Smartex
Smartex pairs on-machine AI vision with a cloud platform to catch knitting defects the moment they appear, stop the machine, then grade every fabric roll automatically so factories inspect by exception instead of by sample.
What is Smartex?
Smartex is a fabric quality control system built by Smartex Europe, Unipessoal, Lda., founded in Porto by Gilberto Loureiro, co-founder and CEO, and Antonio Rocha, co-founder and CTO. It attacks a specific industrial problem: in conventional knitting only about one roll in ten is ever inspected, and defects that slip through compound down the supply chain until entire rolls are scrapped.
The system has three parts. Smartex CORE is hardware fitted to circular knitting machines; it runs computer vision and machine learning on the fabric as it is produced, identifies defects and can halt the machine on the spot. Smartex FACT is the cloud platform where that data lands, reached in a browser from a desktop or a smartphone. Smartex LOOP prints and applies the physical Fast Track label. Product update posts call the combination the Smartex System.
Automatic Roll Grading is the pivot. A factory sets its own quality standards, points per defect type and thresholds per grade, with help from the Customer Success team. Every finished roll is then graded without manual input. Grade A rolls carry a Fast Track mark and can go straight to shipment, backed by a digital twin of the roll; grades B, C and D are pulled for inspection, which can be done digitally in seconds instead of on an inspection machine.
FACT is organised around a handful of screens: a Digital Factory view of machines running and rolls produced today, a My Machines page with RPM and running time, a My Rolls page holding a month of history and a digital roll map showing where each defect sat, quality reports, a stops page and remote CORE settings. Notifications cover low RPM, excessive downtime and poor-quality rolls.
Named customers include Tintex Textiles, Familitex, Toraman Tekstil and Ekoten, with projects alongside Kering, PVH and Pangaia through Fashion for Good. In 2026 the public site has been stripped back to one teaser line, with a launch announced for SmartCollab Hong Kong in November: finished-fabric inspection for defects, colour and width, plus a buyer-facing dashboard.
What it does
- Detect knitting defects in real time, directly on the machine
- Stop the machine automatically before the flaw runs down the whole roll
- Grade every roll against quality standards the factory defines itself
- Mark Grade A rolls as Fast Track so they ship without manual inspection
- Track RPM, running time, stoppages and OEE machine by machine
- Raise real-time alerts on slow machines, excessive downtime and poor rolls
- Adjust production, inspection and system settings remotely from the platform
When to use Smartex / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Smartex is the right fit.
When to use Smartex
- Circular knitting mills that want every roll graded rather than the usual one-in-ten sample
- Production managers tracking machine RPM, running time, stoppages and OEE across a shop floor
- Quality teams that need defect data per roll, with a digital roll map to back the grade up
- Fabric buyers and apparel brands asking suppliers for verifiable quality traceability
- Sustainability leads measuring the fabric, water, energy and CO2 saved by scrapping less
When not to use Smartex
- Buyers who need a published price before they will start a sales conversation
- Anyone looking for pure software: the system starts with hardware fitted to knitting machines
- Woven or flat-knit operations, which the site never claims to cover
- Small workshops with no machine park worth instrumenting
- Developers hoping to pull the data into their own stack, since no public API is documented
How to use Smartex
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Get in touch through the contact form or write to sales@smartex.ai; there is no self-service sign-up
- Agree the scope with the sales team, starting with which circular knitting machines will be fitted
- Have the Smartex CORE hardware installed on those machines
- Define your quality standards with the Customer Success team: points per defect type, thresholds per grade
- Select those standards in the Smartex FACT settings
- Log in to the platform through the Login link on the site, which opens fact.smartex.ai
- Let production run: CORE detects and stops, FACT posts the grade as soon as a roll is finished
- Check the My Rolls page daily to pull out the C and D rolls for inspection
- Use the My Machines page and the notifications to act on slow machines and downtime
- Adjust production, inspection and system preferences remotely through CORE Settings
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Grades one hundred per cent of production instead of the roughly ten per cent a sampled inspection reaches
- Stops the machine at the defect, so the waste does not run the length of the roll
- Published pilot result at Impetus: rolls needing inspection down fifty per cent, problem rolls from thirty-three to sixteen per cent in four weeks
- Quality data is shareable with the end customer, digital roll twin included
- Hardware and software come from the same vendor, so there is nothing to integrate
- Human onboarding: a Customer Success team helps set the quality standards
- European publisher with a named legal entity, a published address and Portuguese law
Cons
- No public pricing whatsoever: no page, no figure, no plan
- No free plan and no trial is offered, or even mentioned
- The 2026 site is down to a single teaser line and the product catalogue page now returns an error
- The fullest product documentation sits in blog posts from 2023 and 2024 and may be out of date
- No public API and no developer documentation
- No support address is published, although the terms promise email-only technical support
- No DPA, no subprocessor list, no hosting location, and two different postal addresses across the legal pages
Pricing & Plans
Smartex does not publish any price. There is no pricing page in the site's sitemap, no figure on any page collected, and neither a permanent free plan nor a free trial is announced. The offer combines hardware installed on knitting machines with a cloud platform, so terms are quoted case by case: the route is the contact form or sales@smartex.ai, and the call to action used in the company's own blog posts, "Get FACT today!", simply points at the contact page. Budget holders should expect a capital equipment discussion rather than a subscription checkout.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Smartex handles your data.
