Exponential Industry

[Overcapacity] Neuromorphic Locomotion on Display

David Rogers — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:03:26 GMT

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This weeks digest:

Neuromorphic Locomotion on Display

David Rogers — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:02:05 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

As America continues to celebrate its 250th anniversary, Union Pacific’s Big Boy No. 4014, the world’s largest operating steam locomotive, continues its historic coast-to-coast tour, thundering across the nation as a living tribute to the engineering ingenuity that helped build and unite the country /NPR/.

Remaining public displays are scheduled /UP/ in St. Louis on July 19, Kansas City on July 21-22, and Hays, and Kansas on July 25. Come see the restored 133-foot, 1.2-million-pound marvel captivates crowds with its raw power, haunting whistle, and the sheer spectacle of steam-era might, drawing families and rail enthusiasts alike to witness a once-in-a-lifetime connection to America’s industrial heritage.

Not in America? Exponential Industry is developing a game to experience industrial heritage across the world. Stay tuned!

Heard on the floor

“It’s an AI problem. It’s not a data problem, and it’s not an energy problem,” he said. “If you’re a tier-one AI researcher, where are you going to work? I don’t think Shell’s on that list.”
Applied Computing Chief Executive Callum Adamson /TNW/

Yes, there will be winners in the robotic supply chain, but the big outsized winners will be those that build and sell the robots themselves: Tesla, Figure, 1X, Apptronik, etc.
And the biggest will have in-house data collection and in-house robotic AI models as well as significant vertical integration in motors, actuators and other key hardware.
/Phil Trubey on X/

Assembly Line

This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

How China came to dominate the global EV factory boom

A New Semi Every 8 Minutes: Inside Tesla’s Truck Factory /Core Memory/
Decommissioning the original Model S & X assembly line in just 46 days /Tesla/
The landscape of automotive companies and their robotics bets /Vedant Nair/

Inside the Self-Driving Manufacturing Lab

Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility is using AI, robotics and autonomous experimentation to accelerate manufacturing development. Dr. Tom Kurfess explains how the self-driving lab is helping manufacturers test and de-risk new technologies before they reach production.

The Lab Mistake That Might Revolutionize Computing

✍️ Authors: Mario Lanza, Sebastian Pazos

The brain is roughly one million times as energy efficient at many of the comparable tasks we set for AI. To try to approach these efficiencies, a radically different way of computing called neuromorphic engineering is seeking to build electronic components and circuits that act more like the brain’s neurons and the synapses that connect them.

Working in our laboratory in 2024, one of my students was measuring a memory circuit that consisted of one transistor and one memristor—a type of nonvolatile memory device first fabricated in 2008. The student’s memristor circuit was built from two-dimensional material atop a silicon microchip containing MOSFETs. The MOSFETs were created in a commercial foundry using fabrication technology called the 180-nanometer node, which was cutting-edge in the year 2000.

One day the student forgot to connect the bulk terminal of the transistor. What he observed was a sudden increase in current with high nonlinearity that self-relaxed when the voltage was ramped down (a phenomenon called a hysteresis loop). This was a very promising neuronlike behavior!

RoboTTT: Context Scaling for Robot Policies

✍️ Authors: Yunfan Jiang, Yevgen Chebotar, Ruijie Zheng, et. al

Recent robot foundation models operate with single-step or short-history visuomotor context. We introduce Test-Time-Training Robot Policies (RoboTTT), a robot model and training recipe that scale visuomotor context to 8K timesteps, three orders of magnitude beyond state-of-the-art policies, without growing inference latency. At this context length, we unlock new robot capabilities: one-shot in-context imitation from human video demonstrations, on-the-fly policy improvement, robustness to perturbations, and stronger performance on multi-stage, long-horizon tasks.

Read more at arXiv and NVIDIA Research

WAM-TTT: Steering World-Action Models by Watching Human Play at Test Time /arXiv/
Claude plays robotics /Anthropic/

Chipstrat

The Next Trillion-Dollar Chip Company

Two AI chip startups had huge financial outcomes in the past year. Groq was acquired for $20B, and Cerebras IPO’d to a $40B+ market cap. Huge, but not trillion-dollar huge. And in this environment, an inference-first system that runs frontier models and scales to gigawatts of compute has a real shot at a trillion-dollar market cap if it can scale, grow, and IPO…

8 days ago · 27 likes · Austin Lyons

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

As an early proof of concept, Kimi K3 designed a chip to serve a nano model built on its own architecture. In a single 48-hour autonomous run, K3 built, optimized, and verified the chip using open-source EDA tools on the Nangate 45nm library. Within 4 mm², the chip closes timing at 100 MHz and sustains over 8,700 tokens/s decode throughput in simulation, packing 1.46M standard cells, 0.277 MB of SRAM, and an INT4 MAC array with fused dequantization. A chip built by a model, for a model, reflects K3’s long-horizon agentic capabilities.

Archer Announces Zee, AI Foundation Model Purpose-Built for Aviation, a Key Pillar of Its Physical AI Strategy

Archer created Zee, what it believes to be the world’s leading aviation-specific foundational model that delivers a unified aviation intelligence platform built on ADS-B, ATC communication, maps and charts, aircraft state, terrain and weather data. Zee is trained on real-world operational data, aggregated through Archer’s proprietary data pipeline and a global network of over 6,000 ADS-B receivers.

On a typical day, more than 45,000 flights move through American airspace. That flight activity generates a constant flow of data in the form of radio calls, navigation inputs and aircraft-state that pilots and air traffic controllers piece together in real time. Zee is built to understand these disparate data sources as a single system. The goal of Archer’s approach with this unified aviation intelligence platform is to deliver a lower latency, better performing model capable of running on-device requiring no connectivity, critical for use in a wide range of aviation environments from air taxis and UAVs to commercial airliners and air traffic management.

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

Walden Robotics Launches with $300 Million to Put General-Purpose Robots to Work Today

Walden Robotics, a full-stack Physical AI company building and deploying general-purpose robots that continuously learn and improve while performing real work, launched out of stealth with $300 million in funding. The round, which values the company at $1.1 billion, is co-led by Toyota (Toyota Motor Corp, Toyota Invention Partners, and Toyota Ventures) and Deviation Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, Boeing, AE Ventures, Samsung Ventures, Prologis Ventures, CoreWeave Ventures, and financial partners Calibrate Ventures, Colle Capital, Shine Capital, NextView Ventures, Squarepoint Capital, One Madison Group, KAS Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures, among others.

Walden’s product builds on a decade of foundational AI and robotics research the Walden team helped pioneer, including Diffusion Policy and Large Behavior Models (LBMs), the frontier model class that powers Walden’s robots and lets them quickly learn new tasks and continuously improve through real-world practice. Walden launched out of Toyota Research Institute in January 2026 and began working with customers across multiple industries immediately. Since February, Walden’s general-purpose robots have been doing useful work in production at a Toyota plant in North America, moving from first pilot to real work in under two months.

Read more at Business Wire

LimX Dynamics Closes US$200 Million Pre-IPO Round /LimX/
microagi raises $55 million seed round to power Europe’s robotic reindustrialisation /microagi/

TerraFirma Raises $115M to Accelerate Construction on Earth and Beyond

TerraFirma, a tech-enabled, vertically integrated construction company focused on critical infrastructure, announced it has raised approximately $115 million, including a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, BANNER VC, Saga Ventures, Trust Ventures, Definition, PEAK6, Magnetar Capital, and Ravelin Capital. Angel investors include founders, executives, and engineers from companies including SpaceX, Anduril, Base Power, Shinkei, and Hadrian.

TerraFirma is building the robotic infrastructure stack for modern construction. The company’s full-stack platform combines AI-enabled pre-construction software, a remote command-and-control center, and retrofitted semi-autonomous heavy machinery, including excavators, dozers, loaders, rollers, skid steers, and more, converted into robots that no longer require an operator in the cab. Instead, skilled operators orchestrate entire fleets from screens, using the same intuition and judgment they’ve built over years, now extended across multiple machines at once. The result is a system that can make each operator up to 300% more effective, accelerating project execution, reducing costs, and creating jobs that are safer and higher-paying than traditional equipment operation.

Read more at Business Wire

Monumental raised $32 million to put more robots to work building the world /Monumental/. They run a fleet of more than 100 robots laying real brick on job sites across Europe today.
Hyperion Robotics raises €6.4 million to bring physical AI to European infrastructure /EU Startups/ using large-scale additive manufacturing and localized robotic microfactories to replace traditional, labour-intensive concrete processes with a cleaner, faster alternative. It claims to use up to 75% less material and to reduce program times by up to 3x.

Senra Systems Announces $65 Million Series B, Plans for Third Manufacturing Facility

Senra Systems, a software-driven manufacturing company modernizing wire harness production, announced it has raised $65 million in a Series B funding round and plans to accelerate its expansion with a third factory location. The round brings the company’s total funding raised to over $112 million and was co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Interlagos, with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Dylan Field, CIV, 8VC, The Friedkin Group, Jaws Estates Capital, Sozo Ventures and Alumni Ventures.

Senra manufactures complex wire harness systems used in aircraft, spacecraft, launch vehicles, satellites, defense systems and other advanced platforms. The company’s manufacturing model is powered by Amp, its proprietary software platform that integrates quoting, engineering, manufacturing, supply chain management and production workflows into a unified system. Unlike traditional wire harness manufacturing environments that rely heavily on fragmented manual processes, Senra’s integrated manufacturing approach enables faster onboarding, reduced production variability and accelerated delivery timelines.

Read more at PR Newswire

Bezos’ Blue Origin Said to Seek Funds at $130 Billion Valuation /Bloomberg/
Ravee Optics Secures $6 Million Seed Round as the Need to Move More Data in Space Explodes /Business Wire/

Lucid Weighs Going Private or Chapter 11 as Adviser Reports to Board

Restructuring adviser AlixPartners has been asked to deliver its findings to Lucid‘s board before its next meeting, two people familiar with the matter told EV. The strategic options under review include taking the Saudi-backed EV maker private or filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, one of the sources said.

[Overcapacity] Human-Readable API to the Physical World

David Rogers — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 16:00:59 GMT

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This weeks digest:

Human-Readable API to the Physical World

David Rogers — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:03:05 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

Exponential Industry’s mission is to be the premier source and mixed-media aggregator for the business culture of high-tech manufacturing, energy, and supply chains. We are building a thriving community of founders, engineers, operators, and capitalists who are accelerating innovation in the physical world. Our tenets:

Direct from the source - We select from primary sources across millions of company blogs, press releases, podcasts, deep-dive articles, social media posts, and videos directly from where they are originally published.
(Otherwise mishaps like the WIRED exclusive on the 1X hands launch happen)
Credit and attribution - We prominently display the authors and publication to give credit where credit is due.
Straight to the point - Our excerpts seek to answer what and why. We highlight the technology, value proposition, and results so each reader is briefed on a wide range of cross-discipline topics and is encouraged to dive deeper if the content is enticing to explore further.
Private and opt-in by default - Substack is used to deliver this publication directly to your inbox.

