Company History

2021年是Cognex成立40周年。任何企业都有40年的历史是不寻常的，而且对于一家技术公司来说，这甚至更不寻常。Cognex不仅幸存下来，而且我们已经成为机器视觉的公认领导者。德国必威我们的成功是基于创新，大胆和创造力的悠久传统。虽然我们拥有一家40岁公司的声誉和财务实力，但我们像一家初创公司一样快速行动！我们是一家重视努力成为我们所做工作中最好的公司的公司，但是我们也是一家具有幽默感并且精神上年轻的公司。

Cognex公司成立于1981年,由博士袍rt J. Shillman, a lecturer in human visual perception at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Shillman decided to leave academia to start Cognex, investing his life savings of $100,000 into the company. He invited two MIT graduate students – Marilyn Matz and Bill Silver – to embark on this business venture with him, offering free bicycles to convince them to leave MIT for a summer. What began as a summer job for Marilyn and Bill turned out to be the start of a career, as they stayed on to help co-found the company. These three individuals gave Cognex its start – and its name, which was derived from the phrase "Cognition Experts".

The company produced its first vision system, DataMan, in 1982. DataMan was the world’s first industrial optical character recognition (OCR) system capable of reading, verifying, and assuring the quality of letters, numbers, and symbols marked directly on parts and components. Cognex's first customer was a typewriter manufacturer, who purchased the system to inspect the keys on each typewriter to ensure that they were located in the correct position.

As an OEM supplier, Cognex began looking for markets where machine vision provided a critical competitive advantage. Cognex found that market in the semiconductor and electronics capital equipment industry. Today, machine vision is essential in virtually every step of semiconductor manufacturing, and the large majority of these applications were developed by Cognex engineers. In 2005, Cognex founders Dr. Robert J. Shillman, Bill Silver and Marilyn Matz were honored by Semiconductor Manufacturers International (SEMI) with the 2005 SEMI Award, in recognition of their important technical contributions to semiconductor manufacturing.

Cognex的以OEM为重点的策略获得了回报。1987年初，该公司在其历史上首次获得盈利。Cognex于1989年在纳斯达克交易所上公开，每股1.38美元。在一年之内，股票价格增加了两倍。

自1980年代初开发了第一个DataMan系统以来，今天的视觉系统已经走了很长一段路。现在可为Cognex客户提供的功能和以用户为中心的设计是发展新愿景技术并解决该行业最具挑战性的视觉应用的结果。