Fredericton-based Eigen Innovations, which sells an artificial intelligence system to perform quality control checks on production lines via thermal cameras, has raised a $2.6 million funding round.

The company said in a statement it has seen growth in demand for thermal imaging tech, and the raise comes after CEO Erin Barrett said at Entrevestor Live last month that the key to making Eigen scaleable has been to focus on that single, niche market, rather than seeking to offer AI tools for a broad range of quality control applications.

“The way April Dunford talks about it in her positioning book [Obviously Awesome] is differentiated value,” Barrett told attendees. “For years, we had a really hard time explaining this to customers, so we ended up with a funnel of prospects that weren’t the right fit. And we were asking our customers … to expend way too many calories trying to figure out, ‘Are you the right fit for me?’

“We’ve gotten on the other side of that, and we’re really excited about it. We’ve defined our ideal customer profile and we know our niche. We know we can’t be beat in our niche.”

The round also included investment from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund, as well as Swiss impact investor Momenta Ventures, which Barrett last month described as having been a key ally in the fundraising process. As part of the funding deal, Momenta Founding Partner Ken Forster is also joining Eigen’s board of directors.

“Momenta was an early investor in Eigen, anchoring our focus on industrial analytic solutions,“ said Forster in a statement. “I look forward to joining the board, helping accelerate the company to scale the adoption of its solutions within manufacturing.”

The statement also said NBIF Chief Executive Jeff White joined Eigen’s board earlier this year and played a pivotal role in helping Eigen raise the round.  

Eigen has also developed a new portable demo of their system to help illustrate the technology’s potential to would-be customers.

Barrett said the company decided earlier this year to focus primarily on thermal imaging and to cater to a narrower, more specific market, rather than indiscriminately chasing short-term revenue at the expense of resources that could otherwise improve the company’s scaleability. 

“My [chief revenue officer], he’d get on a call (after the refocusing), he’d have a supervisor in a manufacturing plant on the call,” recalled Barrett. “He’d show them the process that we’re talking about and the key domain experience we have in it. He’d talk about the value proposition and the problem we’re going to solve, and he couldn’t even get through slide two before the guy said, ‘Well, okay, I’ve got to talk about this plant over here that has this problem. Give me a budgetary next week.’”

Eigen was founded in 2012, growing out of research conducted at the University of New Brunswick and now has a little over 20 employees, according to LinkedIn data. Barrett joined in 2018 as vice president of sales and marketing, becoming CEO in September, 2022.