Niobia speeds up diagnosing costly battery and chip defects

Niobia is betting on a critical but often overlooked part of battery and chip manufacturing: helping engineers understand how and why things go wrong. The startup’s AI software flags production defects and lets engineers ask a chatbot what caused them, aiming to deliver answers in minutes rather than days. Customers place AI agents on their production lines to look for defects, then loop in human engineers to work out the cause. The agents run on self-contained GPUs mounted directly on manufacturing equipment, much like a sensor, and can spot pinhole-sized flaws such as scratches; Niobia’s AI also gathers all the data in one place so engineers can ask a chatbot what went wrong and dig deeper into the cause.

Speed matters because chips and batteries are some of the world’s most important products while also increasingly in short supply. As manufacturers develop and improve their technologies, things inevitably go awry during research and development, and engineers can spend days or longer figuring out a fix before restarting production — each flaw or mistake can run into the millions of dollars and set back manufacturing timelines.

Niobia’s co-founders, Gaurav Jha and Harveen Kaur, both hold PhDs in chemistry and have worked at chipmakers and battery manufacturers. “It’s extremely niche; maybe people will never know about it,” Jha told TechCrunch of the battery and chip manufacturing market Niobia aims to serve — a market he said is nonetheless worth billions of dollars and touches nearly every product around, from glasses and shoes to wallets and headphones.

Niobia’s agents run on open-source models that the company trains further with battery and chip research and other data, which is what lets them identify pinhole-sized defects. Jha said Niobia chose open-source models largely because its customers don’t want their highly sensitive company information going into a public AI cloud, even when told it would be safe. Given the high-stakes race among competing nations to innovate in the battery and chip space, Niobia also lets customers hold their own encryption keys so the startup itself cannot decrypt their data. For now, the company is focusing on three specialties — film coating, electroplating, and fluidized bed reaction — with the longer-term goal of making its technology more autonomous, eventually aiming to help build a fully self-driving factory for its customers. Niobia is one of 20 startups competing in the Startup Battlefield pitch competition this week at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

Why it matters

If Niobia’s model holds, cutting root-cause diagnosis from days to minutes could meaningfully shorten the already-tight supply pipelines for chips and batteries — markets where a single multimillion-dollar defect can ripple into delayed products well beyond the factory floor.