Please spread the word of Exponential Industry by sharing the publication:

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Heard on the Floor

“This country is either going to start making things again or it’s going to circle the drain.”
Mike Rowe on the Shawn Ryan Show /YouTube/

Assembly Line

This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

🗜️ How to Build a Full Body Ultrasound

This project is actually crazy, combining 40 ultrasound probes into one machine, an underwater elevator to slide you through them, and the computational expertise to build an image of your insides just based on the echoes of what bounced around you.

Announcing Midjourney Medical /Midjourney/
How The World’s Best Cricket Balls Are Made in Australia /YouTube/

🛰️ Space Can Have Big Impact on the Economy

Money is flooding into the space economy, from SpaceX’s record IPO to Blue Origin’s first outside fundraising effort. But while capital is abundant, rocket launches are not. Founders Fund Partner and Varda Space Chairman Delian Asparouhov explains why access to space could become the industry’s biggest bottleneck.

🔻 The Debt-Fueled Collapse of China’s Top Machine Tool Maker

Shenyang Machine Tool (SYMT), once the world’s top machine tool maker, collapsed in 2019 due to unsustainable debt-fueled expansion and reliance on unmastered foreign technology. Following a bankruptcy reorganization, the state-owned conglomerate General Technology Group (GENERTEC) took control of the Shenyang Machine Tool Group to salvage and restructure the business.

☀️🚰 New 3D Photothermal Structure Enables Efficient Solar Desalination and Crop Irrigation

✍️ Editor: Zhang Nannan

Researchers from the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shenzhen University have developed a new three-dimensional (3D) photothermal structure that greatly improves solar evaporation efficiency.

The researchers used Hansen solubility parameter theory to tightly combine polyethylene terephthalate (PET) chains with HoMS /Advanced Materials/. Accelerated seawater aging tests found no detectable particle detachment from the material after 30 days of continuous exposure. In addition, no active free radicals were detected when the material was exposed to light, suggesting potentially good durability and reliability during long-term use.

The new technology also shows promising economic potential. The researchers estimate that after two years of operation, the cost of water produced by this technology would be lower than that of commercial bottled water. If it proves capable of stable long-term performance, the new material may offer a practical solution for sustainable freshwater production in regions facing water shortages.

Read more at Chinese Academy of Sciences

Industrial Sector Insights

BMW's Spartanburg will be the proof if a US export base can carry electrification

BMW Group has closed out a $1.7bn investment in South Carolina, marking it with the "Home of X" event at Plant Spartanburg on 30 June and the premiere of the fifth-generation X5…

20 days ago · 1 like · Dan Mottram

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

⚡🛢️ Making a new gas turbine, how big should it be?

“There’s a sweet spot in the 40-50MW range where the turbine has most of the efficiency of a gigantic unit yet is also much more manufacturable and deployable. This is the sweet spot is in total cost per unit energy, inclusive of capital expenditure.

This is why Superpower sits at the ever magical 42MW.”

🫲🦾🧠 NEO’s Hands: An API to the Physical World

Our NEO hand is read-write. Developed from the ground up by our world-class engineering team, it runs quasi-direct-drive tendons via the 1X Tendon Drive at low gear ratios of approximately 5:1 to 15:1. All 25 degrees of freedom (22 fully actuated DoF in the fingers and palm, plus 3 at the wrist) are natively force-controlled and fully backdrivable. Push on a finger and it yields — and reports exactly how hard you pushed. Force flows out and information flows back through the same physical path. We call this force transparency, and it’s what turns a push into a measurement.

These 25-DoF hands are IP68 waterproof and food-safe, allowing NEO to wash its own hands like a human. Far from fragile, they deliver powerful, useful strength: Peak torques reach 3.5 Nm at the thumb CMC and 2.6 Nm at the finger MCP joints, with distal flexion forces up to 45N. The wrist delivers 17.75 Nm of torque. This enables strong whole-hand grasps, tool use, lifting and carrying, opening doors, pushing loaded carts, and precision pinch under load, all while retaining full dexterity. With ±0.2 mm positioning accuracy, they work (and perceive) in the small-object regime where most human labor actually happens. Those aren’t demo modes. They’re the natural output of enough independent, force-controlled DoF at human scale.

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

🇺🇸♨️ Quaise Energy Raises $134 Million in Initial Close of Series B to Build World’s First Superhot Geothermal Power Plant

Quaise Energy, a leading developer of utility-scale superhot geothermal energy, announced the first close of its Series B financing, raising $134 million with additional equity and debt capital expected to close imminently. The round was led by Prelude Ventures, with strategic investments from JERA and Idemitsu, two of Japan’s largest energy companies. Nearly all existing investors, including Safar Partners, participated in the round.

The proceeds from Series B will fund Project Obsidian, the world’s first commercial superhot geothermal power plant, and the continued development and commercialization of Quaise’s millimeter wave drilling system towards depths in excess of 5 km. Project-level equity and debt financing is concurrently being raised as the company advances toward first revenues secured by yet-undisclosed commercial off-take partners.

Read more at Business Wire

🇺🇸🔋 EnergyX Secures $225 Million Strategic Investment from Eni to Advance the Black Giant™ Lithium Project in Chile /PR Newswire/
🇺🇸♨️ Hephae Energy Technology Raises $17.8 Million for Commercial Deployment of Superhot Drilling Tech to Advance Geothermal /EINPresswire/

🇧🇪🥔 Polysense raises $10.7M to shape the food factory of the future

Polysense has built AI-native quality control and process optimization technology for food manufacturers. The $10.7M round was led by Felix Capital, with participation from Fortino Ventures, Syndicate One and angel investors including 100IN. This funding goes toward expanding to more production lines worldwide, growing our team, and making deployment faster.

🇺🇸📸 Oxipital AI Closes Series A Following Major Commercial Expansion and Rapid Adoption of its V-CORTX AI Vision Platform /PR Newswire/

🇬🇧🎛️🧠 Luffy AI raises £8.1M to put self-tuning AI inside the world’s electric motors

Luffy AI, an Abingdon startup building what it calls neuroplastic AI for the real-time control of physical machines, has raised £8.1m in a Series A round. The round was led by BGF, which bills itself as the most active equity investor in the UK and Ireland, and the money is earmarked for turning pilots into commercial deployments. It is a large ambition for a modest round, and one that rests on whether a self-tuning motor can prove itself on a real factory floor rather than in simulation.

🇬🇧📺🏭 Pixel-Flo Raises £5.25 Million Seed Round to Unlock MicroLED Displays for the Mass Market

Pixel-Flo, a University of Sheffield spin-out addressing a critical bottleneck in MicroLED display manufacturing with its proprietary Continuous-Flo™ Mass Transfer technology, has raised £5.25 million in Seed funding. The round was led by Northern Gritstone with additional investment from SCVC, the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund, and German investment firm, HTGF.

Pixel-Flo is developing the cost reduction breakthrough critically needed for MicroLED display manufacturing, through its highly scalable, cost-efficient approach. MicroLED is the next wave of display technology, offering 2–5x higher brightness and 2–4x greater efficiency than traditional displays. However, volume adoption of microLED is currently limited by the fundamental scalability challenges of mechanical mass transfer techniques. By comparison, Pixel-Flo’s proprietary fluidic self-assembly technology offers extremely high continuous throughput, delivering the high-performance of MicroLED at radically reduced processing and material cost. This will allow MicroLED enabled products from smartwatches to TVs to be made available at mass market price points.

Constraint Capital #7 - Creating Valuable Humanoid Components

David Rogers — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:03:23 GMT

Agility Robotics’ recent announcement of a $2.5 billion SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI /Agility/ and Unitree Robotics’ ongoing push toward a Shanghai STAR Market IPO /ACN Newswire/ mark notable milestones in the humanoid robotics sector’s evolution toward commercial maturity.

Agility, the U.S. company behind the Digit humanoid with established paid deployments in logistics environments such as GXO warehouses /GXO/, is positioning itself to become the first pure-play humanoid robotics firm listed on a major North American exchange under the ticker AGLT. The transaction, which includes significant PIPE investment and is expected to close later in 2026, provides public-market access and capital to accelerate scaling of its Robot-as-a-Service model.

Meanwhile, Unitree is one of the world’s highest-volume humanoid shippers, with thousands of units delivered primarily in Asia, has filed its IPO application in March 2026 seeking roughly RMB4.202 billion (~$610 million). The move reflects strong revenue growth and positions the Chinese leader to fund expanded manufacturing and AI development on public markets.

Together, these developments signal growing investor confidence and infrastructure readiness for the humanoid market. They demonstrate that companies with tangible commercial traction and production scale can attract substantial public capital, shifting the narrative from early-stage R&D and pilots toward a phase of broader commercialization, supply-chain maturation, and measurable economic potential.

Constraint Capital #7 analyzes humanoid bills of materials (BOM) to identify supply chain constraints and value opportunities.

All content published on this newsletter is based on public information and independent research. Opinions are authors own and have been sanitized through AI engines which can make mistakes. This newsletter is not financial advice, and readers should always do their own research before investing in any security.

Lessons from Memory

Before we dive into humanoids, let’s look back at lessons from components of AI Data Centers. Exponential Industry was quick to identify high-bandwidth memory as the top constraint in the AI data center buildout since issue #2 in February and every month since (March #3, April #4, May #5) skipping June. For those willing to take the risk, this has been potentially lucrative.

But why…

[Overcapacity] Borrowed Ingenuity with a Physical Twist

David Rogers — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:01:14 GMT

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This weeks digest:

Borrowed Ingenuity with a Physical Twist

David Rogers — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:02:24 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

In the story of America, the drive to build complex machinery with one’s own hands and to seek true independence from constraints, whether of empire, circumstance, or limited resources, has always formed the living core of the national mythos we call the American Dream. It began with the ragtag forces who, bankrupt and outmatched, refused to accept defeat and instead improvised the decisive victory at Yorktown through raw determination, borrowed ingenuity, and unbreakable will, proving that a people without pedigree or treasury could still forge their own future. That same spirit echoes today in every garage, workshop, and dorm room where individuals turn scrap, code, and sheer grit into advanced industrial systems from high-speed aerospace prototypes to computer systems, reminding us that the Dream was never about inherited advantage but about the radical belief that anyone, through relentless effort and inventive resolve, can create the machinery of their own freedom and prosperity.

Assembly Line

This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

🇬🇧🪙 How a New Steel Alloy Is Invented!

The Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) is a world-leading research and education group, creating knowledge to deliver impact - for industry, people, and the environment.

🇺🇸🚗🏭 Ford’s AI Hiccups Lead Carmaker to Rehire ‘Gray Beard’ Engineers

Ford initially assumed its AI systems could completely take over vehicle quality control and engineering tasks. However, because experienced engineers left the company before their institutional knowledge could be properly captured, the AI lacked the deep “judgment data” it needed to succeed. Instead of catching design flaws, the automated tools actually amplified weak inputs.

To fix the technical gap, Ford brought back the 350 engineers to:

Rebuild the data pipelines feeding the AI to ensure it was learning from proper veteran engineering judgment.
Refine the automated tools and mentor junior staff.
Overhaul software QA by creating a dedicated 40-person software quality assurance team and introducing more than 100,000 AI-powered automated tests to catch edge cases late in development.

