Maneva Raises $27M to Tackle Inefficiencies Across the $46T Manufacturing Industry
June 2026 · 5 min read · Maneva AI, News
Backed by
U.S. Venture Partners · Bling Capital · Freestyle Capital · $38.4M total raised
Maneva, the Video-to-Action AI company building the intelligence layer for modern manufacturing, today announced $27 million in Series A funding, accelerating its mission to close the $18 trillion global manufacturing efficiency gap.
Manufacturing is at an inflection point. The technology to close the efficiency gap finally exists, and the factories that deploy it first won't just cut costs – they'll redefine what's possible on the production floor.
Maneva's Video-to-Action AI turns existing factory cameras into real-time operational decisions. It begins with deep learning computer vision, giving factories the ability to see, understand, and act on what's happening on the floor, then expands into agentic systems that connect, coordinate, and optimize the entire operation. It is the deep learning engine for modern manufacturing, and the foundation of everything Maneva builds.
The raise: $27M Series A led by U.S. Venture Partners
The Series A round was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), with participation from returning investors Bling Capital and Freestyle Capital, alongside a group of leading angel investors and funds. This fundraise brings Maneva’s total capital raised to $38.4M.
“I was immediately impressed the first time I spoke to Rae and Kelvin, when they explained how Maneva was combining the latest computer vision models with their backgrounds in reinforcement learning and robotics to unlock automation in factory environments. As someone who started their career in manufacturing, I knew the potential had always been there, and I could see how Maneva could solve the core issues that plagued legacy systems by removing the need for proprietary hardware, custom training, and heavy services.” — Matt Garratt, General Partner, U.S. Venture Partners
The capital will position Maneva to accelerate on three fronts: deepening its core AI capabilities through continued development of VITA and ALIS, expanding its customer base into new geographies and industries, and rolling out its next generation of factory orchestration and AI knowledge agent features.
The problem: a $46T industry running at 60%
Manufacturing is one of the largest industries in the world, generating roughly $46 trillion in annual output. Yet the average factory operates at only 60% efficiency. The gap between that average and world-class performance represents approximately $18 trillion in value lost every year: unplanned downtime, quality failures, safety incidents, and operational bottlenecks.
Supply chains are under mounting pressure. The World Economic Forum reports that supply chain disruptions have surged by nearly 40%, while global industrial efficiency gains have slowed significantly since 2019. At the same time, manufacturing accounts for roughly 40% of global final energy demand, according to the International Energy Agency, making operational efficiency an environmental imperative, not just a financial one.
For years, the tools to fix this haven’t existed at the edge, in real time, without a multi-year infrastructure overhaul. That’s changed. The convergence of edge AI hardware, vision-language models, and advanced compute infrastructure has made it possible to deploy intelligence directly on the factory floor today, on existing systems, at a cost that makes sense. Global supply chain volatility, rising energy costs, and tightening labor markets have made inaction more expensive than transformation. The window to act is now, and the manufacturers moving first are already pulling ahead.
How it works: deep learning computer vision that sees, understands, and acts
Maneva is building the intelligence layer for modern manufacturing, the data and control system that sits between the factory floor and the decisions that keep it running.
At its core is deep learning computer vision, tailored to each operation, that lets factories see, understand, and act on what's happening on the floor in real time. It's the foundation behind Maneva's Video-to-Action AI and its mission to drive safety, efficiency, and growth in the factories that power the world.
Maneva's patent-pending VITA and ALIS agents run on NVIDIA edge devices and connect to any camera already on the floor. From the moment the software is deployed, reinforcement learning lets the models see, think, act, and improve autonomously, getting sharper the longer they run.
Video-to-Action AI Solutions
VITA is Maneva's Video-to-Action AI agent for quality assurance and downtime reduction. Running fully autonomously, it inspects every unit at full line speed, making accept, reject, or reroute decisions up to 30 times per second.
VITA catches what manual inspection misses: surface defects, packaging failures, foreign object contamination, and subtle process drift. The moment it does, it triggers an automated response, stopping a defective unit before it reaches the next stage of production.
The impact shows up fast. One leading wood manufacturer was losing production to a stoppage every 1.5 minutes, one of its worst bottlenecks, and nothing it had tried fixed it. After deploying VITA, the interval between stoppages stretched from every 1.5 minutes to every 25 minutes, a 16x improvement in uptime.
Across deployments, VITA customers have seen an 8% increase in production volume, with models reaching up to 99.9% accuracy. It works with RGB, depth, and short-wavelength cameras that see through packaging, plus hyper-resolution setups for sub-millimeter precision, all with no proprietary hardware or infrastructure overhaul required.
AI Line Supervisor Solutions
ALIS is Maneva's AI Line Supervisor agent for safety and productivity. It monitors the entire facility in real time, flagging PPE non-compliance, unauthorized zone access, hand proximity to dangerous machinery, and near-miss events, then triggering local alerts the instant they happen, preventing incidents rather than documenting them after the fact.
ALIS gives frontline workers and supervisors visibility they have never had before, surfacing the real-time intelligence that keeps people safe and the line running at its best.
Across deployments, ALIS has delivered roughly a 50% improvement in safety performance and up to a 10% increase in output through higher worker productivity.
Industries Served
Maneva serves customers across confectionery, steel, glass, wood, meat processing, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, distribution, automotive, and electronics, and the industries don’t stop there. Because Maneva’s AI learns and adapts to the environment it’s deployed in, any facility looking to improve uptime, quality, safety, or productivity is a fit.
“The Maneva team is a rising force in vision AI. Talented, driven, and exceptionally capable, they bring both the expertise and the energy needed to push the industry forward. Their work with us demonstrated real execution power and real impact on the business.” — CIO, Fortune 500 industrial manufacturer
Built by people who know the floor
Maneva was co-founded in 2021 by Rae Jeong and Kelvin Chan, whose backgrounds are as grounded in the physical world as in AI research.
Rae, Co-Founder and CEO, started his career as a welder in Alberta before going on to lead robotics and deep reinforcement learning research at Google DeepMind. That combination, firsthand knowledge of the factory floor and world-class AI expertise, shapes every product decision Maneva makes. The conviction behind it is simple: the workforce keeping the global economy running deserves tools actually built for them.
Kelvin, Co-Founder and CTO, brings mechatronics engineering from the University of Waterloo and years developing next-generation perception technology at Magna International. At Maneva, he turns that automotive-grade perception work into edge AI that holds up in the place it's hardest to run: a live production line, on existing hardware, in real time.
Together they built a team fluent in both the technical depth to build edge AI at scale and the operational reality of running it in live production.
“At a time when supply chains are under pressure and the world is facing an energy crisis, manufacturers have a real opportunity to rethink how factories operate by reducing waste, improving efficiency, and making better use of every unit of energy. At Maneva, we’re helping bring that visibility and control to the factory floor.” — Rae Jeong, Co-Founder & CEO, Maneva
Speak to a Maneva expert
Ready to see what Maneva can do for your floor? Book a demo
.png)
