How Sonibel can hear when a welder makes a mistake

After interning as a reliability engineer at a BC shipyard for just a few months, Hooman Pirouz saw that welding errors create a huge backlog of work. So he and fellow University of British Columbia grads Sophia Millar and George Hollo created Sonibel, a startup with a simple mission to make it faster to find and fix welding errors. 

The funding will help the Sonibel team travel to meet their waitlist of around 50 fabrication shops and make the sensor more of a “plug-and-play” product.

Sloppy welds can cause problems as minor as visual imperfections or as major as a cracked joint that can cause an entire structure to fail. When they were first starting out, the Sonibel team interviewed the manager of a fabrication shop to learn more about the target market. When he abruptly stepped out in the middle of their conversation because he could hear one of his new guys doing a poor job, the team found its core concept: listening for welding errors.

“You could hear it: ‘pop-pop-pop-pop,’” Pirouz laughed as he recounted the experience in an exclusive interview with BetaKit. 

Proper welds produce a consistent sound, and any deviation can indicate issues with voltage or speed. The team devised an acoustic sensor that mounts to a welding torch and listens to the welder’s work. Then, a machine-learning model can identify when it hears a noise it shouldn’t, even those imperceptible to the human ear, and alerts the welder on a small display screen so that it can be fixed on the spot. 

That sensor has courted the attention of investors, leading to $1.6 million USD ($2.2 million CAD) in pre-seed funding. The funding will help the team travel to meet their waitlist of around 50 fabrication shops, as well as make the sensor more of a “plug-and-play” product, the founders said, by reducing the amount of time it takes for the sensor to calibrate to the acoustic environment it’s deployed in. 

“We have a lot of demand, but the tech is kind of a bottleneck right now,” Millar said, taking the call from Alabama while meeting with Sonibel’s first paid pilot customer, an undisclosed Fortune 100 company building transmission towers. 

While welders typically perform a visual inspection of their work, that doesn’t reveal all, Hollo explained. He said that radiographic inspections, such as x-ray or ultrasound, can catch defects like air bubbles within the weld. 

These defects mean that the metal is not structurally stable and must be sent back and fixed, lest there be consequences. Technicians told the El Mundo newspaper that a “bad” or “deteriorated” weld was “more than likely” the cause for the derailment of a train in southern Spain earlier this year, which killed at least 42 people, according to the BBC.

Even when bad welds are caught, they simply take up a lot of time to fix. 

“I saw that defects in welding were … a root cause of a lot of equipment downtime,” Pirouz said, drawing on his shipyard experience. Sonibel claimed its sensor can cut over 30 percent of total costs associated with welding errors, resulting in “nine-figure savings” for major manufacturers. 

RELATED: US-based welding tech company ESAB to buy Eddyfi for $1.45 billion USD

Sonibel’s pre-seed round was led by Maple VC, with participation from Champion Hill Ventures, Dorm Room Fund, and undisclosed strategic angel investors. Sonibel’s American investors, in addition to its American customers, have prompted it to incorporate in Delaware, laying the groundwork to relocate the company to the United States. 

Although the team is all UBC grads, most weren’t born and raised in Canada: Hollo was born in the United States and grew up in Switzerland, Millar in the Bahamas, and Pirouz in the United Kingdom, though Millar and Pirouz are Canadian citizens. 

When the founders weighed whether to continue building their company in Canada, where it was founded, they decided that the American ecosystem had more resources available faster. The team struck a “balance” by setting up a Canadian subsidiary to serve some of its customers, Millar said, adding that it was a hard decision in the beginning.

“It’s just the common story of [how] the prospects in Canada are so much different from in the States,” Millar said. 

“If we’re building a unicorn… I really think that it’s just so much faster,” Millar added. “The deals happen much easier, [Americans] have bigger visions for what you’re doing, they back you harder, and so that was really our decision with [moving to] the States.” 

Feature image courtesy Sonibel.