Niobia takes the guesswork out of some of tech’s most expensive mistakes

San Francisco-based startup Niobia is betting big on a critical but often overlooked part of battery and chip making: helping engineers understand how and why things go wrong. Its AI software flags production defects and lets engineers ask a chatbot what caused them, aiming to deliver answers in minutes rather than days.

How it works (broadly): The company’s customers place AI agents on their production lines to look for defects, then loop in human engineers to work out what might…