 instrumental and who are you? My name is Anna Shedletsky, I'm the CEO and founder of Instrumental. So what does Instrumental do? It says, and delays and keep yields high with intelligent data. Yeah so I'm a mechanical engineer by training and I I was at Apple for six years doing product design and I actually did product design it was the product design lead on the Apple watch and so I built this company around the idea of being able to quickly find and fix issues on your manufacturing line so you don't have to spend so many days in China. So this is like machine you're doing here? Yeah so how this works is we take a we take a unit which has gone somewhere so here's an iPod for example and what you would care about in this unit how this is a better one here we've got like internal circuitry of the board and so what we can do is we can actually take an image of this unit get a high quality inspection 24 megapixel photo this is what goes in your factory as an optical inspection station and then we've developed this the system to get that data out of your factory so that you can use it here in our web-based interface and so some of the cool things that you can do here is you can search by a specific serial number or configuration to dive down to the types of issues that you're seeing on a specific unit about 50% of our searches are done that way and you can also move between multiple images taken of the same unit and then once you're in the unit you can zoom in to very high-resolution detail of what's going on in this unit this is actually the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 which you might have heard about having exploding batteries there's no battery here so it's safe but we actually tour down this unit try to understand why the battery is exploding and we're able to determine not only where their Samsung has come out publicly and said that they were pushing the manufacturing parameters too far but we've also found evidence that they were pushing the design parameters of their product too far as well. So it's not a battery only a battery issue what's the issue what do you find out? So it is still a battery issue and Samsung has come out and said that they pushed the manufacturing parameters too far and that made it so that the separator layers between the two charge plates and a battery that you never want to touch could potentially come into contact and touch what we found when we tore down the unit is that this battery is actually under pressure and so these layers were more likely to come into contact in short and so this is a kind of failure analysis that you can do with our system that one was we went through the tear down process to try to measure important things about the power control module on the battery understand if the connector had any issue with it understand if the thermistor had any issue with it these are all the types of things that could cause a battery short in a product we were able to use this system to help us understand that particular issue and many of our customers which span consumer electronics apparel and actually even contract manufacturers have used the system to quickly find and find and fix issues to significantly reduce manufacturing delays in their development schedules and then we also have customers who have left us on the manufacturing line to continue to create a data record because this these images stay around forever so if you have an issue in the field with this product you can come back and look at a very specific unit so is this is just taken image is that it so we take we take a high resolution image as well as some metadata and then what we're doing now is we're working on things like this so we have a measurement tool that you that enables you to actually take measurement so sorry I can't see what I'm trying to do so say I care about where this connector is positioned relative to this battery pocket because maybe I'm having an issue with my flex so I can actually measure right here in this unit this unit is currently right over there in the box but what it could it could be somewhere in a different country it could be in a customer's hands I can still get information out of the unit that I've built so I don't have to tear down a unit to get information we have actually had a customer who had a quality issue and didn't have to unbox units to be able to determine which units had the issue and which units did not and they were able to remotely disposition the quality of that product for what they could ship and what they could not ship from here in California to their factory in Asia so actually they can't design in California it's not just something to say yeah absolutely but you don't need to be physically in China all the time to one of the key value propositions is that while we still recommend you send people to your build to make sure that you're finding and fixing issues and you're able to actually fix the issues this system enables you to be there when you can't be there or to even if you are three stations away some of the issues that we find you wouldn't be able to see so being able to be there at any time and go back in time and see what happened is super powerful for our customers so you said you were design lead on the Apple watch I was a system product design lead so what goes into somebody who's able to get your kind of job it's kind of what what is the job of designing hot it's not easy right design not easy to design work mostly it's a lot of time it's a lot of time spent on the line so first you make a design and you do the best you can and even if you have the best engineers and the most resources all companies including large companies and small companies struggle with product quality and to get the design right that's why in a standard design process you have multiple iterations but in that iteration process if you don't find issues until later they can be really expensive sometimes some companies even big ones don't test enough right they don't have enough users or something and then they figure it out only after itself like the Samsung like the Samsung is an excellent example of how testing and making sure that you have tests implemented before you start shipping to customers is important but there's all sorts of issues you don't hear about most companies have a problem that arises right before production that they need to decide are we going change the spec and ship it anyway are we going to fix the problem and we those are kind of a key moment where an instrumental system can be really beneficial apple once I remember had an issue with using the phone with the left hand and it only worked in the right hand I mean I'm just I don't know if that's but I'm saying can you find in here how many yeah so we have a customer so so we can find lots of different types of issues I think it's a way to answer this question so we can find issues related to workmanship part quality process related or even design issues and that makes up a large gamut a large percentage of the types of issues that you are trying to diagnose going from your ebt to your dbt to your pbt builds before you actually shift customers isn't no product like this in the market our understanding is there is no product like this on the market that actually can take this data and make this data readily available in a format that your engineers can can get what's important out of it how can