Exponential Industry

Introducing Exponential Industry Scholar

David Rogers — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:03:49 GMT

Exponential Industry, the premier source and mixed-media aggregator for the business culture of high-tech manufacturing, energy, and supply chains, is announcing the launch of Scholar, an intelligent career discovery engine and talent graph built specifically for the deep industrial economy.

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As the physical AI supercycle accelerates, spanning multi-gigawatt data center power buildouts, gigacasting, and humanoid robotics assembly lines, the demand for elite technical talent has never been higher. Yet mechanical, electrical, chemical, and robotics engineers have historically been forced to navigate generic recruitment platforms cluttered with irrelevant software listings, recruiter spam, and stale “ghost jobs.”

Exponential Industry Scholar eliminates this friction. Built on top of Exponential Industry’s dynamic industrial technology ontology, Scholar indexes active, verified engineering requisitions directly from leading industrial firms’ first-party applicant tracking systems.

Key Capabilities of Scholar

Ontology-Grounded Query Interface: Rather than relying on fuzzy keyword searches, Scholar introduces an interactive natural language query model focused on the technology areas of the next decade:
“I am an [experienced / entry-level / intern] engineer focused on [physical AI & robotics / rackscale AI / datacenter power / gigacasting / etc.] looking for positions in [metro areas] with prior affiliation at [university or ex-firm].”
Dual-Alumni Graph Matching: Drawing directly from Exponential Industry’s ontology graph, Scholar surfaces institutional affinities by matching both academic alumni networks and corporate alumni networks. Engineers can instantly discover high-conviction organizations where peers from their alma maters or past engineering teams are building next.
Verified Regional Employer Directory: Beyond venture-backed technology hubs, Scholar indexes direct career portals, industrial ecosystem, and regional supply chains across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific connecting technologists across the globe.

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Availability & Pricing

Exponential Industry Scholar is now available at exponentialindustry.com/scholar.

Community Access (Free): Open exploration of the Scholar interface, regional employer directory, and unlocked access to top two technical requisitions.
Paid Subscription: Unlimited, unredacted access to all open requisitions, direct apply links, corporate and academic alumni matching, as part of your Substack subscription.

Half a Billion Manufacturing Technology Orders

David Rogers — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:03:10 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

A standard domestic first-class seat packs thousands of dollars of aerospace-grade machining straight into the floorboards. Those on their way to IMTS looked inside the hinge of a United A321neo tray table /Greg on X/ to find THK linear guides running along bead-blasted 6061 stock, matched with custom flexures designed to stop vibration. The beauty of industrial design is something to appreciate at every place in the journey.

Heard on the Floor

Back home from IMTS. It was a record year for us, like 2.5x our best IMTS numbers. My small region got 13 firm orders (we don’t take orders at the show, too hard to do paperwork given the crappy net connections and chaos).
/Greg Koenig on X/

Manufacturing Technology Orders Exceed $500M for 5th Consecutive Month /USMTO/
Manufacturing PMI® at 54.6%; August 2026 ISM® Manufacturing PMI® Report /PR Newswire/

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Assembly Line

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

📸🧠 How to Make a Robot Better at Its Job? Give It Eyes.

At a Stellantis assembly plant in Detroit, a recurring bottleneck threatened production: a massive robotic arm tasked with welding Dodge Durangos and Jeep Cherokees frequently froze whenever parts were slightly misaligned on aging racks. Rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace the legacy machinery, Stellantis retrofitted the arm with a vision system from French start-up Inbolt. By mounting a sub-$600 3D camera and proprietary AI software directly onto the robot’s wrist, the machine gained the ability to see, calculate part positions in real time, and adjust its movements autonomously. The fix eliminated costly reboots, which can bleed up to $100,000 per minute in automotive assembly, and helped propel the Detroit facility into one of the automaker’s top-performing plants.

🦾🧠🎛️ Agentic Robotics Solves an Industrial Production Problem

We applied the AmbiOS Agentic Robotics Harness to a problem where subtle edge cases impact critical operational metrics: throughput, sort accuracy, and uptime. Millimeter-level inaccuracies can have a significant effect on throughput. We estimated that this issue was reducing capacity by approximately 31k sorts per year per robot for a typical facility running 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Fixing this issue with hand-tuning would take several weeks of engineering time.

AmbiOS Agentic Robotics harness architecture for performance improvements on real production robots.

We used the AmbiOS Agentic Robotics Harness with Anthropic’s Claude models including both Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.8. The agents analyzed images and data from 500 events over the previous week of production, 50% of which were the known failure mode and 50% which were selected at random to avoid regressions. Within 10 hours, the agents generated and evaluated three solution hypotheses.

🦿 Unitree G1 Actuator Teardown: How This Humanoid Robot Moves

The Munro & Associates team takes a close look at the motors, gearing, bearings, electronics, and overall actuator design to understand how Unitree packages this technology into the G1. They also examine the engineering, manufacturing, and design decisions behind these compact actuators and what they tell us about the rapidly evolving humanoid robotics industry.

Xpeng One Step at a Time /Chairman & CEO Xiaopeng He on X/
UBTECH unveils the world’s first intelligent manufacturing facility for humanoid robots designed for 10,000-unit capacity /Global Times/ noting that the factory can roll out one industrial humanoid robot every 10 minutes.

Hidden Factory

Unseen patterns in emerging industrial technology

New Product Introduction

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

🦾 Universal Robots Unveils Gen 7, a new platform for industrial automation and physical AI deployment

Gen 7 represents a unified system upgrade, enhancing the exceptional robot user experience that operators, engineers, and integrators already prefer to work with every day. Anchored by the PolyScope X robot operating system, Gen 7 has a fully reengineered control box, teach pendant and tool flange – all designed to make even the most demanding tasks and setups easier.

At IMTS, Gen 7 is on display alongside new developments from 20+ ecosystem partners – including demos of Gen 7 functionality with Cognex, Schunk, Magswitch, Smooth Robotics, Psyonic, Robotiq and Inbolt. The demos illustrate how the platform’s open architecture lets best-in-class physical AI, machine vision and gripping providers build applications directly on Universal Robots hardware and software.

🛰️🖨️3️⃣ Orbital Matter Tests 3D-printing Concept for Building Large-scale Space Structures

Polish startup Orbital Matter is testing on-orbit additive manufacturing to fabricate structural components directly in space. Its Replicator 2 satellite carries four printers designed to operate in microgravity and vacuum by extruding a liquid polymer resin that cures into rigid cylindrical beams under ultraviolet light. In the primary mission demonstration, two synchronized print heads will generate twin one-meter beams that draw out an accordion-folded solar array as they lengthen.

