Cerrion raises $18M to reduce factory downtime with AI video agents

Cerrion, the Swiss-founded AI video agent platform that detects and resolves production line issues in real time, has raised $18 million in Series A funding to further expand and scale operations in the US and Europe. The round was led by Creandum, with participation from existing investors Y Combinator, Goat Capital, 10x Founders and Session VC, alongside prominent angels including Harry Stebbings (20VC), Oskar Hjertonsson, Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face) and Garret Langley (Flock Safety).

Factory downtime costs the global manufacturing industry an estimated $1.4 trillion annually, and with rising energy prices and increasingly complex supply chains, related costs have increased 319 per cent since 2019.

Cerrion addresses this issue with AI video agents that monitor factory operations beyond what workers can directly observe. These agents help operators detect and respond to process deviations, quality issues and safety risks in real time, triggering alerts, slowing or stopping machines and notifying relevant personnel as needed.

This combination of automated intervention and human oversight enables manufacturers to resolve problems up to 50 per cent faster, reducing downtime and scrap losses by up to half.

Cerrion is rapidly emerging as a key provider of AI-enabled automation, safety and efficiency solutions for the manufacturing sector. Its platform is already in use in live production at manufacturers such as Unilever, Riedel, Schott Zwiesel, Stölzle Lausitz, Sisecam and Verallia, spanning glass, food, timber and CPG industries that supply major global brands including Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Pfizer and Novartis.

Customers frequently scale quickly once the platform is deployed, often moving from single-site pilots to company-wide rollouts within months of seeing results.

Global manufacturers are facing mounting pressure from unplanned downtime and rising operational costs, and the demand for solutions that tackle these challenges has never been higher,

said Karim Saleh, Co-founder and CEO of Cerrion.

With a team built from talent originating at ETH Zurich, Google and EPFL, Cerrion plans to use the new funding to double its headcount in Europe and the US and to expand its platform beyond vision to support a wider range of manufacturing processes and customers.