For the first time in 16 years, Ford secured the #1 spot among mainstream brands in J.D. Power’s Initial Quality Study (IQS), scoring 152 problems per 100 vehicles. Specific segments like the F-150, Mustang, and Super Duty won best-in-segment for the second consecutive year.

🦾 Automate Show 2026 Recap

The conversation traces the industry’s shift away from early-stage humanoid hype toward the practical, real-world deployment of Physical AI and edge computing. It then transitions into how software orchestration, digital twins, and advanced kinematics are solving labor shortages and preserving vital manufacturing knowledge.

Vention collaborates with FANUC and Universal Robots on software-defined automation /Robot Report/

🇺🇸🖨️3️⃣ Advanced 3D printing creates origami-inspired structures

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have introduced an innovation in additive manufacturing by integrating origami-inspired 3D printing techniques with hybrid composites — materials made from mixed reinforcing components. By eliminating the need for molds to fabricate a part, this process produces lightweight, cost-efficient structures with faster build times and greater adaptability.

The method enables the production of complex geometries that traditional mold-based methods cannot economically achieve. It also allows the fabrication of objects larger than the printing machine itself, reducing capital costs and boosting production efficiency. In a test print, researchers found that eliminating molds reduced fabrication time by 95 percent and costs by 90 percent for printing a unique design compared to conventional mold-based composite manufacturing. ORNL has filed a patent, and the team is in the process of preparing the innovation for future licensing.

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🇺🇸☢️ Nuclear Reactor Powers Nvidia AI Chip in US First

Valar Atomics, a California-based nuclear startup, generated power from an advanced reactor to run an Nvidia AI chip. While just a trickle of electricity was produced, it’s the first time a next-gen reactor has done so in the US. On the heels of a demonstration of Valar’s Ward 250 reactor connecting to the Nvidia Blackwell chip at the company’s site in Utah, Valar Atomics CEO Isaiah Taylor joins Ed Ludlow on “Bloomberg Tech.”

🇨🇳💿 Hangzhou Garen claims world’s first 6-/8-inch gallium oxide wafer production line

Chinese semiconductor firm Hangzhou Garen Semiconductor has established the world’s first mass-production line compatible with both 6-inch and 8-inch homoepitaxial gallium oxide wafers. Most commercially available gallium oxide wafers are limited to 2 to 4 inches due to severe manufacturing and quality-scaling challenges.

Garen overcame these hurdles using two core technical innovations:

Proprietary Cast-Growth Single-Crystal Technology: Produces ultra-thick gallium oxide crystals while drastically cutting the consumption of iridium, a costly precious metal. Alongside an ultra-thin substrate process, this increases substrate output by three to four times and slashes substrate costs by more than 80% per wafer.
Optimized MOCVD Epitaxy Process: Delivers epitaxial layers thicker than 10 micrometers with a thickness variation below 1%. This high level of uniformity significantly improves manufacturing yields.

Read more at Interesting Engineering

Gallium: The Inelastic Byproduct Powering AI Semiconductors (GaN, GaAs & InP) /eⁱ/

How advanced chip packaging, the process of bundling multiple processors and high-speed memory chips onto a single module via high-speed communication bridges like TSMC’s CoWoS technology, became a choke point for AI /NYT/

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

🇫🇷🇺🇸🤝 Schneider Electric announces agreement to acquire Cognite, unlocking a new level of strategic intelligence for Industrial AI

Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management and automation, announces that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire 100% of Cognite Holding B.V. (“Cognite”), a leading provider of industrial data and AI software, in an all cash transaction valued at $3.1 billion.

Cognite’s scalable, open architecture combined with the capabilities of AVEVA CONNECT means that analytics and industrial AI can ingest industrial data across the asset lifecycle and throughout customers’ existing data ecosystems and investments. The combination extends CONNECT with enterprise-wide data contextualization capabilities and leading-edge agentic AI.

🇨🇦 Stathera Announces US$55 Million Series B to Scale Silicon Timing and Accelerate Next-Generation AI Data Center Solutions

Stathera Inc., a fabless semiconductor company pioneering silicon timing solutions, announced the close of an oversubscribed US$55 million Series B financing. As the market consolidates around a dominant incumbent, the round positions Stathera to become the leading independent alternative for AI data center and hyperscale customers. The round was led by new investor Maverick Silicon with continued backing from existing investors Celesta Capital, BDC Capital, MediaTek Innovation Fund, TXC Corporation, and Ultratech Capital Partners. The financing brings total funding to US$75 million.

Stathera will use the proceeds to fund mass production of its GEN2 silicon timing portfolio while accelerating development of its next-generation platform for AI data centers and growing the company’s engineering and commercial teams. With this expansion, Stathera will establish a Silicon Valley office to engage leading AI, data center, and hyperscale customers.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇺🇸 Omen AI Raises $31M Series A to Bring Continuous Fluid Intelligence to the Machines Powering the AI Economy /PR Newswire/
🇫🇷 VSORA strengthens its funding to launch the commercial roll-out of Jotunn8, its AI inference processor, and execute its ambitious technology roadmap /GlobeNewswire/.

🇰🇷 CarbonSix Secures $40M Series A to Deploy Physical AI Across Global Manufacturing

CarbonSix, a pioneer in Physical AI for the manufacturing sector, announced today that it has raised $40 million (approx. KRW 60 billion) in a Series A funding round from a syndicate of premier U.S. and South Korean venture capital firms. The round was co-led by DSC Investment and LB Investment. New investors joining the round include IMM Investment, Korea Development Bank (KDB), SV Investment, Cortentia (U.S.), and ASQ (A Squared, U.S.). Demonstrating strong continued confidence in CarbonSix’s technology and scalability, all existing seed-round investors—Foothill Ventures, Storm Ventures, Zeitgeist Capital, Xquared and CarbonBlack Fund—fully participated with follow-on investments.

At the core of CarbonSix’s competitive edge is its proprietary “data flywheel” business model. Instead of dumping massive, generalized datasets into abstract foundation models, CarbonSix provides practical automation tools that factories can use immediately. As clients operate these tools, high-quality, task-specific data is naturally captured and fed back into the system. This creates a powerful compounding loop: tool usage drives data accumulation, which refines the AI models, ultimately delivering even smarter automation tools back to the factory floor.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇺🇸 Robot hand company, Proception, settles Tesla trade secret suit and announces $11M raise /TechCrunch/
🇺🇸 Luxonis Raises $14 Million Series A to Power the Perception Layer Behind Physical AI /Business Wire/

🇺🇸 Arcturus Emerges from Stealth with $8M in Seed Funding to ‘Rewire the World’ with Metals Infused with Carbon Nanomaterials

Arcturus, an advanced materials company that infuses carbon nanomaterials into metals to unlock step-change improvements in electrical, thermal, and mechanical performance, emerged from stealth with an $8 million seed round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from 1517, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Toyota Ventures, and Wireframe Ventures.

Arcturus is developing a proprietary process to infuse carbon nanomaterials into metals, creating a new class of high-performance materials designed to improve electrical, thermal, and mechanical performance. The company is building these materials as a drop-in solution for critical components across electrical systems, with target applications including motor windings, bus bars, heat sinks, and, over time, transmission lines and broader grid infrastructure.

Read more at GlobeNewswire

🇺🇸 Altillion Secures $5 Million Seed Round to Extract Iodine and Critical Minerals from Oilfield Wastewater and Industrial Brines /GlobeNewswire/

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[Overcapacity] Into the Lab for Industrial Scale Returns

David Rogers — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:02:52 GMT

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Into the Lab for Industrial Scale Returns

David Rogers — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:00:49 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

The rise of “Labs” is essential because large venture-scale industrial opportunities ignore traditional disciplinary boundaries and require teams to master disparate fields across thermodynamics, fluids, mechanical and electrical engineering, materials science, and semiconductor physics, often by learning them on the fly when no single set of experts exists. This model was exemplified by Elon Musk’s transition from PayPal to founding and scaling SpaceX and Tesla, and it is now enabled by applied Labs that create dedicated, low-friction environments for cross-discipline collaboration and rapid iteration, something traditional siloed organizations or pure SaaS teams cannot replicate when building full-stack physical systems. The approach continues to be validated by software-founded companies such as Boom Supersonic (led by ex-Amazon engineers now developing supersonic jets) and AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic that have moved into hardware (see below), where only boundary-spanning Labs deliver the enduring technical depth and commercial value that venture capital bets now require.

@cerebras team hadn’t studied thermodynamics at college.\n\nThe residential solar market didn’t care that the @Sunrun team hadn’t spent a day in the energy industry.\n\nCerebras ","username":"vassallo","name":"Steve Vassallo","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/707774773430882304/Y0bFygI__normal.jpg","date":"2026-06-22T13:54:17.000Z","photos":[{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/HLbDyWRWoAAOMda.png","link_url":"https://t.co/lvbHI6LtKX"}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":3,"retweet_count":9,"like_count":62,"impression_count":4613,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":null,"video_preview_media_key":null,"belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

Assembly Line

This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

Beyond the solver: How Geometric Deep Learning is reshaping CAE

A finite element mesh is an irregular graph. A point cloud from a 3D scan is an unordered set. A CAD surface is a manifold. None of these live comfortably on a regular grid. If you try to flatten them into one, as early AI-for-engineering approaches did, you lose the very geometric relationships that make the physics meaningful. You’re essentially crumpling a map to fit it into a square box, then wondering why the roads don’t connect.

GDL extends deep learning to these non-Euclidean domains – graphs, meshes, point clouds, and manifolds – by building neural networks that respect the underlying geometric structure of the data. The theoretical backbone comes from the concept of symmetry: a well-designed geometric neural network should produce consistent predictions regardless of how you rotate, translate, or renumber the input. This property – known as equivariance – is not just mathematically beautiful but also physically essential.

Washington plant creates jet fuel from water, air and electricity

Alaska Airlines and Microsoft join Twelve to mark commercial operation of AirPlant One — the first plant in the United States to produce E-Jet fuel from CO2, renewable electricity, and water at scale /Twelve/. AirPlant is a eManufacturing factory that produces E-Jet® SAF and E-Naphtha with power-to-liquid technology that works like industrial photosynthesis—transforming CO2, water, and renewable electricity into hydrocarbons.

AquaPoro Raises $5M to Advance Technology that Generates Net New Water from Air /Business Wire/

ViserDex: Visual Sim-to-Real for Robust Dexterous In-hand Reorientation

Experiments show that the pose estimator trained with 3DGS data outperforms those trained using conventional rendering data in challenging visual environments. We validate the system on a physical multi-fingered hand equipped with an RGB camera, demonstrating robust reorientation of five diverse objects even under challenging lighting conditions. Our results highlight Gaussian splatting as a practical path for RGB-only dexterous manipulation.

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

OpenAI and Broadcom unveil LLM-optimized inference chip

OpenAI and Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) unveiled Jalapeño, OpenAI’s first Intelligence Processor: an accelerator architected around OpenAI’s vision for the future of LLM inference, and the first AI accelerator in a multi-generation compute platform the companies are building together to make advanced AI faster, more reliable, and more accessible to more people.