Initial orbital operations produced a preliminary polymer strip roughly equivalent to a one-centimeter cylinder, revealing a print-head over-extrusion issue in the space environment. Engineers diagnosed the defect, refined the extrusion parameters on a ground-based testbed, and prepared updated control software to resume the fabrication of full one-meter beams. Over a three-year operational baseline, the team plans to evaluate the cured resin for thermal expansion and radiation resistance, generating the flight-heritage data required to scale the process for hundred-meter solar arrays and future orbital data centers.

Business Transactions

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

💰 Bain Capital Ventures Announces $1.6B New Fund to Invest in Founders Building for an Abundant Post-AGI World /Business Wire/. Fund XI extends this playbook across AI infrastructure, applications, physical AI, science, security and services, continuing the firm’s track record of partnering with the most ambitious entrepreneurs from formation through long-term value creation.
💰 Matter Venture Partners Closes $450 Million Fund II /Business Wire/ to back early-stage HardTech startups across semiconductors, robotics and Physical AI, AI infrastructure, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, energy building blocks, and AI for the advancement of science.

🇯🇵 CADDi Raises $114 Million in Series D at $1.2 Billion Valuation

CADDi, the global technology company that develops the CADDi Manufacturing AI Data Platform, announced that it has entered into definitive agreements for $114 million at a $1.2 billion valuation in Series D funding, with eight new and existing investors participating, including Moore Strategic Ventures and Coreline Ventures. This funding brings CADDi’s total funding to $234 million.

Designed as a manufacturing operating system, CADDi provides a semantic structure to fragmented data, enabling human and AI workflows to run on shared data without manual handoffs. The new product, CADDi Explorer, is a manufacturing discovery engine and the next-generation version of CADDi Drawer. CADDi Agent is a new AI agent that analyzes manufacturing data, makes decisions, and takes action within each company’s operating context. CADDi will also offer six domain-specific Workflow Products spanning the manufacturing value chain, enhancing decision-making and execution to drive business-critical impact.

Read more at Business Wire

🇺🇸 Samson Sky Secures $80 Million Investment for Production of the Switchblade Flying Car

Samson Sky, makers of the Switchblade Flying Car announced they have secured an investment of $80 million from Dubai-based Matin Group. According to Sam Bousfield, CEO and Founder of Samson Sky and designer of the Switchblade, these funds will be used to establish Samson Sky’s first 180,000 square foot Switchblade production facility, to be located in the U.S.

With seating for two plus luggage, the Switchblade Flying Car is a hybrid-electric driving and flying vehicle with sports car performance on the ground and high performance in the air. It runs on premium auto gas, fits in a standard garage and is driven to a nearby airport using highways or local roads.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇺🇸 Vecna Robotics Raises $31 Million to Meet Demand for Flexible Dock-to-Dock Automation

Vecna Robotics, the leader in flexible material handling automation, announced $31 million in funding to meet surging demand across the business. The round was led by Unless, with participation from existing investors Drive Capital, Tiger Global, Highland Capital Partners, and Tectonic Ventures.

Vecna Robotics will use the capital to scale its deployment teams, expand go-to-market initiatives, and accelerate the development of new capabilities that extend automation across the movement of cases and pallets. The company designs, manufactures and leads support of its autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) from Massachusetts, positioning Vecna Robotics as a U.S.-based source of robotics technology, innovation and expertise at a time when the provenance and long-term supportability of automation platforms are becoming increasingly important.

Read more at GlobeNewswire

Constraint Capital #9 - Land, Power, Shell

David Rogers — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:02:48 GMT

In the most recent earnings calls, NVIDIA (August 26) and Broadcom (September 2) were the two executive teams that put land, power, and shell (LPS) or ready-to-energize buildings at the center of the AI data-center bottleneck. The industry phrase is usually “powered shell,” “warm shell.” “Energized shell” is the same idea: a building with contracted power and electrical and mechanical plant in place so racks can actually be plugged in.

NVIDIA went further than an earnings aside. On August 17, Jensen Huang published the note that named the scarce object: “Land, Power, Shell: The Next Strategic Resource”

For the vast majority of NVIDIA customers, he wrote, securing LPS has long been part of their infrastructure strategy. The world’s largest cloud service providers and investment-grade enterprises have the balance sheets, infrastructure expertise, and long-term contracts to secure LPS independently. They build and operate AI factories using NVIDIA accelerated computing, networking, systems, and software. That model will continue to represent most of NVIDIA’s business.

Frontier AI labs are different. They have extraordinary demand for training and inference compute, but many are growing faster than their balance sheets and long-term credit profiles can support. They may have strong customer demand and rapidly growing revenue and still lack the decades-long infrastructure contracts and investment-grade financing capacity needed to secure AI-factory infrastructure on their own. Their growth is increasingly constrained not by algorithms or customer demand, but by the availability of compute. For these companies, more compute means more intelligence, more products, more users, and more revenue. NVIDIA is helping provide the infrastructure that powers that flywheel.

The centerpiece of that August 17 note was a partnership with SoftBank’s SB Energy to secure LPS at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Portsmouth, Ohio, with OpenAI as tenant /NVIDIA/. Initial capacity: 4.25 gigawatts of AI-factory infrastructure. Site potential if NVIDIA extends the arrangement: about 8 gigawatts. Huang’s economic point was explicit. The LPS commitment locks a long-lived site. The NVIDIA compute inside it can be upgraded every generation.

That is the frame. Both companies can see more chip demand than they can house. The physical market is not one pipeline. It is three inventories of buildings: energized now, ready to energize in the next few quarters, and planned to be energized in 2027–29. Where those buildings appear, and which rack geometries they can take, is what actually constrains NVIDIA and Broadcom.

So let’s dive in…

When AI Models Build Their Own Supercomputers

David Rogers — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 13:04:32 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

Our friends David Ariens and Willem van Lammeren from are launching an operational guide to fix communication breakdowns between industrial plant networks and business software applications. They are joined by Nikki Gonzales of Automation Ladies, former OSIsoft technical chief Richard Beeson, author Jon Smart, and InfluxData executive officer Evan Kaplan to release the definitive guide you need to bridge the divide and unlock the full potential of your teams by aligning people and technology.

Click the image below to register ⤵️

📖 Pre-order your copy on Amazon or learn more about the book and bonus materials at itotinsider.com/handbook.

