Spiral Technology

Market position

Spiral positions its mobile, learned-model approach against traditional manual inspection with paper logs and against fixed machine vision installations that require fixture tuning for each part variant. It has been recognized in industry and defense innovation programs and profiled by wind-energy and composites trade publications.

Differentiators cited by the company include operation on standard iPhones and iPads without fixtures, dedicated cameras or inspection stations; on-premise data capture with no data leaving the facility and no required site visit; single-frame annotation propagated across a dataset; automatic synthesis of failure scenarios from a single "good" reference; fast reconfiguration across changeovers; and persistent AR-anchored defect coordinates shared between inspection and repair crews, cross-referenced to blade layup stacks.

Technology

The system uses a cascade of purpose-trained models covering each stage from first-frame annotation to the final inspection verdict, with one-shot annotation that propagates a single labeled frame across a dataset, custom-trained vision models per component class, a transformer that learns assembly configurations, and zone segmentation that selects the model for each view; a no-code interface links models to assembly lines. Roboscope is a native iOS application using iPhone LiDAR and AR to place defect markers with approximately 5 cm accuracy, with defect measurement down to 3 mm. Earlier technology was built on Microsoft HoloLens 2 (the Spector platform).

Go-to-market

The company goes to market through a direct sales team with regional directors for the Americas (Boston) and APAC (India), supported by self-assessment tools and discovery meetings on its website. Historically it has used corporate accelerators, challenges and pilot awards — Lufthansa Technik, Singapore Airlines/SAESL, the USAF Accelerator powered by Techstars, NSIN, and the Northrop Grumman Technology Accelerator — as routes to funded pilots and strategic partnerships.

Industrial manufacturers and maintenance organizations needing quality control and defect inspection, including high-mix, low-volume manufacturing lines, wind turbine blade manufacturers and OEMs, aerospace and jet engine MRO operations, electronics and PCB assembly, and telecommunications tower equipment. Prior work has involved the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force and GE.

Geography

Headquartered at 12 Channel Street, Boston, MA 02210, United States, with an APAC sales director based in India. Past programs and events span U.S. Air Force sites (Tyndall AFB, Dayton, OH), Singapore, Malta and the Middle East.

History

After its 2018 founding, the company won the Lufthansa Technik Startup Challenge in 2019 (two winners selected from 2,500 startups, with 10 finalists gathering in Malta) and was awarded a pilot project; it also exhibited at MRO Middle East 2019 and was named one of three winners of Singapore Airlines' global App Challenge, earning a pilot with SAESL, the Singapore Airlines and Rolls-Royce joint venture. In January 2020 Spiral was selected among ten startups for the USAF Accelerator powered by Techstars, co-sponsored by BAE Systems and NSIN, and in September 2020 it won the Workforce Augmentation track at Get in the Ring Singapore. Its AR inspection technology featured in AFWERX "Base of the Future" contract awards at Tyndall Air Force Base in October 2020, and the company presented at the B-21 Raider Demonstration Event organized by the Wright Brothers Institute in April 2021. It received investment from Unknown Group in 2021 and was included in Dynepic's Combat Ready Aviators program for the Air Force XR ecosystem that October. In 2023 the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute published a listing for the Spector HoloLens 2 platform, co-sponsored by a DOE grant and co-developed with GE Renewables. Spiral joined the Northrop Grumman Technology Accelerator in July 2024. Product focus subsequently moved from HoloLens-based aircraft repair work under AFWERX to Roboscope, an iPhone LiDAR inspection application.