Jalapeño was co-developed from initial design to manufacturing tape-out in just nine months, and the custom AI accelerator program represents what we believe to be the fastest ASIC development cycle ever achieved in high-performance advanced semiconductors. That speed reflects deep software-hardware co-development with OpenAI’s engineering teams, Broadcom’s silicon implementation expertise, and the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process.

IBM Debuts World’s First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip Technology

IBM’s new sub-1 nm chip packs nearly 100 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail, nearly twice the density of IBM’s 2 nm chip, unveiled in 2021. Enabled by a series of structural and material innovations, including IBM’s groundbreaking three-dimensional nanostack architecture, the technology demonstrates how continued gains in performance and efficiency remain possible even as chip features approach atomic dimensions.

To produce this chip, IBM researchers developed an entirely new transistor architecture, called “nanostack,” the industry’s first known three-dimensional, nanosheet-based design /IBM Research/. Nanostack represents a major advance beyond nanosheet technology, the industry’s current leading-edge architecture, invented by IBM. The nanostack design vertically stacks and staggers transistors, taking advantage of 3D sequential integration to pack more transistors onto a chip. The design also unlocks the use of different material combinations within each stacked layer, optimizing performance and power efficiency of each transistor independent of the other.

Introducing Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators

The best AI models today are conventional deep networks with transformer backbones. However, there is also a long history of alternatives that seek energy efficiency by leveraging the dynamics of a physical system, such as the noisy, time-varying behavior of analog circuits that compute with analog voltage and current instead of conventional digitized numbers.

To exploit these alternative computing methods, the AI task needs to be mapped efficiently to the dynamics of the physical system. Un-0 validates that modern AI workloads can run more efficiently on physical substrates than on today’s hardware.

Why oscillators? In the brain, rhythmic activity and synchronization are pervasive, and have long been hypothesized to do computational work like binding distributed features into coherent percepts, gating communication between regions, and organizing the timing of spikes (Gray et al., 1989; Buzsáki, 2006; Fries, 2015). Coupled oscillators are among the simplest mathematical models of that kind of behavior, which makes them a natural primitive to study for neuro-inspired models of computation (Winfree, 1967; Kuramoto, 1975; Ermentrout, 1996; Ermentrout et al., 2010).

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

As AI scales, efficiency, not capability, becomes a constraint. Performance-per-watt drives the cost of inference, and cost determines what scales. Meeting this demand requires more than hardware. Developers need software that connects system-level optimization with heterogeneous, disaggregated compute, turning silicon performance into reliable and efficient AI services across accelerators, environments, and use cases.

Modular provides an open, AI-native software stack that enables AI to run efficiently across hardware architectures. Built by engineers who helped create much of today’s AI infrastructure, Modular’s unified platform runs models with industry-leading performance across CPU, GPU, NPU, and custom ASIC architectures without re-writes for each accelerator. For developers and enterprises, that means building once, deploying across any environment with lower total cost of ownership. Modular is supported by an open, industry-friendly, vendor-neutral developer community committed to improving the portability and efficiency of AI infrastructure.

Nearfield Instruments Secures $380 Million Series D Funding in Largest Ever Deep-Tech Funding Round in The Netherlands

Nearfield Instruments, a leader in advanced semiconductor 3D metrology and process control, announced the successful closure of a $380 million Series D funding round. The transaction values the company at $1.6 billion, marking a major milestone in Nearfield’s development into a global leader in semiconductor metrology and inspection.

Nearfield’s innovative metrology and inspection solutions provide the accurate, reliable and high-throughput measurements needed to control advanced processes, improve yield and ensure manufacturability. By enabling critical measurements for High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet (High-NA EUV), Gate-All-Around (GAA) and Complementary Field-Effect Transistor (CFET architectures), and hybrid-bonded 3D integration, Nearfield plays a central role in making the next generation of AI computing scalable, energy-efficient, manufacturable and reliable.

Read more at Business Wire

Agility Robotics to Go Public Through Merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI

Agility Robotics, Inc., a leading humanoid robotics and physical AI company, and Churchill Capital Corp XI (NASDAQ: CCXI) (“Churchill”), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, announced they have entered into a definitive business combination agreement. Upon closing of the Transaction, the combined company is expected to operate as Agility and be listed on a major North American exchange under the ticker symbol “AGLT.”

Agility’s mission is to build robot partners that augment the human workforce and lead the adoption of humanoids everywhere. Its flagship humanoid robot, Digit, is a general-purpose, human-centric robot Made for Work™ and currently operating in manufacturing, distribution, and logistics environments to fill chronic physical labor shortages. Through more than a decade of development, Agility has established itself as one of the only humanoid robotics companies with multiple years of operational experience in real customer environments. The Company is supported by leading strategic investors and partners across the AI, technology, VC, and industrial ecosystem, including DCVC, NVIDIA, Amazon, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Schaeffler, Foxconn, Abico, and Playground Global.

[Overcapacity] Are You Ready to Automate?

David Rogers — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 16:01:27 GMT

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Are You Ready to Automate?

David Rogers — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:00:29 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

The magic of the Automate Show is the feeling that you are stepping directly into the future, where the cutting edge of industrial tech becomes a tangible, hands-on reality. As thousands of engineers, founders, and industry leaders gather this week at McCormick Place, the show floor transforms into a high-energy hub of live demonstrations, breakthrough AI, and game-changing humanoid robotics. Whether you are watching groundbreaking ideas pitch live at the Startup Challenge or trading insights with peers between sessions, it is a unique space where the next big technology and the right connection come together to reshape your business.

A few interesting exhibitors I’ve had the pleasure of first connecting with at previous Automate shows:

Copia Raises $26M in Funding to Unify OT Code Management, Backup, and Recovery /PR Newswire/ used to accelerate Copia’s mission to bring modern code management and recovery capabilities to the operational technology (OT) teams who are the first responders in the event of an industrial cyberattack or downtime incident.
Podium Automation Raises $18M Series A to Modernize the Backbone of Industrial Automation /PR Newswire/
CESMII Releases i3X™ 1.0: A Complete, Implementation-Ready Open API Specification for Manufacturing Interoperability /CESMII/

Assembly Line

This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

🇪🇺🏭🧠 AI for Industry Is Europe’s Hope to Salvage Manufacturing Edge

While Europe may have lost the consumer chatbot wars to the US and China, a critical new battleground is emerging on the factory floor. European manufacturers are racing to integrate industrial AI using real-time sensors, predictive maintenance software, and automated quality control to create highly efficient, autonomous “smart factories.” This transition is a matter of survival, with over $1 trillion in manufacturing value at risk of leaving Western Europe due to high costs and labor shortages. However, the clock is ticking: industry experts warn that Europe has a narrow two-to-three-year window to successfully deploy these advanced systems before falling irreversibly behind Asian competitors, who are moving rapidly to combine robotics and AI.

🖨️🔋 The Secret Revolution in Battery Technology: 3-D Printing

The core uniqueness of 3D-printed battery technology lies in its ability to transform energy storage from a rigid, predetermined component into a fluid structural element that can fill any arbitrary geometry or empty space within a device. Unlike traditional manufacturing, which relies on chemical innovations and standard cylindrical or pouch shapes, this additive manufacturing approach is entirely chemistry-agnostic—boosting existing lithium-ion, sodium-ion, and solid-state designs alike. Furthermore, it revolutionizes the production process itself by enabling a solvent-free dry manufacturing method that eliminates massive, energy-intensive drying ovens, drastically reducing production footprints while making complex, high-capacity material designs physically viable.

🦾🧠 An Overview of Modern AI Robotics from First Principles

There is a deceptively simple way to describe what physical AI is all about, a way in which anyone with a STEM background will intuitively understand. Like all other AI models, a model which controls a robot is also a function. It takes in observations (camera pixels, joint angles, the felt resistance of a gripper, etc) and it outputs actions, the next set of positions and torques for its motors. Everything else, all the complicated algorithms, training methodologies, and data scaling theories are in service of producing a good version of that function and embedding it into the weights of a neural network.

The way out is the way humans learn: practice, against a critic. This is reinforcement learning: letting the robot try, scoring the outcome, and reinforcing what worked. The catch is that you can’t supervise a robot at every moment or hand it an example for every possible situation, and in the real world (unlike a simulator) attempts are serial, slow, and require a human to reset the scene. RL in the physical world proves very difficult as a result. Self-improvement algorithms hence fix major bottlenecks in performance for robotics, especially with regards to generalization.

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

🧫 Launching Midjourney Medical & The Midjourney Scanner

The major computational task is figuring out how to change waves into images. Basically - as waves travel through the water and your body they change shape. The shape of these waves changes whenever there is a change in density or stiffness (i.e., going from water to skin to fat to muscle to bone). By looking at how the shapes of all the waves change, we reconstruct a detailed map or ‘image’ which basically lets us figure out what’s in there. All of these images come together to cover a 3D map of your body, down to a fraction of a millimeter, that looks a lot like today’s MRIs but at nearly a hundred times the speed.

The next 12 months are about refining our algorithms and hardware on a daily basis. We’ll be doing research trials to show off the raw capabilities of our system, moving towards a 2nd generation hardware design, and we’ll do build-out for our first “research spa” which will become the promethean site that enables mass-scale health scanning.

🦾🧠 Qwen-Robot Suite: A Foundation Model Suite for Physical World Intelligence

The Qwen family of foundation models already gives strong perception and reasoning about the physical world. But seeing is not acting: the gap between vision and language understanding and physical control remains the central bottleneck for embodied intelligence. The Qwen-Robot Suite bridges this gap with three foundation models — Qwen-RobotNav, Qwen-RobotManip, and Qwen-RobotWorld. Nav unifies five navigation task families through a controllable observation protocol. Manip turns heterogeneous robot data into a coherent canonical space, enabling cross-embodiment training at scale. World co-trains 20+ embodiments via a natural-language action interface under one world model. Together, they enable an agentic system where general intelligence translates directly into physical action.

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

🇨🇭♻️ GR3N raises €15.5M to build the world’s first microwave-powered PET recycling plant / TNW/. GR3N’s technology, called MADE (Microwave Assisted DEpolymerisation), can process all PET.

🇪🇸🦾 THEKER raises €73M to deploy AI-native factory robots that learn on the job

THEKER, the Barcelona-based AI robotics company, has raised €73 million ($85 million) in a Series A to scale its generalist factory robots across industrial production environments. The round was led by CRV, with participation from Samsung, LVMH, Cathay Innovation, 20VC, Henkel Ventures, Korelya, and Bright Pixel Capital. It marks Samsung’s first-ever investment in a Spanish company, LVMH’s first bet on the Spanish startup ecosystem, and CRV’s first investment in Spain.

The round comes less than a year after THEKER closed Spain’s largest-ever seed round at €18 million. The speed from seed to Series A reflects what the company calls real commercial deployment momentum, not just lab demos.

THEKER’s pitch is a new category of industrial robot: AI-native, generalist machines that adapt in real time to changing environments, mixed SKUs, irregular shapes, and operational variability without manual reprogramming. Unlike traditional industrial robots that are rigid and costly to reconfigure, THEKER says its systems deploy in days and continuously learn in production.

