The company was founded by Gaurav Jha and Harveen Kaur, who both hold PhDs in chemistry. Their system runs on self-contained GPUs mounted directly on manufacturing equipment, scanning for pinhole-sized flaws that can otherwise go undetected until a batch fails. Manufacturing errors in these sectors can cost companies millions of dollars, and Niobia is pitching its technology into a market it describes as worth multiple billions of dollars.

Niobia trains open-source models locally rather than routing data through public cloud AI services, a choice the founders frame as necessary to keep proprietary customer manufacturing data secure.

The company's technology currently covers three specialties: film coating, electroplating, and fluidized bed reaction. Jha and Kaur have described a longer-term goal of building a fully autonomous "self-driving factory," with the current product line as a step toward that aim.