Maneva Is Founded
Maneva was born at the intersection of world-class research and real-world manufacturing. Co-Founder and CEO Rae Jeong is a ex-Google DeepMind research engineer who worked on AI and robotics at the frontier of lifelong reinforcement learning.
Co-Founder and CTO Kelvin Chan is a former Magna R&D engineer who developed next-generation perception technologies in computer vision, RF, and deep learning for automotive and manufacturing.
Together, Rae and Kelvin bridge advanced AI research with the realities of the factory floor. Their mission is clear: to create the world’s first Self-Improving Factory, optimizing manufacturing and empowering people.
Foundation
We ran our first pilot with a manufacturer, testing AI for quality control and machine health on a live production line. It showed a return early, without disrupting operations.
What we learned shaped our core technology, Video-to-Action AI, which turns what cameras see into real-time actions on the line. It became the foundation for the AI agents that followed, first acting on the product, then supervising the process and the people.
Breakthroughs
We moved from pilots to partnerships with established manufacturers, running our technology in high-volume production. Working on real lines at full speed showed it could scale well beyond a single test.
Those results drew interest from leading venture capital firms and recognition from peers in the industry, setting up the funding round that followed.
Commercialization
We expanded our product family to support a modular, scalable factory intelligence. We introduced ALIS (AI Line Supervisor), which oversees production flow, tracks efficiency, and ensures safety compliance across the line.
This evolution in product strategy, paired with strong customer validation, helped us secure a $10 million seed round to accelerate development, scale deployments, and move closer to our vision of fully autonomous, AI-driven factories.
Building the Self-Improving Factory
In 2025 we set out the category we’re building: the self-improving factory, where AI doesn’t stop at analyzing data. It sees what happens on the line, decides, and acts in real time, accepting, rejecting or rerouting product and flagging unsafe conditions as they happen.
Our patent-pending VITA and ALIS agents run on the cameras a plant already has and learn continuously. Instead of being reprogrammed for every change, they improve with what they see, so the factory gets a little smarter with every shift.
Series A and the Orchestration Platform
In June we raised a $27 million Series A backed by USVP, with Bling Capital and Freestyle Capital returning from our seed round. That brought total funding to $38.4 million, earned on results from real production lines.
In July we launched the Orchestration Platform, which connects our agents into one real-time system across the facility. VITA acts on the product, unit by unit. ALIS supervises the process and the people. The Orchestration Platform ties them together, so a plant runs as one operation, from one agent on one line to the whole floor.
