Almetra is turning the perception stack from self-driving cars into factory intelligence.
I sat down with Silviu Homoceanu, Co-Founder & CTO of Almetra, to talk about growing up with computers in post-communist Romania, eight years inside VW's self-driving programme, and why the data most factories run on doesn't describe what actually happens on the line.
Silviu learned programming by translating English menus on his father's work PC, was selling self-built accounting software at 15, and came to Germany for a PhD in machine learning. He joined VW Group Research in 2014 and spent the next eight years on perception for autonomous driving, before a question from a manufacturing colleague sent him into factories for seven months.
Today, Almetra (formerly Deltia) combines computer vision, sensors and machine data to show how production actually runs instead of how it was planned. The company raised a $19M Series A led by blisce/ in June 2026 and is opening an office in Boston.
We cover why factory data is often wrong, what happens when the MES reports a reality that isn't real, the 100% defect detection problem, why so many robotics startups get stuck in pilot purgatory, what reliability really means on a running line, and Almetra's move from measuring manual work to automating parts of it.
Silviu Homoceanu:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/silviu-homoceanu-893b7a5
Almetra:
https://www.almetra.ai/
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00:00 Meeting at the AI Campus in Berlin
00:47 Who Silviu is and what Almetra does
02:44 Romania after 1989 and his father's first PC
06:08 A 286 at home, MS-DOS, then Linux
08:04 Running a computer business at 15
10:21 High school nights in the computer lab
14:44 The mentor who said: study abroad
16:15 Flipping burgers to see the MIT campus
18:58 Romania vs Germany: theory against practice
20:23 First job: cluster computing for bridge simulations
26:20 Why computer networks stopped being enough
28:00 The exam answer that led to a PhD offer
30:47 Percentages or factors: how he picks problems
36:20 VW Research comes knocking in 2014
39:05 The meeting with manufacturing that changed everything
39:52 Seven months in factories: the data is wrong
40:30 Merantix, meeting Max, and founding the company
42:08 The Goal, bottlenecks, and life on a shop floor
43:31 The 100% defect detection problem
46:14 When the MES reports a reality that isn't real
48:09 Automating stations and the robotics angle
49:33 99.999% and why factories say no to startups
52:47 What is actually automatable today
55:07 The Series A, blisce/, and the move to Boston
59:21 Closing
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