[1] In the 1990s, Cognex's business grew due to a demand for machine vision tools to help automate semiconductor and electronics manufacturing.

[3] 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.

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.

[12] In April 2017 Cognex acquired ViDi Systems, a Swiss-based provider of deep learning software for industrial machine vision applications.

[13] In October 2019 Cognex acquired Sualab, a Korean-based developer of vision software using deep learning for industrial applications.