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Assembly Line

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

The Hidden Pillar of Robotics Research is Deployment

In ten months, we’ve scaled to 60+ paying customers across moving goods, making deliveries, inspecting sites, providing security, preparing food, as well as operating inside warehouses, factories, and data centers. Mobility accounts for 10% of our revenue, including AMR solutions that account for 4%. The remaining ~90% comes mainly from manipulation tasks. We have crossed 100M ARR. And 50M has already been recognized since starting deployments 10 months ago.

Together with NVIDIA and Foxconn, we are deploying the Skild Brain on dual-arm manipulators for high-precision assembly of NVIDIA Blackwell systems — work that changes with every product cycle and used to mean reprogramming every robot on the line /NVIDIA/.

At Sumitomo Wiring Systems, we are working towards deploying S1 to automate processes in wire harness manufacturing that were considered “impossible” to automate. With Mitsui & Co., whose supply chains serve 1.4 million meals a day across Japan, we are piloting general-purpose robots powered by S1 in commercial kitchens.

🎣🍣 The Machine That Could End Japan’s Sushi Empire

Shinkei built a robot that kills fish with computer vision and millimeter precision, all in the hope of making American seafood more humane and much better to eat. Its Poseidon machine automates ike jime, the Japanese practice of spiking a fish’s brain and bleeding it soon after capture /Shinkei/. The usual alternative can leave fish suffocating on a boat while stress and blood damage the meat. Poseidon identifies each fish, finds its brain, makes the cuts, and sends it into the cold chain in about five seconds. It is surgical accuracy at industrial speed, performed on a rolling deck covered in salt water. What could go wrong?

⛏️ DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation Announces $73 Million to Advance Domestic Mining Technology

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI) selected four projects for $73 million in funding through DOE’s Mine of the Future initiative to establish domestic testing grounds for innovative mining technologies.

Innovative Wireless Technologies, Inc.: Establishing a multi-state national testbed across underground and surface sites (WV, CO, VA) to test, validate, and accelerate digital networking, automation, and safety technologies in real-world mining conditions /IWT/.
University of Arizona: Developing a nationally accessible underground proving ground in Sahuarita, AZ, centered on advancing mine electrification, energy management, and operational de-risking for critical minerals.
Curators of the University of Missouri (Missouri S&T): Building a multi-facility proving ground in Rolla, MO, integrating underground technology testing with advanced comminution (crushing/grinding) research and workforce training.

Southern Methodist University: Repurposing an instrumented Texas drilling site in Navasota to construct the world’s first “synthetic mine” test facility for repeatable testing of autonomous systems, downhole sensing, and drilling workflows /Hoodline/.

Hidden Factory

Unseen patterns in emerging industrial technology

New Product Introduction

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

🏭🦾🤖🦿 XPENG Robotics Production Line Officially Launched

XPENG’s robot production lines are the world’s first automated production lines for advanced humanoid robots, deeply integrating the mature automotive-grade quality systems of the smart electric vehicle industry with precision manufacturing for humanoid robot. Built to automotive-grade quality standards, it establishes a quality system for mass production of advanced humanoid robots. Designed for scale from day one, with over 80% of core processes automated, the lines deliver a high-precision, highly flexible, and intelligent manufacturing system, ensuring consistent critical-process quality and laying the foundation for scaled production and rapid capacity expansion.

Unboxed Automotive Assembly at Scale

Our unboxed process for Cybercab assembles vehicle modules in parallel & frames the car in one step at the end.

This streamlines automation & reduces the line size by half, unlocking much greater production capacity.

The first real revolution in automotive manufacturing in over a century

Watch Robotaxi on X

The Zelinski Report

How AI Enables 20X Faster CT Scanning

Even though people in manufacturing are generally aware it is an industrial measurement tool, most associate computed tomography (CT) with medical applications rather than manufacturing…

a month ago · Peter Zelinski

Lumafield Unveils Saturn Large-Format Industrial X-ray CT Scanner to Inspect Complex Assemblies and Dense Materials /Lumafield/

Business Transactions

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

🇺🇸🚇 The Boring Company Series D Funding Round Announcement

The Boring Company completed a $3 billion Series D funding round at a $23 billion valuation. The round was led by investment entities affiliated with the United Arab Emirates, with participation from venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Vy Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Temasek, Shamal Holding, Baron Capital, and Human Capital. The company will use the capital to increase headcount across engineering, production, and operations teams. Additionally, the funds will accelerate research and development for its proprietary Prufrock tunnel-boring machines and finance the expansion of underground Loop transit networks in target markets.

The company’s core technology centers on its proprietary Prufrock tunnel boring machines and the Loop transit architecture. Unlike conventional tunnel boring machines, Prufrock is engineered to launch directly from the surface and re-emerge without deep excavation pits, mine continuously while simultaneously erecting precast concrete tunnel segments, and operate remotely to eliminate personnel inside the tunnel. The Loop architecture uses dedicated, underground point-to-point tunnels that route autonomous electric passenger vehicles directly to destinations without intermediate stops. Deployments include the operational Las Vegas Loop network which has been approved for 68 miles and 123 stations, with active planning and expansion underway in international and domestic markets such as Dubai and Nashville.

🇺🇸🦾 Maven Robotics Raises $100M Series A for the World’s First General-Purpose Robotics System for Industrial Work

Maven Robotics, an intelligent industrial robotics company, announced $100 million in Series A funding from RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Ventures, among others. Maven designs, builds, and deploys intelligent robotics for logistics and manufacturing. Founded in 2024, the company has created the world’s first general-purpose robotics system for industrial work.

Maven designed its system from first principles for complex physical environments and rigorous industrial requirements. The system integrates hardware, software, and AI across every layer, including the robot, the fleet, the factory, and the Maven network. Maven’s robots master real tasks that deliver immediate impact, industrial-grade reliability and intelligence that compounds at scale. The company started with mixed-case palletizing and tote handling, two workflows that represent an estimated $80 billion addressable market, and has recently begun expanding into more complex material handling and assembly workflows to address a market in excess of $1 trillion.

🇺🇸🦾🖥️ Antioch Raises $32M to Bring Software Speed to Physical AI Development

Antioch, the simulation platform for physical AI, announced a $32 million Series A led by Greylock, with participation from A*, Category Ventures, Box Group, and Icehouse Ventures. The company’s prominent angel investors include Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Adrian Macneil, CEO of Foxglove; and Ian Andrews, an NVIDIA executive and former Groq executive. Antioch enables robotics and autonomy teams to develop, test and validate AI systems in high-fidelity simulation, scaling from a single experiment to thousands of parallel evaluations before real-world deployment. The company is led by second-time founders, and alumni of Tesla and Meta Reality Labs.

