Azumuta

The Fast 50 ranks four years of revenue growth. What it does not show is where that growth comes from. We're one of the nominees for Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 2026, the ranking of the fastest growing technology companies founded and headquartered in Belgium. That growth belongs to the manufacturers who reached the same conclusion at roughly the same time: Not digitizing their shop floor costs more than it looks like it does. In rework. In onboarding time. In knowledge that walks out the door when people retire. Thanks to Deloitte, our team and to every manufacturer who let us into their factory. #fast50 #maakindustrie #digitalworkinstructions #connectedworker

The dark factories conversation continues, another award landed on our desk, and we're packing our bags for ABISS Kortrijk. A lot to cover, so time to dive into the new edition of The Daily Build!

"I have practiced over 10 different sports in my life." So we already know Mathieu Martens isn’t afraid to try something new. We’re glad his latest move is joining our team as a Product Engineer. What he is most excited about: hands-on development of innovative solutions in an upscaling tech company in the heart of Ghent. His words, and we plan to hold him to all of it. Welcome, Mathieu. We promise not to ask you to demonstrate all 10 sports in your first month. 😊

22 of 23 documents came through with full text agreement. Reviewers still disputed 2% of the step figures. That second number is the one worth talking about. Document Extractor is an Azumuta Labs project. It turns manufacturing documents into structured work instructions. PDFs, Word files, slide decks, scans of scans. The kind of thing that sits in a folder because converting it by hand takes days. It works. It does not work perfectly, and that is the point. The pipeline classifies the document, renders the pages, recovers text, finds figure regions and checks page order. A separate check compares what it proposes against the source, and every item links back to the page it came from. What it flags instead of guessing: - Steps that look like they are missing - Figures it could not place - Text it could not read cleanly - Regions that conflict with each other - References to drawings and specs that live outside the document Nothing syncs to Azumuta until a person approves it. Those numbers come from a 23-document lab corpus, so read them as a lab result, not a promise about your documents. Labs is where we publish what we are experimenting with, including the parts that are not finished yet. #azumutalabs #digitalworkinstructions #documentextraction #connectedworker

Our podcast episodes are raking in views and listens! We spent three episodes on one question: are dark factories real? The first season of Shop Floor Stories is now complete. Two UGent robotics professors on what robots still can't do, Jonathan Berte (Robovision) on why cost beats capability, and Stijn Gryp from Belgium's largest trade union on what it means for the people on the floor. Four very different people, but coming to the same conclusion: dark doesn't need to be dark. Robots and humans can function together on the same line. If you haven't checked it out yet, it's available on your favourite podcast app or via the link in the first comment 👇

Factories are full of advanced machines and robots, but a surprising number of the processes around them are still analog. Mediaplanet Belgium just released a full campaign on innovation, and who better to talk about innovation on the shop floor than our own Batist Leman? In the article he explains how AI captures what your most experienced people know, turning a video of someone doing the job into a work instruction anyone can follow. Read the full article (in Dutch) here: https://lnkd.in/ec4M8DDn

For two years we sold into France by getting on a plane or a train. It worked. It just always started with explaining who the Belgians were. So this month we took a seat at STATION F in Paris. A seat, in the middle of Europe's largest startup campus. Not a floor, not a flag on a map. Small on purpose. What matters is that there is now a place in Paris where a French manufacturer can sit down with us and talk about what their operators actually do all day. That is where every one of our projects starts. France matters to us. Hundreds of manufacturers are all dealing with the same thing: The people who know how to build the product are retiring, and the knowledge is walking out with them. Manufacturing runs on trust, and trust is local. If you run a factory in France, come and find us in Paris. #stationf #frenchmanufacturing #digitalworkinstructions #connectedworker

Pieterjan Lauwers is a geographer by training but today he starts mapping something new: He joins Azumuta as Customer Engineer! He arrives after 4.5 years at Becosoft, where, in his own words, every project had one constant: trying to get to a good and workable solution for the customer. That is more or less the whole job description of a Customer Engineer, so we did not have to explain much. A few things worth knowing about Pieterjan: 🏠 Born and raised 'Gentenaar' 🪈 He plays the flute 🍟 Steak friet, and honestly anything that arrives with 'frietjes' Welcome, Pieterjan!

"There's probably a way to automate this." That is the motto Harry Hextall lives by. It is also, more or less, our entire product strategy. Harry joined Azumuta last week as Senior Product Manager. He comes to us from Oqton, where he spent three years working the seam between design and engineering on Manufacturing OS, and before that from Dyson in the UK. He has swapped Bristol for Ghent, and he arrives already fluent in MES, work instruction management and shop floor automation, which saves us a lot of onboarding slides. A few things worth knowing about Harry: ☝ He automates his own home for fun ✌ He solves Rubik's cubes 🤘 He likes combining technology and creativity, including creating his own digital art that continuously evolves over time What he is most excited about: diving into new problems and solving them with a new team. Good news, Harry. The shop floor has plenty. Welcome, Harry.

ABISS Kortrijk is built around three questions: how do you make production smarter with AI and data, how do you secure your OT environment, and how do you connect machines, systems and processes so your data actually does something? We'd add a fourth: what about the people doing the work? You can connect every machine on the floor and still lose hours to paper instructions, undocumented tweaks and knowledge that walks out the door with one experienced operator. Connected production only pays off when the operator is part of the loop. That's what we'll be showing at ABISS on 8 October. Digital work instructions, quality checks and skills management, live! Find us at stand 56. Laurent Fassin and Jannes Beltman will be there all day, 9:00 to 17:00, Kortrijk Xpo. Interested? Registration is for free with the link in comments 👇 See you at INDUSTRIALFAIRS in Kortrijk!