Lumafield: Illuminating manufactured parts

Making a product that customers love is hard. Making a product that customers love and can be manufactured in the millions of units? That’s a crowning achievement.

Every day, engineers make design and manufacturing decisions about products that put millions of dollars at stake. Many, if not most, of these decisions are made relatively blind. It’s not the fault of the product designers or engineers — products are made of things like metal, plastic, composite, ceramic, and wood. They are sometimes soldered together, can have tiny components that are impossible to measure without a microscope, and you really can’t see into them once they’re put together.

A single leaky seal, weak solder joint, or failure-prone casting can mean the difference between a successfully manufactured product, and a costly recall. For this reason, the manufacturing behemoths have turned to destructive testing, and CT scanners that work similarly to those in a medical office — enormous devices that are operated and interpreted by trained specialists.

As an engineer, Eduardo Torrealba thought that 3D X-ray technology should be high throughput, low-cost, and focused on the information captured, not the complexity of hardware. This lets engineers themselves use the technology to make decisions and collaborate with their teams. It’s the thinking that’s behind Lumafield, the company that produced an easy-to-use 3D scanner with a cloud platform to do things like record, measure, and collaborate with the data that the scans produce.

Lumafield has the power to give engineers confidence in pushing the limits of manufacturing, especially with an eye towards sustainability. With better confidence, products can be lighter and higher-performing, and engineers can fine tune their process to get better yields and fewer rejections.

Lumafield is team a of world-class engineers, building for world-class engineers. We’re proud investors, and look forward to a world where all engineers have access to technology-powered scans.

— Wen & Haomiao