Critical Ventures Invests in Almetra to Bring AI Intelligence to the Factory Floor

Lisbon (Portugal) – 25 June, 2026 – Critical Ventures is excited to announce our investment in Almetra, a Berlin-based startup using AI and computer vision to help manufacturers understand and improve how their production lines work.

For us, this one was an easy conviction, Almetra is solving a real problem, with real technology, for an industry that has been waiting too long for this kind of solution.

Manual assembly is still the backbone of most factories. And yet, for all the investment in automation over the past decade, the human-led parts of production lines have remained largely invisible: no data, no feedback, no way to systematically get better. Almetra changes that.

Their platform places cameras at assembly stations and uses AI to continuously capture what's happening: hand movements, cycle times, work step sequences. It turns a process that previously lived only in the heads of experienced workers into something measurable and improvable. No constant labelling, no heavy IT integration — it starts generating insights within a shift or two.

The numbers speak for themselves. Almetra's customers report 10–30% productivity gains and training times cut by up to half. And this is happening in an environment where finding skilled labour is one of the hardest problems manufacturers face right now. The platform doesn't try to replace workers, it helps them do their jobs better and helps their managers see what's going on.

"It is clear that every manufacturing business is right now evaluating how they can further automate and optimise their processes. That starts with factory floor data and analysis using AI. There is a huge trust barrier to enter these customers and Almetra has found a winning formula." — Eric Kohlmann, Managing Director of Critical Ventures