you get so much done through a web web based interface I will have to ask my engineer Isaac so this is Sam CTO and co-founder of instrumental also Apple background worked on Apple watch water seals Taptic engine was his baby all sorts of stuff and this is Isaac who is a software engineer in our team and also running a whole bunch of other helpful stuff inside our company and he actually designed this interface so how's it this company how's it going fantastic this is a company building a product that I wish I had had as a product design engineer number of hours and weeks it would have saved me time I wouldn't have to spend in China I'm really excited didn't you enjoy Chinese food and all that stuff you know the first time I did but by the 12th trip the jet lag gets you and so how many how much time did you spend in China over 300 days in the last five years over nearly a year like over 300 days in the last five years and Sam well over a hundred hundred and fifty probably is it in Shenzhen or no all over all over Shanghai shenzhen outside of those cities in the moonies a small device like this has components all over the place and so you have to go and check them all I don't don't want to talk to the specifics of the Apple watch supply chain but both through Apple and through our customers have been all over so how much it cost the machine so we charge on a per inspection per month basis per inspection per month yes so we work with our customers to make a customized proposal that works for what their key issues and concerns are and whether they're in development or production so I can't give you a quote in the price because it really depends each customer has a very different needs this is the first time you show it this is the first time we were at a trade show that is true we launched this product in June so how's it going to change the future of consumer electronics is it going to mean better faster stronger time to market yeah absolutely higher quality as well fast time to market with higher quality higher quality and higher yield means essentially cost will get driven down as well so why isn't everybody in the industry already calling you up and buying it they should right they're starting to yes so you guys should too and customers everywhere right yeah yes we were deployed in several global factories we have a contract manufacturer who's actually a customer we also work with consumer electronic companies we have a global apparel company that's a that's a customer and there are other applications this would be great for that we haven't started working on yet so if your application is outside that they're kind of in this general area we'd love to speak with you about it and I guess designing consumer electronics or electronics in general it's it's one thing to do a prototype but it's another thing to get it into mass production that process we help get through that process it's we help our customers do that yes it how does it work to get something from an idea to mass production well it will often depend on the industry but in general it takes many iterations iterations meaning typically in consumer electronics are called a build and each build can last a few weeks and be spaced by a couple months and so essentially the faster you get through those and the fewer issues you have along the way the faster your product gets to market and the issues people have you help solve this yeah tons of issues I think this system is effective at helping engineers to solve part quality process issues workmanship issues and design related issues and one of one of the major time sinks so we're trying to end delay of product you've probably seen the the metrics that say like 80% of Kickstarter products are late or never even ship you've probably seen all sorts of products get delayed and the reasons they often get delayed I've asked I've had a lot of interviews with these companies engineers at these companies big and small they get delayed because there is an issue that they didn't find until very late and then they had to scramble to fix it and we're trying to improve issue discovery so you find these issues earlier so I guess when you go and look at the Indiegogo and the Kickstarter page you like laughing a little bit all these projects but commiserating that's a good that's a good response but wondering if they have the tools and the skills to make it absolutely it's not easy our main customer focus is not these small Kickstarter type of companies but certainly we have we have worked with engineers from these companies interacted in selling this product and they have high quality engineers and they just want to get good product out and so working with companies of all sizes from small to large one of our customers is worth over 300 billion dollars but still signs value in this system and what other things do industry people needs and engineers need to make a perfect product are there other products you're going to make in the future to address some of the other challenges that there are so really what we're trying to do is fix data so you may have noticed that you can have a live video conference around the world and yet if you're in the factory as an engineer you have no idea if your lines even running on the other side of the wall we make products that can read my heart rate through my skin and yet I am as an engineer measuring stuff on the line with calipers and feeler gauges if you're if your engineer is in that situation you know what we're trying to do is build intelligent software systems and bring modern software to manufacturing to modernize how manufacturing is done and we have a great big vision for how we're going to do that but you'll just have to wait and see about our new products I've been to do videos in a bunch of SMT lines and yet and often I see girls or boys just looking with their eyes on the PCB yes is this what you help with here it is it is one of the potential applications we've worked with customers to reduce headcount for human visual inspection but I think you actually bring up a great point about SMA surface mountain assembly PCB assembly lines is that they often have inspection equipment but you go on to it called an AOI machine automated optical inspection but if you go on to the actual system integration part of the line you end up not having that automated feedback system and in fact one of the main reasons why PCB assembly is usually 99% yield and system integration is usually 50 or 60 and kind of an early build and part of that is making sure you're measuring you're taking the right data that can help you solve problems quickly and bring the product quality up and all these functions that are here you can have more or yeah absolutely and we're working on more yeah what more do you need to do there's only one more minute to battery I think I think what Anna said still holds which is we're working a lot more we have really exciting features that we're building but any customers right absolutely that's the beauty of it yep so we're adding functionality to our customers all the time yep and essentially we're hiring a machine learning and computer vision team to do some smart things with this data as a glimpse into into kind of the future of where this can go we want to essentially build artificial intelligence for factories so if you're a computer vision or machine learning engineer we'd love to hear from you