CERPRO, a German startup founded in 2023, secured about €2mn in pre seed funding. seed + speed Ventures led the round, D11Z co led, and EIT Manufacturing and Techstars joined in.
CERPRO plans to ramp up product development, hire across sales and engineering, and expand through Europe’s industrial hubs where QA headaches pile up fastest.
Quality assurance in manufacturing still feels like a slog, with engineering, production, and QA teams working in their own silos.
Many rely on paper drawings and clunky Excel sheets, even though up to 30% of problems trace back to flawed or misunderstood technical drawings.
It’s a workflow stuck in the past, and companies pay for it in scrap, delays, and all the quiet frustration you hear on factory floors.
CERPRO decided to fix that. They built QualiSpec, a cloud based SaaS platform that uses AI to read and interpret technical drawings automatically.
Instead of teams spending hours building inspection plans, QualiSpec generates them in minutes, sometimes cutting QA cycle times by 80%. And fewer manual steps mean fewer mistakes. Pretty simple logic.
The founders, Frederik Frei, Sascha Müller, and Henrik Pitz, come from Germany’s southern manufacturing belt. Their backgrounds mix Industry 4.0 engineering, software, and strategy experience from places like Roland Berger and EY.
They saw QA workflows frozen in manual routines while everything else in factories modernised. So they built a tool to standardise inspection planning and create a shared quality baseline across OEMs and suppliers.
Pitz told TFN that teams shouldn’t need heavy change management to adopt smarter QA tools. He said companies should be able to move from paper-based workflows to AI enhanced processes quickly, without long rollouts. Maybe that’s the pitch everyone claims, but here it actually lines up with what QualiSpec does.
QualiSpec uses AI to identify dimensions, tolerances, drill holes, and other critical elements across PDFs, JPGs, DXFs, and more.
It’s built for industries with complex, small batch production: aerospace, medtech, high precision mechanical engineering. What sets it apart is the shared cloud environment.
OEMs and suppliers log into the same space, use the same structured quality data, and avoid the endless email ping pong of updated drawings and misread specs.
Since launching in December 2024, more than 100 manufacturers across five European countries have adopted the platform. That early footprint suggests the problem is big and the appetite for automated QA is even bigger.
CERPRO plans to bring OEMs directly onto the platform and run pilots that connect them with contract manufacturers so everyone sees the same data at the same time. According to our analysts, that’s where the real network effect kicks in.
Investors are buying the pitch. Alexander Kölpin of seed + speed Ventures said they invested because QualiSpec consistently produces clear, error free inspection reports just by uploading a drawing.
He said that reliability helps manufacturers get first part success, cut scrap, and free up hours of tedious QA work. One comment stood out: sustainable growth through quality. Not exactly poetic, but the logic is solid.
The result for industrial manufacturing is inspection documentation and processes that integrate seamlessly into existing systems.
Alexander Kölpin
“This ensures that first parts pass on the very first try, reducing scrap and complaintsm, all while saving valuable work time. That’s sustainable growth through quality”.
Tom Villinger from D11Z said CERPRO’s AI is raising the bar for QA software. He pointed to cost reduction and a better inspection workflow, wrapped in a user experience that doesn’t feel like old industrial software.
He thinks CERPRO could become the dominant tech in industrial QA. Maybe early, maybe bold, but the momentum looks real.
