A Berlin startup that watches factory floors through computer vision cameras has raised $19 million to expand what began as a simple monitoring tool into something closer to a shopfloor operating system.
Almetra, which recently shed its old name Deltia, closed a Series A round led by blisce/, the transatlantic venture firm behind Spotify and Pinterest. NAP, Merantix Capital, Robin Capital, Underline Ventures and Critical Ventures joined the round, along with several undisclosed individual investors. The company announced the financing last month but declined to share its valuation.
It's the latest bet on manufacturing intelligence at a moment when factories, squeezed by labor shortages and margin pressure, are hunting for efficiency gains that don't require ripping out equipment or halting production lines.
Almetra's pitch is straightforward: mount cameras overhead, let algorithms parse what's happening in real time, then surface the bottlenecks that plant managers couldn't see before. The system tracks cycle times, output rates and what the company calls "micro-stoppages" without storing most of the footage. Workers get anonymized. Machine sensors feed in alongside the video. The result, according to Almetra, is a continuous stream of intelligence about what's actually slowing things down.
"We could see how much they produced, but not how they were producing it," a Bosch manager said in a case study the company released. "For the first time, we could understand not just the results, but the reasons behind them."
The technology has found takers among some of Europe's industrial heavyweights. Bosch, Siemens Energy, ABB, Grundfos and Continental's Aumovio division are all customers, Almetra said. At a Bosch e-bike battery line in Hungary, the platform reportedly lifted shift output by 19 percent over four months while cutting labor needs by a fifth. Viessmann's plant in Poland saw productivity climb 20 percent, and Grundfos recorded an 11 percent throughput gain in three months.
Handelsblatt, the German business daily, reported similar figures at other sites, with productivity increases reaching 20 percent at some Bosch, Siemens Energy and ABB facilities.
Those numbers matter in an industry where single-digit efficiency improvements can reshape cost structures. But they also raise questions about how much of the gain comes from better visibility versus other changes happening simultaneously on those factory floors.
From Autonomous Vehicles to Assembly Lines
Almetra traces its roots to Berlin's Merantix venture studio, where co-founders Maximilian Fischer and Silviu Homoceanu spun out the company in 2022. Homoceanu had spent years building autonomous-driving software at Volkswagen Group before pivoting to manufacturing. The rebrand from Deltia, he said, reflects the platform's evolution from pure computer vision into broader factory automation.
The startup raised a €4.5 million seed round in early 2024 from Cavalry Ventures, Merantix and a handful of angels, including Willi Tscheschner, who co-founded Signavio, and Max Viessmann of the Viessmann industrial family. It has since grown to more than 40 employees spread across Berlin, Munich and offices in the United States.
Google DeepMind selected Almetra for its first European Robotics Accelerator cohort earlier this year. AWS Startups, NVIDIA Inception and MassRobotics tapped the company for a Physical AI Fellowship shortly after.
What Comes Next
The fresh capital will fund a U.S. expansion and product development aimed at turning Almetra's vision intelligence into what the company calls a "comprehensive intelligence layer for the shopfloor." That means pulling in more data sources, tightening integrations with enterprise IT systems, and building tools that don't just diagnose problems but help orchestrate responses.
It's an ambitious roadmap in a sector where software adoption has historically lagged and where factory managers often resist tools that feel like surveillance. Almetra insists its focus is on processes, not people, but the distinction can blur when cameras are tracking every motion on a production line.
Still, the underlying demand seems real enough. Manufacturers are sitting on decades of accumulated inefficiency that became easier to ignore when margins were fatter and labor was abundant. Neither condition holds anymore, which perhaps explains why a startup filming factory floors can pull $19 million from investors who normally chase consumer apps and fintech.
"Manufacturing is the backbone of the global economy," Almetra wrote in its announcement, a statement both obvious and, in the context of venture capital's historical indifference to the sector, quietly radical. The company says it aims to give factories continuous visibility into production losses they've been running blind to for years.
Whether that vision scales beyond a few dozen installations remains the open question. For now, Almetra is betting that what worked in Miskolc and Legnica will work in factories from Detroit to Shenzhen.
