We make sure every factory in the world builds without mistakes.
TL;DR: Every custom metal part starts as a drawing, and every drawing gets checked by hand before anyone builds it. Hera does that check in minutes instead of a full day, and catches the mistakes that turn into scrapped parts.
The Problem
Custom mechanical parts run on 2D drawings. Whether you're an OEM releasing drawings to suppliers, or an aerospace supplier answering to source inspection, every drawing has to be checked against ASME/ISO standards and GD&T requirements before it goes anywhere near a machine.
Right now, that review is done by hand, and usually by the most senior engineer in the building. And a single missed tolerance callout or an ambiguous datum reference can mean a scrapped part, a blown schedule, or a shipment that fails inspection.
We heard the same story from a pressure vessel fabricator, a semiconductor tooling shop, and a medical device manufacturer: reviews take days. This isn't because the work is hard. There's simply no good way to do it faster without cutting corners, and nobody cuts corners on a drawing that could scrap a $40,000 part.
Our Solution
Hera is a brain for manufacturing. Any real advance in manufacturing has to be grounded in two things: the standards parts are held to and the reality of the shop floor. So that's what we built Hera on.
Upload a drawing and Hera checks GD&T callouts, tolerance stack ups, and title block requirements against ASME Y14.5, relevant ISO standards, and your own design intent. The result is a drawing your shop can build right the first time, without the delays and rework that eat margins. Every review also makes Hera more valuable, creating a system of record for drawing errors that helps teams build better models for engineering processes.
While the current review takes days, Hera takes minutes… and gets better by the drawing.
Us
Noelle grew up in an industrial park her family runs in the Philippines and has been on factory floors her whole life. At 19, she built a water-treatment facility that added 40 L/s of capacity to the park.
Meera has spent years around manufacturing: at her family's plants, and on projects at Pfizer and TE Connectivity, where she built a SOTA discrete-event simulation. She taught herself PLC programming and C++, and has published ML research at UW.
We actually met on a bus to a factory tour, and have been best friends ever since!
Our Ask If you run or work at a factory (aerospace, semiconductor, medical device, pressure vessel, or custom machinery), we want to visit you! If you invite us out to see your shop, we’ll come by in person and bring you a customized Hera Swiss Army knife.
Reach out to us at founders@manufacturingintelligence.org.
What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
American manufacturers lose an estimated $285,000 annually to poor quality for every $10 million in revenue. At the same time, the industry is losing the engineers who know how to prevent those losses. Nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs will need to be filled by 2033 as experienced workers retire, and almost half are expected to go unfilled. Much of the expertise required to review complex engineering drawings exists only in the heads of senior engineers who are leaving the workforce.
We're both engineers who grew up watching this firsthand. After more than 200 conversations with manufacturing engineers, quality engineers and machinists, we're building software that captures that expertise by automatically reviewing engineering drawings against ASME standards and company-specific rules before they ever reach the shop floor.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
We're building the largest repository of engineering judgment in the world. We tailor each company's checks to their own standards, the kind usually mastered by only a handful of senior engineers. We turn that knowledge into software every plant can use the same week.
With success, the physical things the world depends on get built 10x faster, and a retiring generation's expertise is never lost.