The funding will accelerate Antioch’s product development, expand its engineering team, and deepen its simulation capabilities as demand grows across robotics, drones, industrial automation, fixed perception and other Physical AI applications.

🇬🇧⚙️ CloudNC raises $20M from Nimble Ventures and Lockheed Martin’s fund as its AI reaches 1,000+ machine shops

CloudNC has secured a $20 million funding round led by US-based venture capital firm Nimble Ventures. The round saw additional participation from Calculus Venture Capital, early backer Entrepreneur First, and LM Ventures, the venture arm of Lockheed Martin. The fresh capital is earmarked to drive commercial go-to-market operations, broaden customer support and partnerships across key international markets, and accelerate the adoption of CloudNC’s software including rollout of Quote Agent, a new AI tool launching later in 2026 designed to automate and expedite precision machining cost estimates and quotes, eliminating an expensive administrative bottleneck for machine shops.

Technologically, CloudNC differentiates itself by tackling the complex, manual process of CNC programming through its flagship AI product, CAM Assist. Unlike legacy setups where machinists spend hours manually writing machining strategies and toolpaths, CAM Assist integrates directly into mainstream CAM platforms (such as Autodesk Fusion, Mastercam, and Siemens NX) to generate optimized toolpaths in seconds while leaving expert operators in control. CloudNC also separates itself from software-only competitors by running its own operational precision manufacturing facility in Chelmsford, UK. The software has reached significant scale, deploying across more than 1,000 machine shops globally across major industrial clients such as Major Tool and Machine and Lockheed Martin, while actively pursuing FedRAMP cloud-security certification to unlock sensitive US defense agency workloads.

The Battery Gold Mine

David Rogers — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 13:02:17 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

The fascination with Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics' "Microduck" lies in its approachable, toy-like bipedal form factor offered at an accessible sub-$400 price point, transforming what could be an intimidating engineering challenge into an engaging consumer and developer phenomenon /CNBC/. Beneath its whimsical appearance, the robot serves as a practical, open-source testbed for physical AI, allowing researchers and engineers to master simulation-to-real (sim-to-real) reinforcement learning workflows in physics engines before deploying policies onto physical hardware. For industrial technology, these affordable test platforms democratize legged locomotion, multi-axis motion planning, and edge-compute navigation, accelerating the development of the foundational software models and training pipelines required for next-generation automated guided vehicles and industrial humanoids.

NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face /NVIDIA/

Heard on the Floor

What sets EDA apart from other “replaceable software”: EDA’s moat fundamentally comes not from the data EDA holds, but from the verified tools themselves that only EDA has. But once AI chip design takes off, it becomes possible to convert this verification work into tool revenue. In other words, EDA that used to be sold per seat can be transitioned to a usage based billing model. The countless design and verification iterations that used to be buried inside engineers’ labor costs can now be directly measured and billed as EDA compute and tool invocations consumed by AI agents. It means EDA itself can be sold like Claude Code or an API. Especially now that AI chip design is starting to take hold in earnest, I see a strong possibility of a loop where AI chip design advances -> AI calls EDA more -> EDAmaxxing happens.
/Jukan on X/

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Assembly Line

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

A Tour of the Slate factory

10 AI Lessons from Driving 200+ Million Fully Autonomous Miles /Waymo/

Inside One Company’s Bid to Loosen China’s Rare-Earth Grip

Cyclic Materials Announces USD $75 Million Strategic Growth Financing to Scale U.S. Rare Earth Production /Business Wire/
Maglut Heavy Industries Emerges from Stealth to Rebuild America’s Rare Earth Processing Capacity /Business Wire/

How Australia is turning abandoned gold mines into giant batteries

There’s a hole in the ground in North Queensland that spent ninety years producing gold. Now it’s being converted into a 250 MW pumped hydro plant /Genex/, storing roughly 2,000 megawatt-hours by moving water between two old mine pits. Pumped hydro is already the largest form of grid-scale storage on the planet, bigger than every battery installation combined, and engineers are now eyeing hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines as ready-made sites.

SpaceX Lays Groundwork For Turbine-Blade Factory to Solve Data Center Power Crunch

SpaceX is constructing its own foundry in Bastrop, Texas, to cast critical gas turbine blades and vanes, drawing on Raptor engine expertise to bypass global backlogs that stretch to 2030. This supports the massive Terafab chip facility, which needs on-site natural gas turbines and batteries for stable power that the grid can’t provide. Musk notes natural gas will bridge the gap until solar and Tesla Megapacks scale up, addressing AI compute’s surging demands for reliable energy.

Hidden Factory

Unseen patterns in emerging industrial technology

New Product Introduction

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

Z1T: Sparse Transformer‑Like Models for Probabilistic Hardware

However, it goes without saying that the most dominant family of algorithms today is the Transformer. Training and inference for Transformer-based models account for an enormous share of the workloads being executed on modern digital hardware accelerators. The market’s seemingly insatiable demand for running more instances of this architecture has led to one of the largest industrial buildouts in recent history, commanding extreme financial costs and causing a sharp spike in energy demand.

Our chip, Z1, is built as a graphical model of probabilistic bits (pbits). These are binary stochastic CMOS circuits whose probability is controlled by a bias induced by neighboring pbits. The chip samples from a programmable Ising model and updates the states via Gibbs sampling at a 50 MHz internal update clock. Each pbit draws a new value conditioned on its neighbors, executing a chromatic Gibbs sampling algorithm in-memory. When two pbits have a connection, in physics one calls this a “coupling” between spins in the Ising model.

Helogen Announces October Missions to Advance Commercial Manufacturing in Orbit and Establish First Regulatory Pathway

Helogen, the company building autonomous factories in space for advanced material production, announced two missions scheduled for October 2026. The missions will support the manufacturing of biomaterials for artificial retinas and orthopedic applications, while advancing the company’s work toward GMP-compliant production and FDA review.

Helogen’s HEL-IOS platform brings the core steps of terrestrial precision biomanufacturing into a closed-loop orbital system, including cell and tissue cultivation, media and fluid management, environmental control, processing, separation, harvest, and in-process quality monitoring. CELS, Helogen’s NASA TechLeap Prize-winning autonomous analysis system, provides real-time characterization through imaging, spectroscopy, and sequencing. Together, these systems allow biological production to be monitored and controlled from start to finish with little to no human intervention from the ground.