🇺🇸🪙 Foundation Alloy Industrializes New Metals Platform with $22M Series A

Foundation Alloy, the 21st-century metals company building a new way to engineer alloys, today announced $22 million in Series A financing to scale production on its MetalsFIRST™ platform—a fully integrated, solid-state metallurgy technology—to industrial volumes. The round was led by Voyager Ventures, with participation from Trust Ventures, Yamaha Motor Ventures, America’s Frontier Fund, Overlap Holdings, Material Impact, Engine Ventures, and El Cap.

Foundation Alloy’s MetalsFIRST approach is a fully integrated, solid-state platform encompassing composition design, mechanical alloying, shape forming, and sintering, that produces engineered alloys without ever entering the molten state. This process enables faster, simpler manufacturing cycles, capital-efficient industrial scale up, and access to alloy compositions and properties impossible to achieve with legacy melt processes. Foundation Alloy’s specialty and stainless steels are engineered for the most demanding applications while requiring 80%–90% fewer production steps, while its Molyclast® product line includes MC1200, a molybdenum alloy that delivers more than 3x the strength of commercial alternatives. This combination of superior performance and manufacturability unlocks new capabilities for demanding applications across the industrial space.

The funding transitions Foundation Alloy into an industrial supplier. This summer, the company is opening a new 36,000 sqft facility in Massachusetts, standing up an additional modular production cell with Re:Build Manufacturing in southern New Hampshire, and doubling headcount across production, engineering, and commercial operations.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇺🇸🪙 Cuprum Metals raises $19.4M Series A to accelerate Copper Extraction Technology /Cuprum/ using a water-based chemical leach, with the flexibility to operate using sea water, to achieve high recovery rates at significantly faster processing times.
🇺🇸🪙 NOX METALS Raises an $11.5M Seed Round to Reindustrialize America /NOX/
🇬🇧⚙️ Doncasters seeks to raise up to $747M in U.S. IPO /Yahoo/ which manufactures high-precision alloy components for demanding conditions.

🇺🇸♨️ Critical Energy Raises $22M to Mass-produce Modular Geothermal Turbines

Based in Los Angeles and founded in 2024 by Spencer Jackson, Critical Energy just closed a seed round led by Susa Ventures and Upfront Ventures. Other investors include MaC Venture Capital, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Humba Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Underground Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank, which provided venture debt.

Critical Energy designs modular geothermal turbines. These are container-sized units built in-house that turn heat into electricity using a closed-loop fluid system and custom machinery. The company says it can reduce deployment times from years to weeks by building most of the system off-site. It has already built a pilot facility in Los Angeles and is moving toward larger commercial projects.

[Overcapacity] Logistic Constraints to Scoring The Goal

David Rogers — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:01:46 GMT

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Logistic Constraints to Scoring The Goal

David Rogers — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:03:11 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

When we tune into a massive sporting event, we’re usually watching the athletes, but behind the scenes, a different kind of elite performer is keeping the whole show from collapsing. YOU. This year’s modern sports spectacles are high-stakes marvels of heavy industrial engineering, where prepping a venue means pushing logistics and science to their absolute limits. Whether it’s turfgrass scientists treating the 2026 World Cup pitches like a living "layer cake" /UT/, growing stadium sod in Colorado and racing it across the country in refrigerated trucks to beat the clock /YouTube/, or structural engineers dropping a 600-ton, 92-foot-tall steel behemoth nicknamed "The Claw" directly onto the historic White House lawn for UFC Freedom 250 /ESPN/, the margin for error is zero. This week we explore the incredible technology changing agronomy, role of the robots and AI, and precision logistics. Enjoy!

Assembly Line

This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

Why robotic arms are now being integrated with CNC machines

✍️ Authors: Lou Ferrell

For years, automation in CNC environments meant a dedicated unit performing one task. Modern integrations look different. A robotic arm now loads a raw blank, transfers it between machines, inspects the finished part, and routes it downstream — all without human involvement.

The infrastructure being built today by FANUC, Universal Robots, KUKA, ABB and RoboDK is already functional. What remains an open question is how much further the role of the robot expands as artificial intelligence matures. A robot that loads a part today follows fixed logic. But one that monitors spindle load, detects tool wear in real time and decides autonomously whether a part passes inspection is an entirely different kind of participant in the manufacturing process.

What Can SLS 3D Printing Really Do? | The SLS Mindset

Selective laser sintering (SLS) is one of the most capable AND one of the most overlooked additive manufacturing processes for polymer parts. In this episode of the SLS Mindset series, Nate Stevens of Lifestyle Additive and explore what makes SLS different: no supports, complex geometry without compromise, assembly consolidation into single parts, and production-ready material performance.

Formlabs’ new 3D printer is poised to reshape manufacturing /Fast Company/. The Fuse X1 is designed to bring large-format SLS printing to more engineering teams and production lines. The new machine is a selective laser sintering (SLS) printer built for manufacturers, engineering teams, product developers, and 3D printing service bureaus. The printer can turn out production-quality parts in less than 24 hours. (It starts at $84,999, is available for order today, and is expected to begin shipping in the fourth quarter of 2026.)

BlueME: Robust Underwater Robot-to-Robot Communication Using Compact Magnetoelectric Antennas

✍️ Authors: Mehron Talebi, Sultan Mahmud, Adam Khalifa, Md Jahidul Islam

We present the design, development, and experimental validation of BlueME, a compact magnetoelectric (ME) antenna array system for underwater robot-to-robot communication. BlueME employs ME antennas operating at their natural mechanical resonance frequency to efficiently transmit and receive very-low and low-frequency (VLF/LF) electromagnetic signals underwater. We detail the system’s design, simulation, fabrication, and integration onto low-power embedded platforms, emphasizing portability and scalability. For performance evaluation, we deployed BlueME on mobile robot platforms in freshwater (lake) and saltwater (ocean) trials. Our tests demonstrate reliable signal transmission and detection using the BlueME antenna system at distances beyond 700 m while consuming less than 10 W of power. Ocean trials demonstrate that the system operates effectively under challenging conditions, such as turbidity, obstacles, and multipath interference, which are factors that typically degrade acoustic and optical methods. Our analysis also examines the impact of complete submersion on system performance and identifies key deployment considerations. This work represents the first practical underwater deployment of ME antennas outside the laboratory and implements the largest VLF/LF ME array system to date. BlueME demonstrates significant potential for marine robotics and automation in multirobot cooperative systems and remote sensor networks.

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

This Nvidia Challenger Says Its AI Chip Is 10x Faster Than A GPU

There’s a new challenger to Nvidia that says its chip can run AI inference at ten times the speed of a standalone GPU. The new chip from D-Matrix is called Corsair, and it’s now in volume production with commitments from hyperscalers, neoclouds and frontier AI labs. In an exclusive interview with CNBC, CEO Sid Shath explains how Corsair bypasses the DRAM shortage by relying on SRAM directly on the chip, and how that tight integration means Corsair can transfer data using five times less energy. It’s a novel approach to memory that’s led to huge gains for other chip startups in recent months. Cerebras’ blockbuster $95 billion IPO in May landed it among tech’s largest ever debuts, and Groq received $20 billion from Nvidia in the AI giant’s largest purchase ever in December. Now CNBC asks whether D-Matrix could be next.

Inside The Chip Factory 1,000 Times Cleaner Than An Operating Room /YouTube/
Rapidus Completes 150 Billion Yen Funding Round from Japan Government /PR Newswire/ to support its evolution from the R&D stage to full-scale 2nm logic semiconductor manufacturing by 2027.
TensorWave Raises $350 Million Series B at $1.55B Valuation to Expand Global AMD-Powered AI Infrastructure /Business Wire/
Granarium Technologies raises EUR 1 million to commercialise the world’s first renewable, affordable supercapacitors for grid stability and industrial reliability /PR Newswire/

Claude Fable 5 and Mechanical Design (V8 engine)

Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 /Anthropic/. Fable 5 is state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks of AI capability, showing exceptional performance in software engineering, knowledge work, vision, scientific research, and many other areas.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 /Anthropic/. Anthropic suspends new AI tools over US government security concerns /BBC/.
Will AI-augmented CAD make manufacturability easier to integrate into design? /Brain Ratliff on X/
Robotics will not have a clean Llama moment /The Robot Report/

We’re Raising the Curtain: Introducing Azumuta Labs

It’s a working space where we run real experiments, put prototypes in front of real operators and engineers, document what happens, and share it here before we have all the answers.

That means you’ll see results that surprised us. Approaches that didn’t work out. Ideas that are solid in a controlled environment but need more work before they’re production-ready. We’ll share all of it, including the failures, because the path to useful manufacturing AI is shorter when we stop repeating each other’s dead ends.

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

NEURA Robotics Announces Record Series C of up to $1.4 Billion to Accelerate the World’s Leading Physical AI Platform

NEURA Robotics, the pioneer in cognitive robotics and creator of the Neuraverse, announced a landmark Series C financing with a total round size of up to $1.4 billion to accelerate its mission of building the world’s leading Physical AI platform. The financing brings together global leaders across AI, robotics, compute, manufacturing and industrial infrastructure, including Tether, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Amazon, NVIDIA, imec.xpand, Bosch, Schaeffler, European Investment Bank, Lingotto Horizon, InterAlpen Partners and others.

NEURA is building a new category of AI infrastructure where cognitive robots continuously learn, collaborate and operate across real world environments through a shared intelligence ecosystem called the Neuraverse. Unlike traditional robotics companies focused on isolated machines or narrow industrial automation, NEURA combines robotics, AI, sensors, edge compute and large scale learning infrastructure into one unified platform architecture designed for global deployment.

Read more at Business Wire and The Robot Report

PhysicsX Announces $300M Series C to Accelerate Physics AI for Industrial Engineering

PhysicsX, the physics AI company for industrials, announced an oversubscribed $300 million Series C financing at a valuation of approximately $2.4 billion. The round is led by Temasek, with participation from new investors M&G Investments and Intrepid Growth Partners, alongside existing investors including Applied Materials, Atomico, General Catalyst, July Fund, NGP, NVIDIA, Radius, and Siemens. Temasek first invested in PhysicsX in 2025, and has played an instrumental role in supporting the company’s international expansion and growth.

This round will accelerate the company’s global growth, the expansion of its platform capabilities, and frontier research, including the development of larger, more powerful pre-trained physics AI models, known as Large Physics Models /arXiv/.

Standard Bots Raises $200 Million Series C At $1 Billion Valuation To Scale AI-Native American Robotics

Standard Bots, the largest U.S. manufacturer of AI-native industrial robots, announced a $200 million Series C financing led by RoboStrategy and existing investor General Catalyst, valuing the company at $1 billion.

The funding will support the expansion of the company’s manufacturing footprint in Glen Cove, New York, where Standard Bots is increasing its facility to 70,000 square feet. The company said the expanded operation will strengthen its ability to design, assemble, and deploy American-made robots at scale.

Read more at PR Newswire and The Robot Report

Mesoware Announces $1.5M to Build AI-Powered Robots for Manufacturing /Manufacturing Tomorrow/

Innovafeed raises $59m, scales production, cuts R&D headcount as insect ag hits “industrialization phase”

French insect ag firm Innovafeed has raised a €51 million ($59 million) round and unveiled plans to consolidate activities at its commercial-scale black soldier fly larvae production facility in Nesle, France.

