Cognex Corporation was founded in 1981 by
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 1989, Cognex went public on the
NASDAQ exchange for $1.38 per share—within a year, the stock price had tripled. In 1995, Cognex purchased Acumen, a U.S. based developer of wafer identification systems. In 2004, the company won an
intellectual property victory when a federal judge ruled in Cognex's favor in a patent lawsuit brought against the estate of the inventor
Jerome H. Lemelson, who had filed dozens of
submarine patents, some of which purported to cover machine vision processes. The machine vision-related patents were held invalid. The ruling was upheld by the
Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Cognex sold off its in-vehicle product in 2007, citing concerns about profitability and intellectual property issues.In 2015 Cognex sold off its Surface Vision Division and the associated range of products SmartView (web inspection), Vision Gear (slit inspection), Smart Advisor (process surveillance, web monitoring) and VisionPro Surface to Ametek Inc. for approximately 160M US$. The sold division represented about 12% of Cognex in terms of revenue and number of employees. In April 2017 Cognex acquired ViDi Systems, a Swiss-based provider of
deep learning software for industrial machine vision applications. In October 2019 Cognex acquired Sualab, a Korean-based developer of vision software using
deep learning for industrial applications. During summer 2020 Cognex laid off 8% of its headcount (190 employees). [https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Cognex+Corp+%28CGNX%29+Announces+Significant+Cost-Cutting+Measures%2C+to+Reduce+Headcount+by+8%25/16942975.html In December 2020 Cognex announced payment of $2 dividend per share. In the press release explaining this special dividend the chairman,
Robert J. Shillman, referred to one of the company's mottos, to explain the highest dividend paid out in the company's history. This motto being: “When Cognex wins, we all win”. == Products ==