Read more at Business Wire

Newlight Demonstrates the Future of Maritime Energy: Hydrogen-Hybrid Energy System Cuts Fuel Use and Emissions by Over 20% Across 8,500 Nautical Mile Journey /PR Newswire/

Joe Lonsdale

Ep 161: Generalist CEO Pete Florence on the Robot Revolution & Bringing General Intelligence to the Physical World

Until recently, robots were constrained to narrow, specific tasks. Think assembly lines, medical devices, or household vacuum cleaners. But now all that is changing. One robot trained by Generalist's foundation model can do everything from folding clothes and washing dishes to sorting objects and repairing other robots. How are Pete Florence and the Gen…

Listen now

a month ago · 13 likes · Joe Lonsdale

Business Transactions

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

Cummins Joins Emerald to Advance Customer-Focused Innovation Across Power, Mobility and Energy /Cummins/

Reframe Systems Raises $40M to Industrialize Homebuilding and Expand Microfactory Network

Reframe Systems, the physical AI company industrializing home construction, announced an additional $40 million in venture-backed equity financing to scale its microfactory network across North America and deliver more homes for customers. The financing was led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP), with co-investments from Counterpart Ventures, E12 Ventures, Global Brain, Thin Line Capital, Up Partners and LACI Impact Fund. Reframe also had continued support from existing investors, including Eclipse, VoLo Earth, Cubit Capital, RA Capital Management (Planetary Health), MassMutual Catalyst and Nor’easter. The additional capital positions Reframe to accelerate home delivery in New England and deploy additional microfactory capacity across North America, bringing robotics-enabled homebuilding to the communities that need it most.

Reframe addresses construction’s efficiency problems by building a network of small, highly automated microfactories near the communities where homes are needed. Unlike traditional modular builders that rely on large, centralized factories, Reframe’s microfactories can adapt production to different zoning requirements, climate conditions, and architectural styles. Software coordinates design with production, robotic systems automate repetitive fabrication tasks, and digital work instructions enable builders of all skill levels to assemble components, helping deliver homes 3x faster and at 35% lower cost than traditional construction.

Read more at Business Wire

Atira Raises $17.5 Million To Build AI Orchestration Platform For Industrial Sales Engineering

Atira has raised $17.5 million in funding, including a $15 million Seed round led by Accel and a previously unannounced $2.5 million Pre-Seed round. UVC, Fortino and Booom also participated, alongside industry executives and operators including Ann-Kristin Achleitner, Whirlpool CEO Marc Bitzer, Markus Flik and Celonis Co-Founder and Co-CEO Bastian Nominacher. The Munich-based company plans to use the financing to expand its go-to-market organization, accelerate product development and support international growth.

Atira’s platform helps industrial companies process complex requests for quotation, or RFQs, by reviewing specifications, identifying and commenting on key requirements, configuring appropriate solutions and producing bid documentation. The software connects with existing CRM, ERP and CPQ systems and can generate outputs including technical documentation, configuration proposals, pricing options, completed customer templates and final proposals.

Caterpillar and FieldAI Advance AI-Powered Industrial Innovation

As industries face growing labor shortages and increasing productivity demands, Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) is collaborating with FieldAI to advance physical AI, autonomy and robotics that help jobsites and factories operate safer and more efficiently. By turning real-time observations into actionable insights, physical AI helps improve decision-making, enhance safety and maximize the effectiveness of every worker and machine.

Caterpillar selected FieldAI for its proven ability to deploy in complex, dynamic industrial environments where traditional automation often falls short. FieldAI’s robot-agnostic autonomy and foundation models can turn large volumes of operational and jobsite data into actionable insights—complementing Caterpillar’s manufacturing modernization and jobsite of the future initiatives.

Caterpillar and FieldAI are advancing AI-powered autonomy to help customers build, move and power progress more safely, productively and efficiently. Leveraging NVIDIA accelerated computing, NVIDIA Omniverse technologies and high-fidelity digital twins built from operational data, the collaboration improves site visibility, accelerates decision-making and supports the next generation of industrial operations.

Actuators, Agents, and Orbit

David Rogers — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:03:20 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

At Exponential Industry, our goal is to cover technology breakthroughs, business adoption, and heritage across the heavy industrial world. Moving forward, I will reduce the amount of AI-centric material /Reuters/ (you can find that on plenty of other publications) in this weekly digest with more cars, ‘dozers, and rockets! Enjoy!

Heard on the Floor

one of the most important bottlenecks for diffusion of learning-based robots — that there is a material cost of verification for physical actions.
/Oliver Hsu on X/

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Assembly Line

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

Deploying Megapack At Scale

At Tesla, we think about the full project as our product. Executing Megapack projects at scale is extremely complex. Our products are designed for fast and simple installation ensuring projects are deployed and connected to the grid on time and as fast as possible.

Drew Baglino, Heron Power, Elon’s Former Battery Chief on Making Transformers 100x Smaller /YouTube/

Unitree G1 Knee Actuator Teardown

The Unitree G1 knee actuator integrates a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM), a two-stage planetary reduction, dual magnetic encoders, and a motor driver into an 80 mm OD by 64mm profile weighing approximately 1000g. Rated at a peak torque of 120 N·m (derived peak torque density of roughly 120 N·m/kg), the design emphasizes axial compactness and high structural integration for dynamic legged robotics.

Zetta ζ: An Efficient Closed-Loop Embodied Harness for Self-Evolving Physical Intelligence

✍️ Authors: Xin Ding, Liang Mi, Mingzhe Huang, et. al.

Embodied agents are increasingly used to close the gap left by end-to-end policy models. Yet the agentic path has not realized closed-loop learning in physical execution: existing harnesses remain largely open-loop, following fixed skills during rollout and reflecting only after an episode completes. Such post-hoc reflection cannot govern execution as it unfolds, because physical interaction requires decisions to track rapidly changing robot-environment states at a frequency beyond today’s large agentic models.

We present Zetta, a closed-loop embodied harness that evolves code-based runtime critics and recovery skills online while keeping the base policy frozen. Through three timescale-separated loops, Zetta provides action-frequency governance, rollout-level critic-recovery proposal, and validation-gated skill updates. Together with Z-Infra, a rollout infrastructure decoupling agent logic from heterogeneous execution resources, Zetta achieves state-of-the-art success on LIBERO-Pro and RoboCasa under our current rollout budget, reaching 90.8% and 93.6%, with an 11.1x inference speedup; success continues to scale with self-exploration experience; learned skills transfer zero-shot, and clear robotic “Aha Moments” emerge. These results show that closed-loop harness self-evolution opens a scaling path for reliable physical intelligence.

