The Manufacturing Intelligence Company

Building HERA (YCS26)

Hera is an automated drawing review tool for the engineers who sign off on mechanical drawings before parts get cut. Every custom metal part starts as a 2D drawing that has to be checked against ASME/ISO standards and GD&T requirements before it goes near a machine, and today that review is done by hand, usually by the most senior engineer in the building. Hera ingests a drawing and checks GD&T callouts, tolerance stack ups, and title block requirements against ASME Y14.5, relevant ISO standards, and the shop's own design intent , returning each flag with the specific clause or internal SOP behind it so reviewers can trust and audit the output. The launch matters because the people who catch these mistakes are aging out of the workforce, and a single missed datum or unreachable weld can scrap a part worth tens of thousands of dollars. According to the founders, Hera is already live in three plants running roughly 60 real drawings a week, aimed at OEMs and suppliers in aerospace, semiconductor, medical device, pressure vessel, and custom machinery work. The pitch to buyers is straightforward: turn a multi-day senior-engineer bottleneck into a minutes-long check that gets sharper as more drawings and SOPs run through it. The Manufacturing Intelligence Company was founded in 2026 by Meera Patel and Noelle So and is based in Seattle as part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch. Noelle grew up in an industrial park her family runs in the Philippines and at 19 built a water-treatment facility that added 40 L/s of capacity to the park. Meera has spent years around manufacturing at her family's plants and on projects at Pfizer and TE Connectivity, where she built a discrete-event simulation, taught herself PLC programming and C++, and published ML research at UW.

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