Niobia Cuts Guesswork From Some of Tech's Costliest Mistakes
The San Francisco startup aims to help battery and chip manufacturers identify production line defects, reducing downtime and costly errors.
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San Francisco-based startup Niobia is betting on an important but often overlooked part of battery and chip manufacturing: helping engineers understand how and why things go wrong. Its AI software pinpoints manufacturing defects and allows engineers to ask chatbots what caused them, with the goal of providing answers in minutes instead of days.
How it works at scale: The company's customers put AI agents on their production lines to look for defects, then circle human engineers to figure out what might be causing the product to fail. These agents run on independent GPUs installed directly on production equipment, much like a sensor. They can detect defects as small as a pinhole like a scratch. Niobia's AI also collects all the data in one place so engineers can ask a chatbot what went wrong and dig deeper into the cause.
Speed is critical because chips and batteries are some of the world's most important products, while they are increasingly in short supply. As manufacturers continue to develop and improve their technologies, things inevitably break during research and development. Engineers then spend days or more finding a solution before restarting production. Any defects or mistakes can be costly – sometimes running into millions of dollars – and push back the production schedule.
Gaurav Jha and Harveen Kaur, founders of Niobia, both have PhDs in chemistry and have worked at chipmakers and battery manufacturers, giving them first-hand experience of the industry's challenges. On a call ahead of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where the company is a Battlefield finalist, Jha explained that while what Niobia does is specialized, it serves a multibillion-dollar market that includes some of today's biggest battery and semiconductor makers.
"It's very entrenched; people might never know about it," Jha said of the battery and chip manufacturing market his company aims to serve. "But it's like behind the scenes, it enhances everything ... we don't see that in the normal world."
"Every product around you, like glasses or shoes, slippers, wallets and headphones - these processes touch every single part of it," Jha added.
Niobia's agents run on open-source models that the company further trains with battery and chip research and other data. This training is what allows them to detect defects the size of a pinhole. Jha said Niobia chooses to open-source models mainly because its customers don't want their company's highly sensitive data to end up in a public AI cloud, where it might be used to train the model.
"None of our customers want their proprietary data going to the cloud, even if we tell them it's safe," Jha said. The startup also describes how it approaches cybersecurity given the high-stakes competition among warring nations. Innovate in the battery and chip space. For example, Niobia allows its customers to keep their encryption keys so that the startup cannot decrypt the customers' data.
Jha said the company's priority now is to focus on three specialties, such as film coating, electroplating (which coats a surface with metal using an electric current) and fluid bed reaction (a chemical process in which solid particles are suspended in a gas or liquid).
He said the company also wants its technology to become more autonomous, with the ultimate goal of creating a fully autonomous factory for its customers.
If you're curious to learn more, Niobia will be taking the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt this afternoon in San Francisco. Join us as we celebrate the company and the 19 startups competing against them as part of the Startup Battlefield story competition from today, Tuesday, through Thursday, October 15th.
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