Ex-Meta scientists want to bring visual AI to the factory floor

AI is transforming everything around us but, thus far, it has largely remained contained to the digital realm. Increasingly, however, startups are looking to take it into the real world.

Perceptron, a startup started by two former Meta research scientists, is one such company. Founded in November 2024, the firm develops frontier vision models that aim to help machines more competently interact with their physical environments.

This week, the company launched its latest model, Isaac 0.5, which its creators say is designed to provide machines with the ability to “perceive, reason and act” in industrial settings. Specifically, the software is capable of helping vision-guided robots navigate complex environments like warehouses or factory floors. It also helps companies extract visual intelligence from videos recorded by those bots.

Isaac 0.5 is also being released as an open-weight model, so its parameters and training materials can be inspected by anyone.

The startup, which recently raised $21 million in a funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, was co-founded by Armen Aghajanyan and Akshat Shrivastava, who previously worked for Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), the tech giant’s AI research division. The duo see their software as the future of industrial automated deployment.