The round, which takes its cumulative funding including grants to over $500 million, was backed by existing shareholders Creadev, QIA, Temasek, FFC, ABC Impact, and ADM along with banking partners, said Innovafeed, which was founded in 2016 by Aude Guo, Bastien Oggeri, and Clément Ray.

Maneva Raises $27M to Tackle Inefficiencies Across the $46T Manufacturing Industry

Maneva, the Video-to-Action AI company building the intelligence layer for modern manufacturing, announced $27 million in Series A funding, accelerating its mission to close the $18 trillion global manufacturing efficiency gap. The Series A round was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), with participation from returning investors Bling Capital and Freestyle Capital, alongside a group of leading angel investors and funds. This fundraise brings Maneva’s total capital raised to $38.4M.

Maneva’s Video-to-Action AI turns existing factory cameras into real-time operational decisions. It begins with deep learning computer vision, giving factories the ability to see, understand, and act on what’s happening on the floor, then expands into agentic systems that connect, coordinate, and optimize the entire operation. It is the deep learning engine for modern manufacturing, and the foundation of everything Maneva builds.

[Overcapacity] Glass Half Full of Pinball Manufacturing

David Rogers — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:01:30 GMT

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This weeks digest:
https://substack.exponentialindustry.com/p/glass-manufacturing-ai-pinball

Glass Half Full of Pinball Manufacturing

David Rogers — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:00:28 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

The enduring success of Stern Pinball offers valuable lessons in managing production complexity at the intersection of heritage craftsmanship and modern tech. While often perceived as a nostalgic pastime, manufacturing a pinball machine is an intensive engineering challenge that requires balancing thousands of unique parts within a highly constrained physical footprint. As an avid player myself, I closely followed Austin Weber’s coverage of Stern’s operational evolution and took away the following core lessons:

Intricate Packaging & Multi-Disciplinary Design: Each machine represents a dense engineering and spatial challenge. Design teams must integrate thousands of distinct parts, from mechanical solenoids to digital HD displays, within a fixed footprint. This requires tight synchronization between mechanical, electrical, and software engineering during a long development cycle.
The Physics of Quality Control: Because pinball is an entirely physical, physics-based experience, there is zero margin for error in geometry. A fraction of a degree in playfield tilt or a millimeter of deviation in a ramp’s placement completely alters the game’s flow, making precision physical placement a critical quality baseline.
Labor Efficiency Over Automation: Stern demonstrates that for certain high-complexity, high-variety products, manual craftsmanship remains superior to robotics. With 18 to 24 labor hours required per unit, the assembly line relies on highly organized human cells to navigate the unique wiring harnesses and mechanical subassemblies specific to each title.
Technological Convergence: A modern machine is a complex hybrid system. It must seamlessly balance legacy electromechanical feel (pop-bumpers and flippers) with modern digital infrastructure like IoT connectivity and advanced animatronics, forcing a design philosophy that respects tactile tradition while adopting modern software standards.
Operational Flexibility: Because the company juggles multiple high-profile pop-culture licenses and various model tiers (Pro, Premium, Limited Edition), the factory floor must remain highly agile. The lesson here is the value of a flexible manufacturing layout that can pivot production focus rapidly to align with real-time market demand.

Some of my favorite pinball machines over the years. I recommend stopping into the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas next time you’re there!

Assembly Line

This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

☀️ How One Man Powers a Global App from a Dutch Cow Barn

Just outside Amsterdam, a converted cow barn is quietly running a global payment app used by over a million people around the clock. To keep it online, Wietse Wind and his installer Danny built a massive 540 kWh LiFePO4 storage system with 150 solar panels, multiple Quattro-II and MultiPlus-II inverters, and full grid redundancy using Victron Energy equipment. This is the story of the largest residential ESS install either of them had ever built.

🐂 A North Dakota startup raised $10 million from ranchers and neighbours to build the operating system for beef cattle /TNW/

🎛️ State of Digital in Process Manufacturing

✍️ Author: Dimitris Paraskevopoulos

Prior IoT Analytics research, specifically on IoT use cases, has found that process manufacturers typically lag behind discrete manufacturers in adopting digital technologies. This is largely due to long asset replacement cycles (more than 50 years in some cases), among other reasons. Oil & gas, though, is often regarded as ahead of other process industries due to its remote nature, with established SCADA and remote connectivity architectures.
Smart sensors top the list of most deployed technologies for process manufacturers. Companies are also adopting bolt-on wireless sensors, such as US-based industrial AI company Augury’s bolt-on Halo sensors, which monitor machine parameters such as vibration, temperature, and magnetic field data and transmit insights to the cloud for AI-driven analysis.

🫙 AI for the Glass Industry

Georg Katzlinger explores the surprising complexity of the flat glass industry and the unique challenges it faces including how AI solutions are revolutionizing the way custom glass orders are processed, from deciphering handwritten requests to integrating with legacy ERP systems. Georg shares his journey from engineering to AI entrepreneurship, revealing why deterministic, human-in-the-loop automation is essential for manufacturers.

💿 A new way to build chips: Sequentially stacking silicon to extend Moore’s law

✍️ Author: Michael O’Boyle

The most efficient approach, known as monolithic three-dimensional integration, builds each layer directly on top of the previous one to maximize interlayer connectivity. However, achieving this has been a longstanding technical challenge. Preparing high-quality silicon and fabricating high-performance devices normally require processes operating at 1,000 degrees Celsius, hot enough to destroy the metal wiring. For upper layers beyond the first, the temperature constraint, or “thermal budget,” is strictly set to 400 degrees.
Current commercial three-dimensional chips are made by fabricating semiconductor devices on separate wafer substrates first and then bonding those wafers or dies together. While this approach has enabled successful products such as high-bandwidth memory and 3D V-Cache chips, it comes with substantial limitations. The alignment between layers is necessarily coarse, and the micron-scale vertical connections between layers called through-silicon via or TSV are relatively large and sparse.

Read more at University of Illinois and Nature

💿🤝 NVIDIA and TSMC Bring AI Into Fabs to Advance Semiconductor Design and Manufacturing /NVIDIA/

🚀 Tom Mueller: SpaceX’s #1 Employee Built the Merlin Engine. Now He’s Building Impulse Space

🚀 Impulse Space Raises $500M Series D to Build In-Space Mobility Infrastructure for the Space Economy /GlobeNewswire/

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

Siemens powers the next phase of industrial AI with Intelligence Center X

Siemens announced Intelligence Center X, new industrial AI orchestration software designed to help organizations turn industrial AI from isolated experimentation into scalable, real world business impact through a hybrid workforce where people and AI agents work together with shared context, workflows and lifecycle intelligence.

By connecting data, models and workflows on a single governed foundation, Intelligence Center X enables companies to deploy AI-driven applications and agents faster, with full traceability and control. Intelligence Center X combines the Mendix™ low-code platform with Siemens’ Graph Studio and AI Studio software from the Rapidminer® portfolio to create the enterprise context, business-specific lifecycle intelligence, and orchestrated agents and intelligent applications businesses needed to turn AI ambition into real value gains. Across industries, companies have invested in AI but are struggling to scale beyond pilots because data is fragmented, governance is inconsistent, and AI insight does not connect to real workflows. Intelligence Center X is designed to close that gap as the production-ready system that orchestrates people and AI agents together, on top of what enterprises already own, with full auditability and policy controls.

🖨️🛥️ Voltage Vessels and CEAD developed a demonstration platform using LFAM, which is informing Voltage Vessels’ basalt fiber-reinforced PETG material developments

✍️ Author: Grace Stubbins

Voltage Vessels (Maui, Hawaii, U.S.), a startup founded by Sam Young, has submitted a 6-meter 3D printed rigid hull inflatable boat (RHIB) prototype for U.S. maritime defense evaluation. The hull’s technical execution was led by CEAD (Delft, Netherlands), using its large-format additive manufacturing (LFAM) system — an industrial-scale printer used by multiple defense contractors for hull-scale composites production — and HDPro thermoplastic composite (TPC) materials.
Separate third-party testing commissioned by Voltage Vessels measured the materials’ tensile strength along the print direction at roughly 108 MPa, versus approximately 49 MPa for the HDPro composite used as a benchmark. Eclipse X9 also retained more than 90% of its strength after long-term saltwater immersion, with water absorption below 0.4%. Additional testing performed at the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center (UMaine ASCC) further validated the material’s mechanical performance under project ID UM-TC-23-1008.

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

🤝 Fanuc, Google advance industrial robotics as part of recent AI deals /Manufacturing Dive/

🇩🇪🦾 SoftBank in Early Talks to Back $800 Million Agile Robots Round

Agile Robots is in discussions to raise about $800 million in new funding from backers including SoftBank Group Corp., as investors seek out companies deploying artificial intelligence in real-world settings. SoftBank is in talks to contribute more than $300 million, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the information is private. The company previously led a funding round in Agile Robots.

🇮🇱 DriveNets secures $410 million in latest funding round, AMD joins as investor

DriveNets, an Israeli networking software firm, said it has raised $410 million in its latest funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners ‌and Atreides Management, taking its total capital-raise so far to $1 billion. New investors AMD and Red Dot Capital joined the round, while existing investors Pitango and D1 Capital Partners also participated. The company would ⁠use the proceeds to meet the surging demand for large-scale AI infrastructure, CEO Ido Susan said.
DriveNets allows telecommunications operators and data centers to build and manage networks using standard, off-the-shelf hardware, rather than costly proprietary systems. ⁠Its technology supports high-speed connectivity and AI workloads.

🇺🇸⛏️🧠 Terra AI raises $20M to Accelerate Mineral and Reservoir Exploration to Meet Global Critical Mineral and Energy Demands

Terra AI, the artificial intelligence platform helping solve subsurface uncertainty for mineral and energy development, announced it raised $20 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures and strategic investment from BHP Ventures.

Terra AI’s patented technology integrates nearly every type of exploration data to generate millions of geological models, enabling teams to evaluate a comprehensive range of potential subsurface scenarios. This allows project teams to identify the best drilling and geophysical approaches to reduce key uncertainty and rigorously assess project economics earlier than ever before. By going beyond geological visualization and delivering risk-quantified decision insights, Terra AI helps explorers on virtually every important decision across their portfolio from determining which assets to acquire in a portfolio to accelerating and de-risking resource development efforts. The outcome: resource pipelines are developed faster and more efficiently to help the world meet its resource needs.

Read more at PR Newswire

⛏️ CopperTech Metals Announces Public Filing of Registration Statement for Proposed Initial Public Offering /Business Wire/. CopperTech’s flagship asset, the Konkola Copper Mines, is a high-grade copper and cobalt producer strategically located in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province.
⛏️ Red Metals Raises $10M to Reshore American Copper Refining and Build a New Supply Chain for Finished Copper Products /Business Wire/ including a $70 million facility in Charleston, South Carolina.

🇺🇸👓 Phosio Raises $4 Million Seed Round to Bring Affordable AR/AI Glasses to Mass Market

Phosio announced the closing of a $4 million seed financing round to accelerate commercialization of its thin-film materials platform for next-generation AR/AI glasses. The round was led by MESH, with participation from Sierra Ventures, TEL Venture Capital, Silicon Catalyst Venture, Willamette Valley Capital, and Silicon Catalyst Angels.

