What does Quartic.ai do?

Quartic supplies an operations intelligence platform for process manufacturing industries like life sciences, pharmaceuticals, CPG, and specialty chemicals.

The purpose of our platform is to help manufacturers produce high-quality products with optimal throughput, using the least amount of cost and energy. We do this by connecting data across factory production floor, lab information systems, quality management systems information, and ERP systems.

Our technology transforms data into a strategic asset, enabling manufacturing teams to make intelligent decisions and automate operations for a competitive edge. A lot of that decision-making is through interpretation of data from these multiple systems, so not only can they make quicker, well-informed decisions, but more importantly, decisions that tell them about the consequences of what is happening in real-time on final quality and throughput.

What is new about your approach?

AI is essential for decision intelligence and automation. However, traditional AI methods focused on prediction and correlation, which aren't sufficient for critical manufacturing tasks. We have made AI that's specifically suited for manufacturing and particularly for optimization decision-making, not correlation based.

Our secret sauce is first using optimization algorithms, then combining AI with what is called control theory, which is essentially the mathematics or techniques that you use in robotics. Our optimization algorithms help you make the most of even small datasets. This is crucial for new products like drugs, nutritional supplements, or cosmetics, where initial production is often limited.

What problems do you solve for customers?

Manufacturing is struggling with declining productivity due to a shortage of skilled labor, which hasn’t recovered since COVID. To maintain quality in this challenging environment, companies must rely on technology. We help our customers achieve this in a few key ways.

First, we are working to speed up the commercialization process by simplifying wet lab experiments and helping life sciences and pharma customers run manufacturing test batches with a learning model rather than with actual materials. Secondly, we can help facilitate streamlined production line changes. When companies need to switch their equipment to start producing a new product, generally a lot of batches get lost trying to perfect the new system. Our intelligence cuts down that error time significantly. Third, we help customers track real-time product quality, which is typically still a very archaic process that only can be tracked retrospectively.

What do you see as the long-term vision or opportunity for Quartic?

Our vision is to bring the next generation layer of advanced automation to manufacturing. This industry has seen automation, so the journey that we're on is to go from automated to autonomous. The North Star is that autonomous goal, but it’s a long journey. We’ve already done a few projects where the process optimization decision is not only automated, but the corrective action is automated as well. Our AI closes the loop in that it makes the decision, but rather than telling a human to take the action, it signals the manufacturing equipment to take the action directly.

The next step is to make this optimization capability more ubiquitous and affordable, so we can put it in the hands of more customers. As you can imagine in these critical manufacturing industries like pharma, where the product you make can impact a human, they require a lot of confidence and trust in these applications before they're widely adopted. We’re building out our evidence now.

Are there any recent milestones for Quartic.ai?

We’ve recently released our latest version of the platform, which enables customers to operate our system now at an enterprise scale across multiple manufacturing facilities. Large manufacturers make decisions at an enterprise level. At that level, many have invested in a lot of data systems and need an enterprise operations intelligence platform to seamlessly fit into their complex enterprise architectures. Offering that capability has been a big milestone for us, and we're starting to see increasing customer confidence as a result.

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Our technology transforms data into a strategic asset, enabling manufacturing teams to make intelligent decisions and automate operations for a competitive edge. 

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What is your professional background and path to founding Quartic.ai?

I am a mechatronics engineer by profession and have worked in that industry my entire career. I started with Siemens and then worked for Emerson in process automation, primarily doing what people called Industry 3.0. I had a great run there starting from the ground floor and working my way up to an executive position.

Now we’ve advanced to Industry 4.0, which is making factories and process manufacturing facilities autonomous. All the things we can do with AI and these big data systems now, we only dreamed of 10, 15 years ago. I knew the problems that needed to be solved, but we simply could not solve them. I was excited by the possibility, and knowing that big companies don't move as fast, I decided to do it on my own with Quartic.

How do you think that an investor can best partner and support an early-stage company?

As a first-time founder with a tech background, my biggest takeaway from investors has been mastering the financial and commercial side of the business. Understanding how to allocate capital wisely and make sound financial decisions has been crucial.

Additionally, I've found immense value in learning from the mistakes of others. Investors have a wealth of experience and can offer insights into common pitfalls to avoid. This has been vital in shaping my approach and avoiding costly errors.

Being a first-time entrepreneur, where do you find the motivation to keep going?

My biggest motivation is my team. My greatest joy in this role is that I get to work with very smart young people that are half my age and 10 times smarter than I am. When I see them put their heart and soul into building what our vision is, that makes me wake up every morning to say, we have to keep pushing forward no matter what.

What advice would you like to give to other founders?

I think many technology-oriented founders fall into the trap of striving for perfection. This is a costly mistake. In the fast-paced world of startups, speed and agility are far more valuable than absolute perfection. Set realistic goals and be prepared to adapt as the landscape changes. Embracing flexibility and a willingness to pivot will serve you in the long run.

What are you reading currently?

I'm reading a book right now called The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl. Most AI that we know now is based on correlations. If you read that book, you will realize we have accomplished little in AI yet until we crack causality. I'm also reading Shane Parrish’s Great Mental Models. It’s all about having to make many decisions, and sometimes making them with little to no data. 

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