Lumafield announces break­through in CT scanning: from hours/minutes to seconds/fractions of a second

A picture is worth a thousand words — and sometimes much, much more. The image above represents a staggering achievement by DCVC-backed Lumafield: a 3,600X improvement in the speed of generating a given high-quality CT scan, as compared to the industry-standard method.

We’ve been enthu­si­astic supporters of Lumafield since 2020, when we were drawn to the company’s expertise in making both advanced industrial CT scanners and powerful comple­men­tary cloud-based analysis software to help engineers across industries solve challenges at every stage of product development. CT scanning — which holds tremendous potential value for any company wishing to see inside a thing it is making — has long been held back by both its cost and its slowness. 

Ahead of today’s announce­ment, Lumafield had already made great progress on the cost front: their scanners are ~1/10^th the cost of competing machines. Now, with the launch of its Ultra-Fast CT technology, the company is reducing inspection time for its customers by more than 99%. The technology is so good that for some products, scan time can be as brief as 0.1 second. This game-changing leap in speed unlocks the ubiquitous use of CT scanning for high-volume manufacturing.

Ultra-Fast CT’s first application will be for battery inspection. This capability is incredibly good news not just for battery manu­fac­turers and their customers, but also for the fight against climate change: better deployment of electric vehicles and other products that rely on stored electricity is key to the energy transition away from fossil fuels. 

Major, major congrats to Co-Founder and CEO Eduardo Torrealba and his amazing team. We can’t wait to see this new technology roll out.