Key takeaways from our conversation with Rapta
- Bridge skill gaps: Rapta acts as an AI Supercoach to onboard workers 10x faster.
- Cut errors instantly: Catches defects live at the work cell to slash error costs by 90%+.
- Deploy in hours: Installs on-premises or air-gapped without changing facility footprints.
- Ensure full traceability: Automatically captures step-by-step photographic evidence and work orders.
- Accelerate future roadmaps: Generates quality control models directly from 3D CAD files to reduce setup time.
Rapta is a portfolio company funded through the Oregon SSBCI Venture Direct Program, which is managed by Elevate Capital. In September 2026, Rapta closed an $8M funding round, co-led by Voyager Capital and Access Venture Partners. “We’re deeply grateful for the support from participating funds and the existing investors who have backed us from day one,” shared Aaron Brown. Pictured above (left/right): Co-founders Aaron Brown (CEO), Matthew Thornton (CFO) and Matt Daue (CTO).
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The manufacturing sector faces an unprecedented challenge: severe skilled labor shortages and mounting pressure to speed up production without compromising safety or compliance. Traditional training methods and manual quality control checks often fall short, leaving plants vulnerable to costly errors and inefficient workflows.
Elevate Capital sat down with Rapta co-founders Aaron Brown and Matthew Thornton to discuss how their company is addressing these hurdles.
What inspired you to found Rapta?
Aaron: We lived through product recalls, warranty claims and quality escapes. When you root-cause those far enough back, they almost always trace to a simple, preventable mistake. In the plants Matthew and I have worked with, it’s not uncommon for 30% to 50% of capacity to go to rework that never needed to happen. Rapta exists to stop mistakes before they move down the line.
Matthew: I’ve spent 27 years in high-speed precision automation, and the need on the ops side has never changed: an automation toolset that gets operators through the process correctly without a supervisor standing over them all day.
You call Rapta an “AI Supercoach.” What does that mean?
Aaron: A supercoach turns humans into superhumans. We automate the drudgery nobody wants to do, ensure quality in real time and get people to success faster than they could on their own.
Matthew: The realization was that throwing more people at the problem wasn’t working. Skills have atrophied. Factory owners tell us new hires arrive without the mechanical dexterity the job requires, and it takes enormous investment of time to get them productive. Rapta sits on the line as a real-time trainer and quality manager that gets an operator to good ten times faster, without consuming an experienced supervisor’s day.
What was the hardest part of getting a manufacturer to trust AI on their production line?
Aaron: ChatGPT was the inflection point. Once people saw AI solving real problems, the conversation changed and the demand jumped. The first time we showed the tool publicly, manufacturing veterans with 30-plus years in the industry called it “the cat’s meow for ISO certification,” which is really them saying it solves training, quality and traceability in one package.
Matthew: In 27 years, I had never seen grown engineers act like little kids. That happened in our earliest demos, because we handed them an AI tool they could deploy with ease, and that tool helped make them better than they were the day before.
One catch saved $239,000 on the spot. What happened?
A defense prime was mid-tour through a supplier’s facility when Rapta flagged a critical defect on the line, in front of everyone. That single catch paid for the system.
Aaron: Point-of-build verification is everything. A mistake inside an engine costs a dollar to fix in the factory and $50,000 to fix in the field; or, critically, it costs someone their life. Catching it at the station saves millions, but more importantly it keeps the products people use safe.
Matthew: On a progressive line, a mistake made at one station gets covered by the next. Either the customer receives it, or you find a whole batch of them at end-of-line test. We solve it in situ instead.
Training a precision assembly process in 20 minutes is a bold claim. How?
Aaron: The net effect is getting new operators to good roughly ten times faster, in any language, without pulling your best people off the line to teach new operators.
Matthew: Video guidance. Watch the step, perform it identically and move on, with a quality check right behind the video to confirm it was done right the first time. It’s YouTube in your factory. On top of that, we run vision-based QC during the build, and we automatically ingest serialization and work order data, so nobody is fat-fingering it into a spreadsheet.
Pictured above: Rapta SuperPod, Rapta PRIS, Rapta Mobile Unit and Rapta fixed array.
How has building for defense primes and instrument makers shaped the Rapta roadmap?
Aaron: Aerospace and defense are being asked to build 10 to 20 times faster without the people or the supply chain to do it. Rapta’s job is making sure the people they do have are utilized to 110%. Medical devices are a different pressure—FDA requirements and patients’ lives—but the answer is the same: build to spec every single time.
Both push us in the same direction. Time to value is our North Star, and we measure every feature against it. If it doesn’t get a customer to a high-quality production workflow faster, it doesn’t ship. That’s why we deploy in hours rather than months, because a traditional vision system takes months to commission.
Matthew: Traceability is the other force. Supply chains are long, and high-value processes have many touchpoints, so you need to know exactly where the error occurred. Rapta gives you photographic evidence of every step traced to the individual station.
Rapta cites 30%+ capacity gains and 90%+ lower error costs. How do customers measure that?
Aaron: The capacity argument is simple: the capacity is already in the building, and it’s going into rework. Rework consumes line time you’ve already paid for, and most plants have never counted it. Give that time back, and you see 30 to 50% more capacity without pouring concrete or adding headcount.
Matthew: Typical ROI is under 12 months, and we’ve had customers where one caught escape paid for the system outright. You use the people and the benches you already have. No new footprint.
Roughly 80% of the ROI customers measure comes from quality savings and throughput. A DoW prime hit full ROI in two months and made a Full Rate Production milestone three months early. Shimadzu USA Manufacturing cut inspection time by 54%, stopped 50-plus defects from shipping in year one, and recovered 1,545 labor hours and $46,000 in labor cost.
How have mentorship and networking helped you as founders?
Aaron: Networking has been critical with partners, employees, customers and investors. It’s how we captured the resources to build a product that delights people and has real impact for U.S. manufacturing.
Matthew: Staying networked in manufacturing means you genuinely learn how things get produced. That carries into every new customer conversation. You can “talk the talk” in front of a team you’ve never met, and they know you understand their process.
What’s next for the Rapta platform?
Aaron: That’s the digital factory coming to life. Augment the human, automate the training, eliminate the errors in real time and get it done right the first time.
Matthew: CAD to AI, and as-built back to CAD. We’ll build quality control models directly from 3D CAD, bills of materials, and sales orders instead of teaching the system visually at each station. That’s where the step change in time and cost is.
The bigger opportunity is data at the local work cell. We’re an industrial data vacuum on steroids: serialization, work orders, quality steps, everything happening at the cell, pulled into one platform the upper-level systems can consume.
Best advice you’ve received as founders?
Aaron: Humility. The whole journey is reinventing your own skill set, and that takes looking in the mirror and admitting how far you have to go. The other principle is making things ridiculously easy for customers. Steve Jobs talked about the beauty of making something complex feel simple; it’s the hardest thing we do and the most important.
Matthew: Learn to love to learn. I teach my kids that daily, and I get to practice it every day here at Rapta.
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