Cognex Corporation - History

History

Cognex Corporation was founded in 1981 by Dr. Robert J. Shillman, a lecturer in human visual perception at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and two MIT graduate students, Bill Silver and Marilyn Matz. Cognex stands for Cognition Experts.

The company's first vision system, DataMan, was introduced in 1982. DataMan was an optical character recognition (OCR) system designed to read, verify, and assure the quality of letters, numbers, and symbols printed on products and components. The company's first customer was a typewriter manufacturer that purchased DataMan to read letters on typewriter keys and ensure that they were located in the correct position.

In 1985, Cognex made the first of many acquisitions when it purchased Acumen, a U.S. based developer of wafer identification systems. Acquisitions have played an important role in the company’s growth and enabled Cognex to enter new markets for machine vision such as surface inspection and vehicle vision.

In 1989, Cognex went public on the NASDAQ exchange for $1.38 per share—within a year, the stock price had tripled.

In 2004, the company won an intellectual property victory when a federal judge ruled in Cognex's favor in a patent lawsuit brought against the estate of the inventor Jerome H. Lemelson, who had filed dozens of submarine patents, some of which purported to cover machine vision processes. The patents were held invalid. The ruling was upheld by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Cognex sold off its in-vehicle product in 2007, citing concerns about profitability and intellectual property issues.