Steelira

Steelira runs the loop from schedule to coil: autonomous gauge and shape control, AI strip-surface inspection, TMCP and roll-force optimisation, anneal and coating control, and chatter and roll-wear intelligence — all on a mill-and-metallurgy digital twin that predicts gauge, flatness and mechanical properties before the pass is made.

Rolling is one of the few places where the physics, the economics and the retiring craft all sit in the same control loop, and most software here settles for advising from a dashboard. Naeem and Hamza write back through the Level-2 system at mill speed and keep an audit log per coil. That is the harder build, and the only one a mill will actually run.

The founders

Naeem Khan

Co-founder & CEO

Naeem spent his career around hot-strip and tandem cold mills, where a tenth of a millimetre of gauge and a few IU of flatness decide whether a coil ships or gets downgraded. He got tired of watching that judgement walk out of the plant with every retiring operator, and built Steelira to keep it.

Hamza Iqbal

Co-founder & CTO

Hamza builds the control side: mill-edge inference under 50 ms, the metallurgy models behind it, and the write-back path through the Level-2 system rather than around it. He is the reason the loop closes on the mill instead of on a dashboard.

How it's gone

• 2026

  We came in

  $3.2M seed, with design partners on hot-strip and tandem cold mills.

• 2026

  On the mill

  Shadow-mode gauge and flatness control running against live line data, not a simulator.

• 2026

  Building the team

  Hiring controls and applied-AI engineers close to the plants.