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Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

We’re opening a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a shared specification for AI agents to safely operate physical devices, to a first group of scientific research labs and advanced manufacturers. MHS enables AI agents to operate multiple lab and manufacturing instruments, such as microscopes, liquid handlers, and robotic arms, in parallel, and perform intricate tasks ranging from routine drug discovery experiments to laser calibration on a quantum computer.

MHS addresses these challenges by introducing a standardized driver: software that translates between a computer’s operating system and a hardware device. The MHS driver uses a simple set of primitives—commands like “read” (for example, “get temperature”) or “write” (for example, “set temperature”)—that any hardware device can understand and act on. And it makes each device discoverable in a standard format, so that devices and agents can find each other and communicate across networks without needing a bespoke “translator” program in between.

Early adopters include Hugging Face, who are adding MHS support in LeRobot, their robotics library, and Raspberry Pi, who are enabling MHS integration across a number of their products following successful tests using their Camera MHS Driver.

GeoField — verified generative engineering for shelf brackets

Introducing GeoField - a set of models that encode geometry, physics (FEA, Stress) and DFM into the same latent space, and reproduces (assisted with an additional design agent) geometries to meet the stated cases. Today, it’s just for L shaped brackets.

Give it a box and a load. It designs a bracket that fits and holds, predicts the stress in milliseconds, and certifies the winner with a real finite-element solve. Everything runs on local hardware; no cloud services, no CAD kernel, no meshes inside the model.

Read more from Connor Kapoor on X and GitHub

Hidden Factory

Unseen patterns in emerging industrial technology

Business Transactions

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

Starcloud Raises $250 Million at $2.3 Billion Valuation to Scale AI with Orbital Data Centers

Starcloud, the company pioneering data centers in space, announced a $250 million Series A extension funding round at a $2.3 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by Manhattan West, with participation from existing investors Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX, 776, and others, alongside new investors NVIDIA, Cisco Investments, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital, Standard Capital, and others. The funding brings Starcloud’s total capital raised to $450 million since its founding in 2024.

Starcloud’s collaboration with NVIDIA began when the company flew the first NVIDIA H100 GPU to orbit aboard its Starcloud-1 satellite in November 2025. As announced in March 2026, the two companies are now working together on NVIDIA’s Space-1 Vera Rubin Module /NVIDIA/.

Since launching Starcloud-1, the company has delivered a string of orbital computing firsts. It trained the first AI model in space. It ran the first version of Google’s Gemini in orbit. It demonstrated high-powered inference and fine-tuning on flight hardware. It also evolved operations and general procedures for running high-performance GPUs on orbit.

Read more at Business Wire

Voya Energy Unveils Metal Fuels Energy System, Closes $35 Million Series A

Voya Energy unveiled a new energy system pairing proprietary aluminum-based metal fuel with a purpose-built electrochemical generator that produces electricity without combustion or air emissions at the point of use. The company also announced a $35 million Series A to advance commercial deployment. The round was led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP), with participation from John Doerr, Mantis VC, StepStone, Founders Fund, Overmatch, Seven Stars and other institutional investors. The financing will support technology development, initial deployments in 2027 and manufacturing scale-up in 2028.

Voya is developing the system for data centers, industrial operators and other large energy users constrained by grid access, permitting or fuel logistics. Its fuel is produced from low-grade scrap aluminum and converted directly into electricity through a low-temperature electrochemical process. Voya’s industrial-scale design is expected to deliver up to two megawatts from a standard 20-foot container. At scale, the system is designed to provide approximately 100 megawatts of generation capacity and 10 gigawatt-hours of stored energy per acre—about four times more compact than diesel generator fleets and 100 times more compact than grid-scale battery installations.

Read more at Business Wire and Bloomberg

ALUMINIUM Global Exhibition 2026: What You Need to Know /SnerpaPower/
Teragen Energy Raises Oversubscribed $6M Pre-Seed Round to Power Today’s Frontier Industries /PR Newswire/ through a novel solid oxide fuel cell architecture, co-invented by CEO Dr. Ruofan Wang at Berkeley Lab “Scaleup and manufacturability of symmetric-structured metal-supported solid oxide fuel cells” /Journal of Power Systems/.

Motion raises $2M to bring humanoid robots to European factories

Motion is Europe’s first Humanoids-as-a-Service platform. Customers pay one monthly fee with no upfront capital, covering everything adoption requires: data collection, robot selection, task training, IT integration, fleet management, financing, insurance, compliance and maintenance. Two things set the model apart:

OEM-agnostic. We select whichever humanoid fits the task best, wheeled or legged, gripper or hand, so customers never bet on a single vendor or a single form factor in a fast-moving hardware market.

Every deployment makes the next one better, and your data stays yours. Each customer benefits from Motion’s deployment experience across the entire network, while each customer’s data remains its own on Motion’s secure European software layer, with cyber security built into every deployment.

The $2M pre-seed is led by Extantia Capital, with Norrsken Evolve, taking Motion’s five live pilots into full production and scales its Humanoids-as-a-Service model across the Benelux.

Supersonic Aviation AI Buildout

David Rogers — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:03:19 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

I’m building a supersonic RC aircraft.

After my Reaper project went viral, @bscholl put up an $800k prize for the first supersonic RC drone and I’m going for it.

>Assembling a small team of Georgia Tech students
>Aircraft/propulsion solution outlined and already in motion
>Target: first flight by December

I’ve already raised ~$20k. Crowdfunding the remaining $50k, with a full cost breakdown on GoFundMe.
/Tomas Salvo on X/

Heard on the Floor

CAD-as-code has been a long-standing promise of our industry, but it has never really become a mainstream method for 3D modeling. This comes down to a few different reasons, and it feels like with the rise of LLMs (which excel at coding), that might change.
/István Csanády on X/

István Csanády: Geometry Kernels, Implicit Representations and CAD /emm0sh on X/. István Csanády breaks down the geometry kernels that power modern CAD and explains why boundary representations remain both indispensable and notoriously difficult to build.
HuggingAI4Engineering/CADGenBench /HuggingFace/. CADGenBench evaluates AI-driven CAD generation: how well a model can turn a description of a mechanical part into a valid, geometrically correct 3D model.
markov-ai/cad-1000-hours /HuggingFace/. CAD 1000 Hours is a computer-use dataset containing 1,021.64 hours of recorded work across 597 workflows and 10 CAD, BIM, structural-analysis, and visualization applications. The tables below summarize its software coverage.
GPT + Autodesk Fusion MCP: The AI That Can Build and Edit Real CAD Models /@irinatoxi on X/ Through an agentic environment such as Codex connected to Fusion MCP, GPT is no longer sitting outside the software explaining which buttons you should press. It can participate directly in parts of the CAD workflow.