As AI shifts from phones to ambient interfaces, the industry is racing toward lightweight, all-day wearable glasses. But optics and display costs remain the biggest barrier to mass adoption. Today’s AR/AI glasses rely on complex, costly display systems that are bulky, power-hungry, and difficult to manufacture at scale. Phosio’s proprietary thin-film platform integrates high-performance display functionality directly into lightweight, everyday eyewear, eliminating the cost, bulk, and power demands that have slowed mainstream adoption.

Read more at Business Wire

🇺🇸🪪 Alitheon Secures $8 Million Series A1 to Scale “Biometrics for Things” Across Global Supply Chains /PR Newswire/

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Constraint Capital #6 - June 2026

David Rogers — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:03:41 GMT

In his May 20th, 2026 interview on Invest Like The Best, Gavin Baker /X/ outlines several profound transformations and strategic maneuvers taking place within the AI infrastructure and data center landscape. Constraint Capital #6 tackles these maneuvers and the technology bottlenecks behind the SpaceX’s identified $28.5 trillion TAM /SEC/.

The three most important technology shifts and product development strategies Gavin highlights are:

The Disaggregation of Prefill and Inference and its Impact on Hardware Lifespans

One of the most critical structural shifts in how AI models run is the architectural decoupling of the “prefill” phase from the “decode” phase during inference [49:46].

The Shift: Baker explains that prefill—where the model processes and understands the prompt or input context—is fundamentally a memory capacity-bound problem [51:17]. Conversely, decode—the subsequent generation of output tokens—is a memory bandwidth-constrained process [51:25].
The Competitive Strategy: This canvas allows chip designers to make highly targeted, optimized trade-offs [51:32]. Startups (such as Groq or Cerebras) can build hyper-specialized chips optimized specifically for one part of this loop.
The Financial Impact: Crucially, Baker points out that companies can now stick specialized custom chips (like Cerebras wafer-scale hardware or Groq LPUs) in front of existing, older hardware architectures like Nvidia Hoppers or Amperes [49:46]. This approach uses the legacy GPUs for the prefill stage and custom silicon for decode, extending the useful economic lifespan of data center GPUs from 1–2 years to potentially 10–15 years [49:28].

Ongoing question for investors: How long before a GPU depreciates? /CNBC/

The Transition to Custom ASICs and the “Terafab” Talent Strategy

As standard GPU architectures face physical limits and intense market constraints, product strategy is shifting toward hyper-specialized ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) and alternative foundry setups [43:30].

The Shift: Major players are leaning away from general GPUs to develop custom internal accelerators (e.g., Amazon’s Trainium 3) [43:30, 43:46]. To win, startups can’t just try to make a “better GPU”; they have to choose unique trade-offs within the “iron triangle” of hardware design (optimizing tightly for speed, memory, or cost) and do something fundamentally difficult to replicate [44:14, 47:58].
The Competitive Strategy: Baker highlights a major domestic foundry initiative (a joint venture involving SpaceX/Tesla, dubbed the “Terafab,” partnering with Intel) to establish bleeding-edge semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the U.S. [27:48].

The Financial Impact: Rather than operating like traditional corporate entities, Baker states that hardware leadership requires an aggressive, human-centric recruiting approach to compete with Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) [28:45, 29:59]. This includes recruiting elite global engineering talent and building highly accommodating cultural enclaves specifically tailored to entice the absolute best hardware minds to move and work domestically [30:15, 30:28].

Which leads to the last of the major maneuvers and the focus on this article…

The Move Toward “Orbital Compute” (Racks in Space)

[Overcapacity] Make Hardware as Nimble as Software

David Rogers — Sun, 31 May 2026 16:00:59 GMT

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This weeks digest:

Make Hardware as Nimble as Software

David Rogers — Sun, 31 May 2026 13:00:59 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

The magic of the "Apollo Moment" is about finding a buyer with a non-negotiable physical constraint who is willing to pay any price. That desperate buyer single-handedly seeds an immature technology until the cost curve drops enough for commercial adoption to take over. Diego Prats’ notes in his essay While everyone watches for the “ChatGPT Moment in Robotics”, don’t underrate the “Apollo Moment” that NASA and the military served as patron for integrated circuits. However, during this exact same 1960s Apollo era, the exact same thesis, that government backing or venture capital could bridge the gap for radical new tech with strict constraints, led to massive, historic bets that went completely awry:

The Supersonic Transport (SST) Race: The U.S. government spent over $1 billion on Boeing’s Mach 3 passenger airliner before canceling the program in 1971 due to insurmountable weight issues, soaring costs, and severe sonic boom restrictions.
The “Timesharing” Capital Collapse: Tech conglomerates like Xerox and General Electric lost hundreds of millions betting on premature decentralized computer networks before the underlying software infrastructure and market demand actually existed.
The 1961–1962 “Tron” Bubble: Speculative investors poured millions into any startup with a space-sounding name, resulting in a violent market crash when these companies failed to secure actual buyers with non-negotiable technical constraints.
Commercial Automotive Fuel Cells: Automakers bet heavily that the lightweight hydrogen fuel cells powering Apollo capsules would rapidly replace internal combustion engines, but the costs of space-grade catalysts never declined far enough to be viable.

This is exactly why we launched Constraint Capital. Issue #6 drops tomorrow, where we focus on the high-stakes, unyielding bottlenecks defining the Second Space Age led by companies like SpaceX. Upgrade to a paid subscription today to back our research and power the publication. 👇

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How engineer Ernest Eldridge advanced the art of supercharging in the 1920s /IMechE/

Assembly Line

This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

🦾🧠 This $440 Million Startup Is Solving Robotics’ Biggest Problem

Meet Generalist, the startup that says the next big leap in robotics won’t come from fancier humanoid hardware. It will come from applying AI scaling principles to physical work, and turning messy everyday tasks into killer training datasets.

🗣️ Jagdeep Singh built QuantumScape and Infinera. His next company Rhoda trains robots to become fully operational by watching YouTube videos — in 10 hours, not 10,000. /CLIMB on YouTube/

⛴️ How Candela’s flying ferries could bring commuters back to the water

At Candela, they make hydrofoiling electric boats and ferries that are the first to combine long range with high speed. Their innovative hydrofoil technology cuts energy use by 80%, creating silent, fast, zero-emission vessels with unmatched efficiency.

⛏️ What 16 Drones Across 4 Mining Sites Looks Like: Real-Time BVLOS Drone Operations in Queensland

RocketDNA has deployed 16 drones across 8 pads at four BMA sites in Queensland, delivering real-time geospatial intelligence across 80km+ of continuous mining operations.

⛏️ Rock Zero’s new extraction process could unlock the world’s lithium /MIT Technology Review/ which could cut costs and carbon emissions from lithium production.

🔋 Why This Mars Battery Could Beat Lithium-Ion

Noon’s system pulls CO2 from the air and splits it into solid carbon and oxygen using electricity. The oxygen vents back to the atmosphere; the carbon is what stores the energy ... it’s the fuel sitting in the tank. To discharge, the carbon is reoxidized inside a solid oxide fuel cell, recombining with oxygen back into CO2 and releasing electricity as it goes. No net carbon released over a full cycle.

🌬️ China launches offshore wind-powered underwater AI data centre /Techwire Asia/

📐🧠 “Our Goal Is to Build an Electrical Engineer.” (Davide Asnaghi, Co-Founder & CEO of Diode)

Since its founding just two years ago, Diode has landed Physical Intelligence and Saronic as customers and partnered with Anthropic to help Claude become a better electrical engineer. The company’s ultimate ambition: to make hardware as nimble as software.

📐🧠 Itera Exits Stealth With $12M to Bring Real-Time Prototyping to Electronics /Business Wire/
📐🧠 Quanscient raises €10 million to scale its multiphysics simulation platform for the AI era /EU Startups/

Crucible Capital

Reshaping a Broken Industrial Robot Market: Introducing the Era of Physical AI + Robotics as a Service with Verne

If I held a gun to your head and asked you to guess the market value of a century-old industry that out-precisions human laborers by a factor of five and has reduced manufacturing injuries by more than 60 percent, you would probably guess something massive. Industrial robotics is only worth roughly ~$20 billion (Estimates vary by source; this is the bal…

2 months ago · 10 likes · Aditya Jha, Neil Nie, Kelly Greer, Honour Masters, and Meltem Demirors

Former NASA Robotics Chief: America is building the wrong kind of robots — and China knows it /Fortune/

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

📶 RNG: Flat Datacenter Networks at Scale

We design and deploy in production the first flat datacenter networks. Our design, called RNG, is based on quasi-random graphs. While the cost and fault-tolerance benefits of such topologies have been long known, their practical realization has been hampered by a lack of scalable routing and cabling approaches. RNG has a new distributed routing protocol that exploits the properties of random graphs to find a large number of edge disjoint paths between pairs of endpoints. It uses a novel passive optical device that internally shuffles cables, which makes its cabling complexity similar to that of fat trees. We show that RNG matches or exceeds the performance of fat trees for a range of traffic patterns, despite being up to 45% cheaper. RNG is now the default datacenter network for most workloads at Amazon.

🖨️💡 High-efficiency multi-scale holographic volumetric 3D printing with a phase light modulator

✍️ Authors: Maria Isabel Álvarez-Castaño, Riccardo Rizzo, Viola Sgarminato, et. al.

Light-based 3D printing with photocurable resins enables the rapid fabrication of complex structures with high resolution and fidelity. Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (TVAM) employs a digital micromirror device (DMD) to project amplitude light patterns into rotating resin volumes, producing 3D geometries through photopolymerization. Typically, the light projection efficiency in such binary amplitude modulator-based systems is below a few percent. Recent advancements introduced phase encoding in TVAM using binary amplitude modulators and the Lee Hologram method, increasing axial control and boosting light efficiency to about 10%. In this work, we present the first 3D printing platform utilizing a phase light modulator (PLM), based on an array of micro-electro-mechanical piston mirrors. Compared to amplitude encoding, phase encoding with the PLM yields a 70-fold increase in laser power efficiency. By coupling this efficient light engine with a speckle reduction method in holographic volumetric additive manufacturing (HoloVAM), we experimentally demonstrate printing 3D objects across different scales from hundreds of micrometers to centimeters and with various materials from acrylate-based resins to soft hydrogels, including cell-laden hydrogels with a concentration of 1 million cells per mL. Micro-CT revealed a as the smallest positive feature printed. Moreover, we introduce the use of gelatin Thiol/Norbornene as a material for printing with the Holographic VAM technique, which allows us to print large-scale objects (up to within 2 minutes using only a 150 mW laser diode. The PLM opens up new avenues in volumetric AM for holographic techniques using low-cost single-mode laser diodes.

Read more at Light: Science & Applications

Rocket, Satellite Stocks Surge as SpaceX IPO Fuels Euphoria /Bloomberg/ Form S-1 Space Exploration Technologies Corp. /SEC/. Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to 5 /Hedgeye on X/

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

💰🚛 Backed by Prologis and the American Bureau of Shipping, the $200M TMV Logistics fund will tap in to growing interest in supply-chain efficiency and resilience /WSJ/
🤝 Autodesk to acquire MaintainX, advancing unified platform in operations /PR Newswire/ in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $3.6 billion.

