Three of the world’s top providers of image recognition and visual search technology have announced an agreement to merge and form one company focused on part recognition.
Partium’s new Part-finder Kiosk enables recognition of parts in a device in warehouses or stores.
U.S.-based Slyce, Spain-based Catchoom, and Austria-based Humai are joining forces to form Partium, a business that offers a solution for the fast identification of parts within industrial environments.
The new company will build on Humai’s part-recognition solutions that combine computer vision with “Delta,” a proprietary spare part AI, to achieve a 95% or better exact-match recognition rate of industrial parts. Several of Humai’s customers already leverage this software in mobile apps to identify installed parts — as well as loose parts in a warehouse.
“With our part search, we can dramatically decrease the time it takes a technician or consumer to identify a part, and also avoid misidentification and mix-ups,” said Humai CEO Philipp Descovich, who will become the CEO of Partium.. “For machine builders, Partium is a new and exciting channel to grow their Aftersales business through promotional offers, parts catalogs, and user data analytics that help to predict demand.”
The Slyce company, a leading provider of visual search for more than 60 retailers in North America, developed its expertise in part recognition with The Home Depot, which launched Slyce’s camera search in 2015.
“Identifying spare parts — whether it’s a hex bolt or a link-arm assembly — is hard, especially if you don’t have that domain expertise,” said Ted Mann, CEO of Slyce, who will become president of Partium. “What we realized at Slyce was that our technology was exceptionally good at getting to an exact part match.”
Mann added: :At first, we did this only with a mobile experience in home improvement and automotive retailer applications. But increasingly, we’re using in-store solutions, like our Part Finder Kiosk, which can truly find a needle in a haystack, identifying any fastener you put inside and blinking a light to show you exactly where to find it in the aisle of a store.”
The Partium business will be headquartered in Vienna, with offices in Philadelphia, Barcelona, and New Waterford, Nova Scotia.
“We believe in making the technology modular and platform agnostic,” Descovich continued. “In other words, you can recognize parts using our Partium app, through the Partium SDK embedded in your own ERP app, a Partium kiosk that lives in the warehouse, or however you chose.”
Filed Under: Fastening + joining