The OS for Reindustrialization: Salem Karani on Tristar’s Mission to Modernize American Manufacturing
“A mistake a lot of people make selling into manufacturing is thinking they can lead with AI. Manufacturers don’t care about AI. They care about ROI. I don’t pitch machine learning models—I pitch reducing scrap, cutting waste, improving uptime. That’s the language they speak.”
Image courtesy of TriStar AI. Left to right: Jack Liu Co-Founder/CPO, Salem Karani Co-Founder/CEO & CTO
Salem Karan, cofounder and CEO of Tristar, isn’t just building software for factories. He’s on a mission to preserve American manufacturing from the inside out. Raised around the hum of production lines and the grit of hands-on maintenance work, Salem’s entrepreneurial journey is deeply personal, shaped by watching his father navigate the volatile world of U.S.-based plastic film manufacturing.
Today, Tristar is at the forefront of industrial computer vision, helping manufacturers increase yield, reduce waste, and build smarter, more efficient facilities. We spoke with Salem about how early exposure to factory life shaped his worldview, what it takes to sell into a skeptical, often slow-to-adopt-tech industry, and why building robust, generalizable AI models is not easily replicated.
A Front-Row Seat to American Industry
“My dad was obsessed with his machines,” Salem recalls. “He’d sleep at the factory to make sure nothing went wrong on the graveyard shift.” Growing up in a family-run plastic film business, Salem witnessed firsthand how difficult it is to compete in U.S. manufacturing. Between fluctuating oil prices, overseas competition, and razor-thin margins, every efficiency mattered.
These early experiences left a lasting impression. “What stayed with me,” he says, “was just how much of America works in factories and farms, not in finance or software.” That sense of overlooked opportunity stuck. Even as Salem pursued an engineering path at UT Austin and later, MIT and Harvard, the draw of solving real problems in physical industries remained.
Timing the AI Wave
While many founders ride trends, Salem and cofounder Jack Logan started Tristar before the recent AI gold rush. With backgrounds in computer vision, the duo began experimenting with AI models in 2020, well before ChatGPT made AI a household name.
Salem and Jack started by focusing on human actions in maintenance tasks, a universal pain point across factories, and slowly built a solution that could scale across sectors. “We didn’t plan it this way,” Salem says, “but the timing worked out. As the broader market grew more comfortable with AI, we were already ahead on R&D.”
The result is a high-performance vision platform that can identify defects, monitor tasks, and provide real-time insights, often at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.
Moats Built on Muscle Memory
Tristar’s advantage goes beyond its tech stack. Salem credits much of the company’s traction to a deep understanding of its customers. “Manufacturers don’t care about AI. They care about ROI,” he explains. “You have to speak their language: scrap rates, labor efficiency, throughput.”
That empathy shows up in everything from product design to sales. Salem and his team regularly visit factory floors, getting to know plant managers and swapping stories about downtime and materials sourcing. “These are people who’ve worked in production for 20 years,” he says. “They know when someone’s faking it. We’re not.”
Tristar’s technical moat is formidable. Rather than overfitting models to specific factories or setups, the team has built generalizable, kinematics-based vision models that work across environments. “Everyone else was labeling objects,” Salem explains. “We focused on human motion. It took years, but now we can drop our models into new factories without retraining.”
Growing the Team and the Platform
Jack leads product and user experience, Justin holds down CTO duties and Salem bridges sales, strategy, and engineering. Together, the team has built a culture that blends hard R&D with frontline urgency.
Image courtesy of TriStar AI. Left to right: Salem Karani Co-Founder/CEO & CTO, Jack Liu Co-Founder/CPO
While they’re early on their journey, they’re seeing early signs of expansion across the enterprise: what began as a tool for quality teams is now used by operators, engineers, finance teams, and procurement. “The more people who touch the system, the stickier we become,” Salem says. “That’s where the real value is—getting everyone aligned on how to improve margins.”
Vision for the Future
As foundational models continue to evolve, Tristar is investing in deeper capabilities. “We’re building models that understand materials like plastic film or steel at a physics level,” Salem says. Unlike generic vision AI, their kinematic models can recognize how tasks are done and generalize across factories without retraining — a capability built on years of specialized data and deep manufacturing know-how. The long-term goal is a platform that not only flags issues but helps factories learn from themselves, optimize sourcing decisions, and predict breakdowns before they happen.
Despite the excitement, Salem remains focused on what matters most: customer ROI. “Our north star is 4 to 5x return for every dollar spent with us,” he says. “If we keep delivering that, we’ll keep growing.”
Lessons from the Field
Asked what advice he’d give to aspiring industrial SaaS founders, Salem is quick to answer. “Go work in a factory. Spend a year on the floor. That’s the only way you’ll understand the culture, the pain points, and the real buying dynamics.”
It’s advice he’s lived by. From sweeping floors as a kid to selling cutting-edge AI to Fortune 500 manufacturers, Salem Karani’s journey is a testament to what’s possible when deep technical talent meets lived industry experience.
As Tristar scales, it’s not just building software. It’s helping American manufacturing build back stronger, smarter, and more resilient than ever before.
