The Singapore-based manufacturing AI startup is the first company picked by Tin Men Capital for its new fund.

SixSense, an AI-powered industrial visual inspection platform for smarter manufacturing, secured its Series A funding of US$2.6million (S$3.7M), led by Tin Men Capital, a Singapore-based venture capital firm focused on B2B tech startups in South-East Asia. SixSense is spearheaded by entrepreneurs, Akanksha Jagwani and Avni Agrawal, who co-founded the company in 2018. Tin Men Capital is led by veteran investors, Co-Founders, Jeremy Tan and Murli Ravi.

SixSense’s defect classification software platform serves semiconductor manufacturers by making traditional manual inspection more efficient and consistent. SixSense scans millions of products per year at high speed at each factory that they serve and automatically identifies defects at scale. Moreover, SixSense’s AI has built-in ‘explainability’ that enables factory engineers to understand the reason defects occur – and increasingly, to predict anomalies in manufacturing equipment before they present as product defects down the line. This allows manufacturers to better utilise the huge capital investment they make in factories, significantly reducing the time and cost of quality inspection, reducing the revenue loss caused by over-rejections as well as avoiding any potential reputational and financial cost caused by recalls of defective products.

SixSense’s AI-based defect identification technology has been adopted by some of the world’s largest multinational semiconductor manufacturers from the US, Europe and Asia. The company is headquartered in Singapore with team members in India. With Series A funding secured, SixSense will be scaling its team across further research and development, customer success and sales.

“From my previous work experience as an engineer in manufacturing environments, I have a deep desire to solve the problems our customers face daily. My co-founder Avni and I wanted to partner with a Series A investor who identifies with our vision and has the experience to support us in our next stage of growth. Tin Men’s focus on enterprise software and our interactions with their entire team made it clear that they are the right partner for us,” said Akanksha Jagwani, Co-Founder and CEO of SixSense.

Murli Ravi, Co-founder of Tin Men Capital, added, “Visual quality inspection of products coming off the manufacturing line is a major barrier to scaling in the semiconductor industry. We know that it is nearly impossible to achieve consistent results at an acceptable cost while keeping up with the high throughput of modern manufacturing operations. We have known the SixSense team since their early days and their ability to serve one of the world’s most stringent quality-focused industries proved to us that they are one of the rare few who can achieve this feat. It was an easy decision for us to commit to the team.”

With this investment in SixSense, Tin Men Capital kicked off the deployment of Tin Men Fund II which announced its first close in August 2022. The VC firm will continue to champion and fund B2B enterprise technology firms operating out of South-East Asia.