🇩🇪⚡ Focused Energy Raises $240 Million in Series A Financing

Focused Energy, the world’s leading laser fusion company, has raised $240 million in a Series A financing round, making it the largest fully secured Series A financing in the global fusion industry to date. In addition to RWE, the investors include the Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation SPRIND, the European Innovation Council Fund, and the previous lead investor, Prime Movers Lab.

The new capital is to be invested into the former RWE power plant site in Biblis, Hesse. Using the site’s infrastructure and RWE’s power plant expertise, Focused Energy aims to accelerate fusion system development and establish Biblis as a blueprint for industrial laser fusion.

Read more at Business Wire

🇺🇸⚡ Thea Energy Raises $100 Million Series B Funding to Build Scalable Fusion Power Plants /GlobeNewswire/
🇬🇧🌊 Caudal Energy lands €4.9 million to develop predictable renewable power from tidal flow /EU Startups/

🇨🇭🚀 Stellar Alpina Raises CHF 3.5M to Build Detonation-Based Propulsion for Mobility After Launch

The Zurich-based startup is developing compact rotating detonation rocket engines (RDRE’s) to make movement between orbits faster, smaller, and more efficient. Just 82 days after incorporation, Stellar Alpina completed Europe’s first known commercial RDRE hotfire campaign, turning a deep-tech concept into tested hardware at exceptional speed. The CHF 3.5 million, approximately USD 4.5 million pre-seed round is led by Founderful, Switzerland’s leading pre-seed venture fund, with participation from LP&E.

Read more at GlobeNewswire

🇩🇪🧊 Qurie: €2.2 Million Raised For Electrocaloric Refrigeration Systems

Qurie, a Freiburg-based startup developing next-generation electrocaloric cooling systems, has secured €2.2 million in Seed funding. The round was jointly backed by HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), Technology Transfer Fund TT49, and Aepikur GmbH.

The company is developing electrocaloric refrigeration systems that operate without compressors, refrigerants, or pressure build-up. Qurie said its technology is designed to deliver quieter, more efficient, and more sustainable cooling solutions compared to conventional refrigeration systems.

The company’s technology is targeting the HVAC market as the industry faces increasing regulatory, technological, and economic pressures to transition toward cleaner and more energy-efficient systems. Qurie’s approach is based on electrocaloric cooling technology, which aims to eliminate the need for traditional refrigerants and compressor-based architectures.

[Overcapacity] Software Guy with Soft Hands Gets a Laser

David Rogers — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:02:57 GMT

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This weeks digest:

Software Guy with Soft Hands Gets a Laser

David Rogers — Sun, 24 May 2026 13:00:39 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

Detroit grew into a major industrial powerhouse in the early 20th century primarily because of the explosive rise of the automobile industry, which was enabled by abundant open land for massive factories, access to Great Lakes shipping for raw materials like iron ore and coal, a surging labor force from The Great Migration, and pre-existing mechanical expertise in carriage-making and metalworking that innovators like Henry Ford adapted into revolutionary assembly-line mass production.

Will the rise of AI Factories bring the same prosperity? /Bloomberg/

Quote of the Week

At first they didn’t want to sell it to me. They’re like, “All right, let’s talk about your sheet metal shop. Why are you upgrading to a laser?” And I was like, “Well, I don’t really have a sheet metal shop. I’m just starting one.”
They had sent out a salesman. He’s like, “You are a moron. You’re a software guy with soft hands. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“But I like you, and I’m going to vouch for you. If this thing all blows up, I don’t give a shit. I’m going to come pick up the machine. It’s 50,000 pounds. You can’t move it. I’ll come get it if you don’t make your payments.”
And I was like, “This sounds like an awesome deal.” So we were able to bootstrap because of debt. And that’s really how we run.
Jim Belosic, Co-founder and CEO of SendCutSend /Turner Novak on X and Spotify/

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Assembly Line

This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

The Manufacturing Startup That’s Outcompeting China | Jim Belosic, SendCutSend | Round II

Why SCS raised $110M, finding buildings with enough power and great capital partners, and plenty more!

I finally raised some money. Here’s why I waited so long. /Jim Belosic on X/

AI in machine building 2026: Adoption, barriers, use cases, and leading sub-industries

✍️ Author: Raghav Kadian

AI use in the machinery industry is becoming widespread. 96% of machine builders have started to deploy AI in internal operations, and many have started to bring AI features into machine software and into the machines themselves, according to IoT Analytics. The research, which surveyed 120 decision-makers directly involved in machine building across 22 machinery sub-industries, found that machine builders vary widely in their AI motivations and use cases, and that adoption rates vary widely by subindustry.

Real-time inference for robots at Physical Intelligence

For standard local inference, Pi models are trained in the cloud then downloaded locally to run using on-board GPUs attached to each robotic system. This provides a reliable system with good performance and straightforward debugging, but requires a GPU on each robot. Off-board remote inference provided a more lightweight solution for robots without an onboard GPU.

Because Pi’s robots sit inside a continuous control loop, even small amounts of jitter or head-of-line blocking can degrade behavior, which means the nature of TCP was not necessarily the right architectural choice for the setup. To match Tunnels-like performance gains without introducing the potential for request-response stalls in the control loop, Pi worked with Modal to build a more specialized transport: a QUIC-based portal running over UDP with automatic NAT traversal. This system establishes a persistent, bidirectional channel between the robot runtime and the Modal GPU container. Instead of issuing independent TCP requests, the robot connects once and streams observations while receiving action outputs over the same channel.

On Modal, PI can allocate larger, data-center-class GPUs per deployment and run GPU-intensive experiments immediately. This lets the team experiment with larger models that couldn’t even fit on the on-board GPUs, so engineers can test ambitious architectures first and optimize later, if needed.

Inside the YASA YM360: Axial Flux Motor Engineering Explained

In this teardown, we take a closer look at the YASA YM360 axial flux motor and the engineering decisions driving its impressive performance. We analyze the motor’s compact architecture, rotor and stator design, cooling strategy, material selection, and power density advantages while comparing it to conventional radial flux motors.

Unitree GO-M8018-6 Motor Reverse Engineering /Hackaday/

Contents May Shift

Bitch less, build more

On a recent North Bay weekend hike, a friend and I stopped to take in the Windows-XP-esque scenery and noticed that we had just spent the last three miles complaining…

2 months ago · 58 likes · 5 comments · Kristin Ellis

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

LeRobot Humanoid: An Open, Low-Cost, 3D-Printed Humanoid for Robot Learning

LeRobot Humanoid is designed for a specific niche: an open humanoid platform that is affordable enough to reproduce, simple enough to modify, and complete enough to support real robot-learning experiments.

If you are looking for the most advanced humanoid robot, this is not it.
If you are looking for a humanoid you can build, understand, repair, instrument, simulate, and use for learning experiments, this is the robot we are trying to make.

This is why the release includes more than a robot model or a controller. It includes hardware files, assembly documentation, simulation assets, runtime tools, identification pipelines, and training environments. The goal is to make the full humanoid learning loop accessible, from mechanical design to real-world control.

Dassault Systèmes became a test case in the repricing of industrial software

Investors are no longer asking only whether a software company is sticky. They want to know where it fits in the AI value chain. Does it generate direct financial gains from AI adoption? Does it control unique data that AI relies on? Or does it operate at the application level, vulnerable to automation, pricing pressures, and valuation compression?

The new test is harder. What does the platform control that AI cannot easily bypass? Where does the real product value reside? Where is engineering authority preserved? Where is lifecycle accountability maintained when decisions are made more rapidly and with increased automation? If industrial software vendors respond with generic AI feature talk, they will continue to be squeezed. “We also have copilots” is not a strong investment case. It is a defensive slogan.

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

🇨🇦 Inside ventureLAB’s bid to bring AI to Ontario’s critical industries /BetaKit/
💰🇺🇸 IXSAR Capital Launches Focused Venture Platform Backing the Future of Space Technology, Autonomy, and Robotics /PR Newswire/. IXSAR is particularly focused on companies where engineering depth creates durable advantages and where execution requires navigating complex markets, supply chains, and regulatory environments.
💰🇨🇳 BAI Capital Announces First Close of New US$800 Million Fund, Continues to Back Asia Growth and Globalization Opportunities /PR Newswire/. BAI Capital has been deeply rooted in China’s technology and industrial ecosystem, while continuously expanding its global perspective and cross-regional capabilities.

🇺🇸💿 Plural backs CircuitHub with $28M to use robots that manufacture electronics in days

CircuitHub has announced new funding to accelerate a new era of electronics production. The company’s latest funding injection stands as a $28 million Series A round. The investment was spearheaded by Plural, an operator-led venture capital firm founded by an experienced team of European tech heavyweights, including Taavet Hinrikus, Sten Tamkivi, Ian Hogarth, and Khaled Helioui.

Today they operate what they believe is the world’s most advanced PCBA factory /CircuitHub/. Their Grid system is a factory-scale robot that looks more like a semiconductor fab than a contract manufacturer. As a matter of routine they ship 1-off prototype PCBAs in 2 to 3 days without charging white-glove prices. 2M+ boards shipped, 133M+ parts placed, 20,000 engineers served so far. In time, prototyping electronics should look a lot more like 3D printing, and they plan on keep driving lead times and prices down until it does.

🇦🇹🛣️⚡ REPS gets $23.6M to turn road traffic into clean electricity at scale

REPS was built to recover wasted mechanical energy and convert it into clean electricity at scale, using infrastructure that already exists. REPS has announced a $23.6M equity financing round to scale its Road Energy Production System, a patented “road power plant” that converts vehicle traffic into electrical energy.

REPS stands for Road Energy Production System. Its core product is a patented road power plant that installs directly into existing road infrastructure and harvests energy from trucks and cars driving over it, without disrupting traffic flow or logistics operations. The technology is particularly effective where vehicles naturally slow down or brake, or where slopes create additional force. REPS is initially targeting ports, logistics hubs, cities, industrial sites, and other high-traffic infrastructure operators that want to reduce energy costs while improving sustainability.

Read more at GlobeNewswire

🇨🇭🛠️ AVIAN raises $2.6M to scale AI thermal monitoring for the world’s most fire-prone industrial sites

Industrial operators across Europe and North America are facing a problem they can’t inspect their way out of. Fine dust, friction, electrical faults, and aging equipment are pushing fire and downtime risk into territory that insurers will no longer underwrite at viable premiums. Sites that were insurable five years ago are being deemed too risky today. Against that backdrop, AVIAN – the Zurich-based industrial AI company building 24/7 thermal monitoring for the world’s most fire-prone facilities announced it has raised a $2.6M pre-seed round, led by Founderful.

Read more at GlobeNewswire

🛠️ Novity, a Leading Provider of Predictive Maintenance for Process Industries, Announces Strategic Investment from Acario Innovation /PR Newswire/
🛠️ UpKeep Announces Strategic Growth Investment from Accel-KKR /AKKR/

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