Cognex Corporation was founded in 1981 by Dr. Robert 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 of the school's top 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. Those three ambitious individuals gave Cognex its start – and its name, which was derived from the phrase "Cognition Experts".

Dr. Robert J. Shillman President, CEO, and Chairman	Marilyn Matz Senior Vice President PC Vision Products Business Group	Bill Silver Senior Vice President of Research & Development and Senior Fellow

Early Years

The company's foray into machine vision produced DataMan, in 1982. DataMan was the industry's first optical character recognition (OCR) system, with the capability to read, verify, and assure the quality of letters, numbers, and symbols in industrial environments. (In fact, when DataMan read its first character, the team celebrated with a bottle of champagne – which began a long-standing tradition of marking important milestones at Cognex by sharing a bottle of champagne, signing the label, and displaying the bottle on Cognex's Wall of Fame.) Cognex's inaugural 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.

During the early 1980's, Cognex gained momentum in the fledgling machine vision industry. A number of investors demonstrated their confidence in the company by contributing venture capital totaling more than $5 million, which helped Cognex continue to grow. It also allowed Bob Shillman to kick off Cognex's first "dental plan," which consisted of handing out toothbrushes and toothpaste to employees at a company meeting. And, the company began its tradition of celebrating Halloween, which has since been declared Cognex's "official favorite holiday."

Strategy for Success

Cognex pioneered a market that was soon crowded with dozens of competitors, all intent on securing a position in the new field of machine vision. In its early years, the company began by selling and installing customized vision systems directly to end users. However, within four years, it became clear to Cognex management that the strategy of providing turnkey vision systems to end users was not profitable. Over 100 competitors were vying for business, and all were being hampered by the cost of custom-engineering each system to individual customer needs. In response, Cognex launched an innovative business strategy in 1986 – one that was to ensure its survival and subsequent market leadership.

That strategy, simply stated, was to develop and sell high volumes of standard machine vision hardware and software products to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), who would have the technical expertise to configure their own machine vision solutions for the capital equipment they sell to the factory floor. In fact, Cognex introduced two unique products that played a key role in the success of the strategy: the Cognex 2000, the world's first machine vision system built on a single printed circuit board, and Search, a powerful software tool that could locate patterns in images very quickly and accurately. To achieve successful sales volumes, the company focused its marketing efforts on those industries in which machine vision is vital to maintaining a competitive edge, such as semiconductor manufacturing.

Cognex Becomes a Market Leader

Over time, Cognex's OEM-focused strategy paid off handsomely. In early 1987, the company became profitable for the first time in its history. Cognex went public on the NASDAQ exchange in 1989, at $1.38 per share. Within one year, the stock price had tripled.

Team Effort

While Cognex's winning OEM marketing strategy is still a key part of its total business plan today, the company is now also able to serve the end user market that had proved to be elusive in its earlier days. With the introduction of Checkpoint – the world's first easy-to-use machine vision system – in 1994, and the subsequent addition of Cognex's Application Specific Products, the Acumen product line, the In-Sight Vision Sensor, and the SmartView ™ surface inspection product, Cognex is now able to offer a wide variety of machine vision options to end-users without the time and expense of custom-engineering highly complex systems. This has enabled Cognex to expand into applications in the pharmaceutical, automotive, healthcare, packaging, consumer products, aerospace, and other industries.

The company's three co-founders provided the impetus to make Cognex the world's leading machine vision company, with over 200,000 vision systems sold to date, and they continue to persevere in their mission to set the standard for excellence in machine vision products and business practices. Today, each of the founders plays a key role within the company: Bob Shillman is Cognex's President, CEO, and Chairman; Marilyn Matz is Senior Vice President of the PC Vision Products Business Group, and Bill Silver is Senior Vice President of Research and Development and Chief Technology Officer for MVSD. And they – along with a team of some 700 Cognoids – continue to work hard to maintain this cutting-edge company's worldwide position as the industry leader.

Cognex has achieved many technical "firsts" in the machine vision industry, including the following:
	First industrial optical character recognition system (DataMan) – 1982
	First normalized correlation pattern finder (Search) – 1986
	First single-board OEM vision engine (Cognex 2000) – 1986
	First patent for dedicated vision chip (VC-1) – 1991
	First full-capability machine vision system for VME bus computers (Cognex 4000) – 1991
	First advanced vision system for PC/AT bus personal computers (Cognex 5000) – 1993
	First "third-generation" easy-to-use machine vision system (Checkpoint) – 1994
	First PC plug-in Data Matrix 2D code reading solution (acuReader/2D) – 1996
	First high-accuracy, high-speed, high-yield, object location technology (PatMax ®) – 1997
	First compact, high-speed industrial machine vision camera (CVC-1000) – 1998
	First full-capability machine vision sensor (In-Sight 2000) – 2000
	First industrial machine vision sensor with Ethernet / IP (In-Sight 1000 and In-Sight 3000) – 2001