GDPR overview
The publisher sits inside the European Union, in Porto, and the terms submit the relationship to Portuguese law and the courts of Porto. Yet the acronym GDPR appears nowhere on the site. The privacy policy grants the substance of the regime without naming it: access, rectification, erasure and withdrawal of consent for the future, exercised in writing at info@smartex.ai or by post to Rua Alfredo Allen 455-461 in Porto, plus the right to lodge a complaint with the national data protection authority. No data protection officer is named. No Article 27 representative is designated, and none is required for a company established in the Union. The policy carries neither an effective date nor a version number, and there is no published DPA, no named subprocessor list and no mention of standard contractual clauses.
Who owns the data?
The terms name Smartex Europe, Unipessoal, Lda. as owner of the website and of everything served through it, and state plainly that Smartex keeps every intellectual property right attached to the Services. Users may not modify, lend, sell, distribute or build derivative works from that content without written permission. What the documents never address is the other side of the relationship: nothing published says who owns the production data, defect images or roll records generated inside a customer's factory. The privacy policy covers website visitors and account holders only. Ownership of factory data is therefore a contract question, settled away from the website.
Reuse rights
Reuse is restricted rather than granted. The terms forbid modifying, allocating, lending, selling, distributing or creating derivative works from Smartex content without prior written authorisation, and they equally forbid using Smartex trademarks, logos and domain names. Automated access to the site and the Services, scripts and crawlers included, is expressly prohibited. On the personal-data side the commitments run the other way and are clear: Smartex states it will not market or share its user database with third parties, and that information collected through cookies is never sold nor made available to third parties. Personal data may still be passed to subcontracted entities under contract, or to third parties where a legal obligation, a decision of the national data protection commission or a court order requires it. Nothing on the site grants the customer an explicit right to export and reuse the quality data the system produces, so that right has to be written into the supply contract.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Smartex publishes nothing about where customer data is hosted. The privacy policy names no data centre, no cloud provider and no transfer outside the European Union, and the site carries no trust or security page. What can be established is jurisdiction rather than location: the controller, Smartex Europe, Unipessoal, Lda., is established in Porto, the terms submit the relationship to Portuguese law, and disputes go to the courts of Porto. A network check on 26 August 2026 resolved www.smartex.ai to 23.236.62.147, an address located in Council Bluffs, United States, on Google infrastructure. That is the Wix-hosted marketing site, and it says nothing about the platform: the application itself lives on a separate subdomain, fact.smartex.ai, whose hosting is undocumented. Anyone with a data residency requirement will have to obtain the answer in writing from the vendor.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Smartex.
- Nothing published says who owns the production data and defect images generated inside your factory: settle it in the contract
- Two different postal addresses for the same company, one in the terms and one in the privacy policy
- The privacy policy carries no effective date and no version number, so you cannot tell what you agreed to, or when
- No DPA, no subprocessor list and no declared hosting country, for a system that watches your production line continuously
- Automatic grading breeds over-trust: a Fast Track label replaces a human check, and that failure mode is silent
- Feature descriptions come from 2023 and 2024 posts while the 2026 site says nothing; confirm what actually ships before signing
- The terms expressly forbid automated access to the site and the Services, which limits how you may retrieve your own data
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Moderate for the end user, heavy for the plant. This is not a software rollout: Smartex CORE hardware has to be installed on the circular knitting machines before anything works. Initial configuration, points per defect type and thresholds per grade, is done with the Customer Success team rather than alone. After that the daily experience is light: a browser, a login, no client-side installation, and machine settings adjustable remotely. There is no API to integrate, so no development work falls on the customer, and no self-service sign-up either.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind Smartex
Fundraising
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What does Smartex actually do?
What is the difference between CORE, FACT and LOOP?
How much does it cost?
Is there a free trial or a free plan?
Is there an API?
Is there a mobile app?
Which languages does the platform support?
Who is behind the product?
How do I exercise my data rights?
Are there documented results?
Should you pick Smartex?
Smartex is one of the rare AI products that has to be bolted onto a machine before it can prove anything, and that shows in everything around it. The technology is credible: on-machine vision that halts a knitting machine at the defect, a platform that grades every roll instead of the tenth a sampled inspection reaches, and a four-week pilot at Impetus that cut the rolls needing inspection by half. Named customers, an EU-funded research track and a USD 24.7 million Series A led by Lightspeed all point the same way.
What is missing is everything a buyer normally uses to shortlist. There is no price, no plan and no trial, and in 2026 the public site has been reduced to a single line of copy with the product catalogue removed: the products page cited in the company's own blog posts now returns an error. The fullest description of what the system does sits in posts from 2023 and 2024, a thin basis for a purchase decision two years later.
The legal layer is thin as well. The privacy policy grants data subject rights without ever naming the GDPR, carries no effective date, and gives a postal address different from the one in the terms. There is no DPA, no subprocessor list, no hosting location, and nothing at all about who owns the production data the system generates inside your factory.
Treat it as an industrial supplier rather than a SaaS. It is worth a conversation if you run circular knitting at scale, and worth insisting that data ownership, hosting and retention be settled in the contract, because the website will not settle them for you. The November 2026 launch in Hong Kong suggests the range is about to move again.
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