Assembly (Founding)

Founding Year: 2015
Company Description: Crowdfunding has fueled an increase in innovative product companies turning to Chinese factories for production. Yet, Chinese factories seem undifferentiated because they all make the same, unverifiable claims of excellence. This results in competition centered on price. Factories are forced to under-bid contracts to win business, but often, they later surprise the customer with quality problems and delays. This process is broken. We install cameras and remote monitoring software on the assembly line, and this ensures compliance with test protocol, improves quality, reduces liability, and helps fight warranty fraud. We charge a nominal per-unit fee to the OEM and revenue share with the factory when they demonstrate compliance with quality standards (whether units pass or fail). It encourages better behavior from factories and rewards those who perform with an audit trail of good performance that helps them win new foreign business. On average, defect rate will fall 75% within 5 months of deploying Assembly at a factory.
Market: B2B
Location: Redwood City, CA, USA
Coinvestors: YCombinator