Hundred scans entire trays to catch tiny hardware defects

Hundred wants factories to inspect an entire tray of small components before any of them reaches an assembly line. Its benchtop imaging station looks for visual defects that the company says can be smaller than 100 micrometers, targeting a job often performed manually under a microscope.

The startup is focused on precision parts used in products such as phones, watches and laptops. A damaged component may cost little by itself but become much more expensive once it is built into a finished device. Catching it earlier is the reason for the system.

In its launch announcement, Hundred describes scanning parts directly in their shipping trays. That limits the handling required for inspection and gives the operator a batch to evaluate in one workflow, rather than a succession of individual pieces to position.

Watch Hundred’s original launch video

The company’s product explanation begins with a known-good reference part, sometimes called a golden sample. Hundred says it scans that reference in under ten seconds. The operator then loads a tray, and the system compares the incoming pieces with the reference and the quality team’s cosmetic requirements.

It describes three ways to inspect the parts: look for departures from the reference, compare neighboring pieces in the batch and check for recognized manufacturing defects. A heat map identifies suspect areas, while the resulting grades tell an operator which parts should be separated from the rest.

The controlled imaging environment is part of the approach. According to Hundred’s YC profile, the rig blocks outside light and uses different lighting configurations. That is intended to make small visual differences easier to detect across materials and surface finishes, rather than leaving the image dependent on conditions around the workstation.

There is also a record-keeping feature. Hundred says it retains a photograph of every part at incoming inspection. If an engineer later finds damage, the earlier image can help determine whether the problem was present when the component arrived or appeared afterward.

That may be as useful as the initial pass-or-fail decision. Without a record, investigating a device failure can become an argument about whether a supplier shipped a bad part or handling on the factory floor damaged it. An earlier image provides another piece of evidence.

CEO Erica Diaz brings direct experience with those investigations. Her public YC profile describes more than five years designing consumer hardware at Meta, Google and Magic Leap, including resolving problems with manufacturing vendors. Hundred’s other founders are chief product officer Imani Gosserand, formerly a Twitch engineer, and chief technology officer Iris Liao, previously a quantitative researcher at Citadel.

The company is part of Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch. Its launch seeks introductions to hardware companies and contract manufacturers, but does not name customers or disclose inspection throughput and independently verified error rates.

Those measurements will matter when a factory evaluates the system. The goal of checking every part is distinct from a guarantee of finding every defect. Hundred’s proposition is to make a fuller inspection routine practical before trouble reaches assembly, and leave engineers an image record when they need to investigate what happened.