A note from the founder

In 2024, factories in China installed 295,000 industrial robots. Every other country on earth put together installed 247,000. Their operating fleet is past two million machines now, the largest anywhere, and for the first time most of those robots came from Chinese manufacturers rather than foreign ones.

People here still file that under cheap labor. I don't think that holds up anymore. You don't lose a part to a line that runs without people because its operators are inexpensive. You lose it because there aren't many operators in the cost to begin with, and because a line that runs unattended runs nights and weekends at a quality that doesn't drift. The competition isn't really about wages now. It's about how much of your line still depends on someone paying attention.

That's the part I find uncomfortable, because most plants have automated everything except one station. The press is automated. Material handling is automated. The robot cell has been running for years. Then the parts reach a bench, and a person picks up each one, turns it under a light, and decides what ships. On the ten-thousandth part of a twelve-hour shift. Inspection is usually the last manual station on a line that's automated everywhere else, and it sets the ceiling for the rest of it. You can only run as fast as someone can look, and you only catch what someone can still catch at hour eleven.

It stayed manual for a fair reason. Normal machine vision wants thousands of labeled images of every defect, on every part number, under your exact lighting. Change the part or move a lamp and you start over. So the pilot drags on for six months, the budget runs out, the person who championed it moves on, and the system ends up unplugged in the corner of the QC room. The technology worked fine. Keeping it alive cost more than anyone planned for.

That's the problem we built Sentry around. It learns what your good parts look like by watching them. No labeled dataset, no defect library to put together, no tuning pass before it does anything useful. It works out what normal looks like and flags what doesn't match, so setup takes minutes instead of quarters, and changing a part doesn't mean starting again.

If you run a line, I'd rather show you than pitch you. We'll put Sentry on your floor for two weeks, on your parts, under your lighting, and you can compare it against the bench you have now. If it doesn't pay for itself, we take it off and you've lost two weeks and nothing else.