Germany-based, RIIICO has developed a digital twin (creation) platform, specifically designed for manufacturing companies to generate digital layouts of their factory floors. These are then used to create new factory layouts e.g. lines, workstations, as well as tooling (to help efficiently/ cost-effectively/ with-minimal-downtime e.g. “transition a plant from IC to EV production”). Original footage is garnered from a handheld, wearable or push-cart LiDAR scanner & meshed together (accounting for any errors during the scanning process) with a clever AI (which among other) is trained to automatically recognize objects such as “this a robot, cage, ceiling…or hole in the ground” & make ensuing recommendations – a claimed USP vs competitors e.g. Navvis (DE) (€90m), Leica Geosystems (CH) (acquired by Hexagon AB) & Faro (USA) (IPO). The (user friendly/ drag-&-drop/ requires no prior training) RIICO suit is cloud-based, which enables faster design collaboration (side note: last year, Siemens & NVIDIA announced a joint plan to build the Industrial Metaverse; connecting hardware & software from the edge to the cloud, to build – you guessed it – digital twins). RIIICO was founded in 2020 by Felix Fink (CEO), Patrick Mertens (CTO) & Jan Büchsenschütz (COO). The team are co-winners of the 2022 Hexagon Sixth Sense competition (alongside SmartParts) & graduates of Berkeley SkyDeck. RIIICO emerged from closed beta last year & now counts Siemens, Porsche, Volkswagen, Schaeffler & Schmitz Cargobull as clients. <Source: deutsche-startups.de, themanufacturer.com, engineering.com, sp-edge.com, tech.eu>