Assembly Line

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

What’s Wrong With Germany?

Even Mercedes Can’t Stop the Decline of German Cars in China /Bloomberg/
GM Sets Up $4.5 Billion Plan to Ensure Supply of Critical Parts /Bloomberg/ to safeguard the company from supply shocks caused by such events as extreme weather, natural disasters and cyberattacks. The automaker reached a deal with Procura Auto Parts LLC, which will buy parts inventory from key suppliers and front the cash.

AI Buildout Stretches Deeper Into Manufacturing Supply Chain

✍️ Author: Brooke Sutherland

The rapid data center buildout across the US is starting to manifest more broadly across the industrial ecosystem, including at companies that wouldn’t have been considered obvious data center suppliers even just a few months ago.
Paintmakers Sherwin-Williams Co., PPG Industries Inc. and Akzo Nobel NV are touting a mix of specialized anti-static and fire-protection coatings for things like transformers, power generation equipment and switchgear, as well as moisture mitigating flooring for server halls. Parker-Hannifin Corp. is seeing growing sales of hoses, couplings, manifolds and fittings to data center customers, while Ingersoll Rand Inc. is a major provider of odorizing systems for natural gas — the power source of choice for many data centers — and also sells compressors used for electricity infrastructure.
Fortive Corp. has found a new source of demand for its power quality and fiber testing products, while Axon Enterprise Inc. sees an opportunity to sell drone defenses to data centers. Pool-pump maker Pentair Plc late last week announced it would spend $1.4 billion to bolster its exposure to the data center and heating and cooling markets through the acquisition of Taco Group Holdings, which makes water circulators, heat exchangers and valves.

Siemens announces over $200 million in U.S. manufacturing investments and 1,500 new jobs to expand electrical infrastructure production /Siemens/
Molex Invests in CAEPlus to Advance Thermal Management with Active Liquid Cooling Solutions for AI Data Centers /PR Newswire/
Xylem to Acquire Cornell Pump and Roper Pump, Strengthening Industrial Presence in High Growth Sectors /Xylem/

Unitree Sees Robots Reaching ‘Mass Market’ Within Decade

The market will take off once robots can handle 80% of tasks given to them via voice instructions in unfamiliar surroundings, Wang Xingxing said in a speech at the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Thursday. That will take two to 10 years, he said.
JPMorgan forecasts global humanoid robot shipments will rise to 60,000 this year and 1.75 million units by 2030, compared with 18,000 units in 2025. The bank sees China accounting for more than half of global demand.

Read more at Bloomberg

Peppy Secures Pre-Seed Funding to Build the Coding Platform for Humanoid Robotics, Democratizing Physical AI /EIN Presswire/

The HydroGym reinforcement learning platform for fluid dynamics

Christian Lagemann, Sajeda Mokbel, Miro Gondrum

Effective control of fluid flows is critical across transportation, energy and medicine, where it can increase lift, reduce drag, enhance mixing and attenuate noise. Yet fluids are notoriously difficult to control because they involve high-dimensional, nonlinear and multiscale dynamics that resist conventional approaches. Reinforcement learning has driven remarkable progress in fields such as protein folding and complex games, which have shared benchmarks and standardized environments. Fluid dynamics has lacked such infrastructure, so each controller is typically tuned to a single geometry and operating condition, making progress difficult to accumulate, transfer and compare. Here we introduce HydroGym /GitHub/, a solver-independent reinforcement learning platform providing more than 60 validated, openly available flow control environments spanning from canonical laminar flows to complex turbulent flows, with systematic progression in the Reynolds number up to Re = 4 x 10^5, and Mach number variations in two and three dimensions. Across these environments, agents repeatedly discover robust control principles, including boundary layer manipulation, disruption of acoustic feedback and reorganization of turbulent wakes. Critically, we demonstrate a proof of concept for zero-shot transfer, in which agents that are trained exclusively in inexpensive surrogate environments are deployed to challenging real-world scenarios such as a three-dimensional wing section. We achieve a 38% reduction in local skin friction while reducing exploration costs by four orders of magnitude compared with direct on-wing optimization. As this transfer exploits shared near-wall physics, the breadth of generalization remains open, suggesting a new pathway for research toward policy generalization across computationally prohibitive simulation environments. By offering a common, extensible foundation for reproducible research, HydroGym moves flow control from isolated case studies toward a cohesive community effort.

Read more at Nature and discuss on X

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Unseen patterns in emerging industrial technology

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Introducing GEN-1.5 by Generalist AI

Humans have a remarkable ability to perform new physical skills from only one or a few examples. Our latest robot foundation model, GEN-1.5, exhibits the beginnings of that same ability: it can learn a new task in seconds, from a single example, without gradient updates or fine-tuning. It displays broad capabilities across one-shot and few-shot learning from demonstration, as well as zero-shot physical generalization. Although the tasks are simple and short-horizon, this is the first model we know for which one-shot and few-shot learning of physical skills have emerged at scale. We view these results as a significant step towards our mission of building general intelligence for the physical world.

Read more at Generalist and discuss on X

Robotics’ Model T moment /Robo/. The case for a robot affordable enough to build economies around.

Heart Aerospace - X1 First Flight

On August 12, 2026, Heart Aerospace’s X1 demonstrator aircraft completed its first flight at Plattsburgh International Airport in upstate New York, becoming the largest battery-electric aircraft ever flown. With a 106-foot wingspan and takeoff weight over 25,000 pounds, X1 completed a 27-minute piloted mission comprising taxi, takeoff, climb, maneuvering and landing, of which 8 minutes were airborne.

Powered entirely by batteries, X1 used approximately $5 worth of electricity during the flight, highlighting electric aviation’s potential to deliver structurally lower commercial aircraft operating costs. The flight demonstrated electric aviation at the scale of a commercial airliner, marking a major step toward bringing electric aircraft into everyday airline service. The milestone advances the development of Heart’s ES-30, a 30-seat hybrid-electric regional airliner targeted to enter commercial service in 2031.

