create solutions to manufacturing challenges by connecting with global companies.

The two joint winners were chosen following an eight-week training program to hone their business models and approaches, concluding with a final presentation to a panel of judges to pitch for the resources to globalize and gain access to Hexagon’s customer base. The winners are RIIICO, a company that has designed a ‘Sims-style’ drag-and-drop virtual factory floor, and SmartParts, a company that has created an embedded digital barcode for 3D printing. 

 RIICO’s AI solution creates a true-to-life simulation of a plant with a single 3D scan. The company says that this technology has productivity improvement potential, removing the ideation barriers from design innovation. This could contribute to greener workflows, by making identification and installation as low-resource as possible. The team from Germany launched the company last year, and since joining the platform have already been backed by UC Berkeley's SkyDeck fund, multiple investors and AI experts in the U.S. and Germany.

SmartParts has developed a solution using data-rich particles that can be embedded into the materials of 3D printed parts which, when scanned, reveal the material and part’s full specifications and history. The solution will enable industries with specific technical requirements, like aerospace and defense, and those with strong ESG commitments such as governments, to have greater control over their supply chain and processes. SmartParts aims to combat counterfeiting directly, by connecting physical assets with digital records to ensure end-to-end traceability and trust in 3D printing. The small, U.S.-based team has direct experience with manufacturing, having served as New York City’s main contractor for 3D printed swabs during the height of the pandemic in 2020.

Sixth Sense is described as a modern approach to the traditional accelerator, designed as an exchange of value between Hexagon and the start-ups, providing more than just theoretical training. The company aims for the cohort to gain tailored instruction on how to hone their offering for commercial success using Hexagon’s deep market insight, while Hexagon aims to apply learnings from the start-ups’ agility and fresh approaches to innovation.

The runner-up to the two winners is Praemo, who developed Razor, a manufacturing insights application that ingests data ‘as-is’ from automation, quality, historians and maintenance systems to drive improvement in areas such as throughput, cost and productivity using advanced machine learning without the need for skilled data science teams. Hexagon would like to congratulate all the companies involved in this pioneering cohort, which included Eyeflow AI, IconPro, SmartPM and SmartUQ.