Doughex

Doughex runs the bakery from dough to dispatch: dosing and mixing, fermentation and proofing control, makeup, depositing and portioning, oven and cooling control, inline AI vision for defects and foreign bodies, quality and shelf-life optimisation, yield, energy and takt balancing, robotic handling and packing, and an as-baked product twin that checks quality, weight and takt before the run starts.

Industrial bakeries run some of the fastest, thinnest-margin lines in food manufacturing, where a few grams of weight giveaway per product, an under-proofed batch or an oven running hot compounds into very large waste and energy bills. The bakers and line technicians who hold that judgement are scarce, and most defects are only found after the product is baked. Matthew and Eric are closing the loop at the mixer, the proofer, the depositor and the oven instead of reporting on it afterwards, and they built the audit trail first, which is what a food plant will actually let near its controls.

The team

Matthew Sinclair

Founder & CEO

Matthew runs the company and the commercial side: which bakery and which line go first, what waste, giveaway or energy number it is judged on, and who at the plant signs off on the baseline. His ground is industrial bakery operations and the economics of food manufacturing — yield, weight giveaway, energy per bake and the cost of a recall — and he started Doughex because bakeries still find an under-proofed batch, an overweight deposit or a foreign body after the product is already made.

Eric Donovan

CTO

Eric leads engineering: the plant-edge runtime, the dough, bake and inspection models, the as-baked product twin, and the bounded, audited write-back into mixers, proofers, depositors and ovens. His expertise is edge inference and industrial controls, and he is why every agent earns its authority in shadow mode first, with an evidence trail behind each action.

How it's gone

• 2026

  We came in

  $1M seed to take the first bakery lines from shadow mode to bounded control.

• 2026

  Where it starts

  Giveaway and waste first: baselines run against live production before any agent is given write authority.

• 2026

  Building the team

  Hiring plant-edge perception, controls and OT integration engineers, and people who have run a bakery line or a process-technology team.