Munich-based 36ZERO Vision has raised €3.6 million in a pre-Series A round to accelerate the expansion of its AI-powered visual quality inspection system across Europe and different sectors.
The latest funding was led by JOIN Capital, Bayern Kapital, and Vanagon Ventures, with additional backing from UnternehmerTUM Funding for Innovators and Alchemist.
According to CEO Heiko Huber: “Our system delivers higher accuracy with lower complexity, and it’s already earning the trust of top-tier manufacturers. This funding helps us scale faster and push the limits of what AI in manufacturing can do.”
Founded in 2021 out of a hackathon at BMW Group, the company is innovating industrial defect detection with a data-efficient, hardware-agnostic platform designed to dramatically reduce pseudo-defects while enhancing accuracy and ease of deployment.
The startup was co-founded by Zeeshan Karamat, a former Microsoft and BMW Group engineer with a background in computer science and mathematics, and Heiko Huber, a mechanical engineer and serial entrepreneur who previously Co-founded fitness tech giant EGYM.
Karamat developed the foundation of the company through his hackathon experience – including over 100 wins – and a growing frustration with the inefficiencies of enterprise engineering environments. His work at BMW on predictive maintenance planted the early seeds for what would become 36ZERO Vision.
“Manufacturing is overdue for AI-driven innovation that reliably delivers results beyond the lab. 36ZERO Vision’s breakthrough solution is rewriting industry standards by dramatically cutting false positives and simplifying processes,” said Tobias Schirmer, Founding Partner at Join Capital.
Launched to address the inefficiencies of traditional inspection systems, 36ZERO Vision has developed a software-first visual inspection tool that leverages a modular deep learning model to detect defects using as few as five annotated images.
This stands in contrast to existing solutions which reportedly require thousands of samples and lengthy manual labelling processes.
Its software can be deployed using low-end hardware – including iPhones or NVIDIA Jetson devices – and supports widely adopted industry protocols, aiming to make integration straightforward and accessible across production environments.
The company’s technology has already seen adoption by Siemens, Bosch Rexroth, and LEONI – integrating the system into their production lines.
According to Huber, manufacturers are ready to adopt new inspection solutions because existing systems simply don’t deliver: “They’re frustrated. It takes hundreds or thousands of images, plus manual labelling. Even then, they often get too many false positives.”
By simulating hundreds of thousands of synthetic image variations, 36ZERO Vision’s AI models reportedly learn robustly from minimal data.
According to Zeeshan Karamat, “In one benchmark with just 10 images, we achieved nearly perfect accuracy – no missed defects, no false alarms. In contrast, a state-of-the-art competitor had a 9% error rate. Our platform is highly data-efficient.“
What sets 36ZERO Vision says sets them apart is its multi-stage deep learning architecture. Each stage, acting as a “mixture of experts,” focuses on specific inspection tasks to deliver high accuracy. Users can perform labelling, training, and validation directly in the cloud-based platform – enabling self-serve onboarding without the need for on-site integration or hardware retrofitting.
Initially focused on automotive, the startup now serves industries including electronics, machinery, building materials, and is seeing increased traction in defence. Plans are in place to expand into semiconductor inspection – particularly wafer and chip applications – within the next few years.
The funding will allow the team to expand across sales, customer success, and product development, and to deepen deployments across Europe. While most of 36ZERO Vision’s current growth is European, the long-term ambition is to define a global standard for software-first industrial AI.
Huber emphasised the importance of staying close to industry: “Ultimately, what we’re building can’t be done in a vacuum. You need proximity to real industrial use cases. AI alone isn’t enough; you need something that works reliably on the shop floor.
“Southern Germany has the perfect ecosystem for this: world-class talent, customers, and industrial champions who are willing to adopt new tech. That’s our home base.”
The company plans to focus on expanding its footprint across Europe in the near term, with ambitions for wider global impact in the years ahead.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/07/german-startup-36zero-vision-secures-e3-6-million-to-scale-data-efficient-ai-inspection-platform/
