Drishti Technologies Joins Emergence Family

We’re delighted to announce that Emergence has led Drishti Technologies’ Series A financing. The two-year-old Palo Alto-based company tackles the challenge of measuring and coaching human activities in manufacturing processes using AI-enabled, action recognition. In so doing, Drishti addresses a huge need for process optimization in the $12 trillion global manufacturing industry -- where humans still perform 90 percent of factory tasks.

Drishti is a great example of how advanced AI technologies can be employed in solutions that learn from humans and improve their skills, rather than replace them. At Emergence we’ve been investing in a range of companies that do just that – we call our thesis “Coaching Networks”, and we believe that these AI-based, human-centric solutions are the wave of the future.

When we met the Drishti team, we were immediately compelled by their vision to “digitize” and measure human activities in manufacturing, that have, until now, been largely unmeasurable. Using computer vision and AI, Drishti creates time and motion data from each task it observes, feeds that data back to line workers, and helps to boost workers’ precision and efficiency. The data generated by Drishti can help manufacturers optimize their stations and lines, sharing best practices with their colleagues and driving overall improvements in factory performance. Think Youtube for manufacturing tied to real time business outcomes like speed, quality and efficiency.

Drishti’s founding team has the deep domain knowledge and talent to win big in the long run. The company is a spin-out from SRI International, where Dristhi Co-founder and CEO Dr. Prasad Akella was an entrepreneur-in-residence. Dr. Akella also led the team at General Motors that created the world's first collaborative robots. Other co-founders include Dr. Krishnendu Chaudhury, a computer vision and machine learning pioneer who previously worked at FlipKart, Google and Adobe; and Dr. Ashish Gupta, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Junglee (AMZN), Tavant, and Helion Ventures.

We’re extremely excited to partner with the team at Drishti to extend human potential in manufacturing and fulfill their potential as a next generation leader in the industrial internet.