Flying-taxi maker Vertical Aerospace secures £74m /UKTN/
Ampaire Closes $19 Million Series B to Advance Hybrid-Electric Aviation Commercialization and Increase Scalability /EIN Presswire/

P Equity Research

The Gas Turbine Supply Chain

3 months ago · 28 likes · 3 comments · P Equity Research

Via Morgan Stanley gas turbine tracker: 38GW of Gas turbine orders in calendar 2Q26 is a new quarterly record, and 1H26 orders are now annualizing at 134GW for 2026 (+34% YOY) /Ben Bajarin on X/

Business Transactions

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

Gravis Robotics Raises $200M for Construction Autonomy

SoftBank is investing $200 million in Gravis Robotics. As the largest Series A in construction robotics history, this funding accelerates Gravis’s mission in physical AI – scaling autonomous heavy machinery across jobsites globally. This investment powers a global rollout, bringing physical AI directly to construction sites and embedding our autonomous systems into heavy machinery fleets across a trillion-dollar market bottlenecked by labor shortages.

Acting as an operating system for mixed fleets, Gravis’ software runs on the Gravis Rack – their autonomous control kit – which has been installed across an unmatched range of machinery brands including Caterpillar, Case, Develon, John Deere, JCB, Hitachi, Sumitomo, Yanmar, Volvo, and more. Because their learning-based models excel at adapting to the nuances of machines, the same core software can drive a compact excavator or a machine five times its size without custom reprogramming.

Mafix Raises $5.4 Million to Commercialize Silicon Fertilizers that Remove CO2

Mafix, an industrial technology startup that turns abundant rocks into agronomically advantageous carbon-negative silicon fertilizers and other mineral products, announced it raised $5.4M in pre-seed funding, led by Azolla Ventures with support from Counteract VC, Astera Institute, Plug and Play Ventures, Impact Science Ventures and a Dutch family office. With this funding, Mafix will commercially demonstrate its proprietary technology to produce 1,000 tons of its fertilizer that restores soil health, boosts crop yields and resilience, and reduces the need for traditional fertilizers. In the U.S., there is demand for silicon fertilizers, but producers cannot reliably obtain high-quality supply at relevant price. Mafix, with its permanent carbon sequestration fertilizer that has multiple value props for farmers, is meeting that demand.

Read more at GlobeNewswire

Rivian Spins out Micromobility Business into New Startup—Also, Inc.

Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN) announced it has spun out its micromobility business into a new company: Also, Inc. Also will focus on small, lightweight vehicles that are designed to meet the global mobility transportation challenges of today and tomorrow. Rivian retains a substantial minority ownership stake in Also and expects opportunities for future collaboration, which may include selectively using some of Rivian’s retail footprint. In connection with the spin-off, Also secured a $105 million investment from the venture capital fund, Eclipse Ventures, which will support Also’s next phase of growth. Rivian Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe will serve on Also’s Board of Directors as its Chairman.

Read more at Business Wire

We Work at Fords

David Rogers — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:02:08 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

The rise of early 20th-century industrial giants like Ford demonstrated that monumental enterprise is forged through relentless operational discipline, demanding standards, and fierce dedication on the factory floor. I recently acquired a 1955 employee handbook and this week took a visit to the Ford Rouge Factory Tour to experience living history before the Woodward Dream Cruise rolled into town.

Heard on the Floor

There are people who understand customer problems. People who have taste. And people who understand the jagged edge of AI capabilities are curious about it.
And like those are the three things. If have those three things, you’re going to do great.

Everyone Is Still Undersizing the AI Market | Eric Vishria /YouTube/

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

How SK hynix Won the AI Memory Race

Inside SK Hynix $720 billion memory bet: Here’s what you need to know /CNBC on YouTube/
NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics | Now in Full Production /YouTube/. Built with an exceptional ecosystem of partners: Foxconn, Lumentum, SPIL, TFC Communication, and TSMC
Point2 Completes $136M Series B Funding with Arm, LB Investment, and Maverick Silicon /Business Wire/ to bolster its engineering, systems, operations, and business teams to accelerate the commercialization of its Active RF Cable (ARC), near‑packaged e-Tube (NPE) and co‑packaged e‑Tube (CPE) solutions for future rack‑scale compute systems.

Melting diamond could unlock triple fusion gain and the secrets of ice-giant planets

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory measured the melting behavior of diamond under extreme pressures higher than the centers of Uranus and Neptune. Using laser-driven shock compression and X-ray diffraction, the team confirmed that diamond melts directly into a dense metallic liquid without passing through intermediate crystal phases. These precise measurements resolve a long-standing discrepancy between previous experiments and quantum mechanical simulations. In inertial confinement fusion, this discovery allows scientists to use slower initial laser shocks to melt the diamond fuel capsule, which improves fuel compressibility and can potentially triple the energy gain. Additionally, the accurate melting data provides a clearer basis to model carbon behavior and internal structures inside ice-giant planets.

Read more at LLNL and Nature Physics

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Uncovering patterns in emerging industrial technology

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Ford’s new EV truck Fathom Starts at Sub-$30,000 Price

Ford announced the “Fathom,” an affordable electric pickup truck with a starting price of $29,945 including shipping. The vehicle is the first model to use Ford’s new universal electric vehicle platform, designed by a specialized engineering team to underpin multiple low-cost models. Key technological enablers include lightweight materials, aerodynamic styling, and an optimized electrical architecture that increases driving range per charge. The truck integrates advanced electronic systems, including the BlueCruise driver-assist software and high-resolution touchscreen navigation. This model directly aims to compete globally with low-cost Chinese electric vehicles following Ford’s overhaul of its electric vehicle business.

Read more at Bloomberg

Reshoring Invites Robots Into US Car Plants /Bloomberg/
- Automakers target labor-intensive internal material transport to improve factory ergonomics and match advanced manufacturers that automate up to 80% of these tasks.
- Ford is replacing traditional moving assembly lines with a parallel assembly process that speeds up production and allows technicians to install components without entering the vehicle chassis.
Ford CEO tells employees Chinese automakers could enter US market in next decade /Reuters/

Ahbstra launches ARK, breakthrough atmospheric water harvester in Barcelona

ARK is a plug-and-play machine that harvests high quality drinking water from air at the rate of up to 500L/day even in dry and hot climates. This means the ARK can support a large household (the average European uses 144L of tap water per day). The ARK is the first commercially available water harvesting machine to be powered by metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) /Nobel/ to operate at this scale, and was demonstrated at an event in Barcelona, with the first purchased units due to be installed by early 2027.

Business Transactions

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

Teknor Apex Company Introduces TekVentures, Its Corporate Venture and Innovation Arm /TMX/. TekVentures invests primarily from pre-seed through Series A focuses on three intersecting areas where advances in materials and manufacturing can create lasting industrial value:
- Next-Generation Materials: new feedstocks, novel chemistry, design for recyclability, and circular systems that improve material performance while reducing resource use and emissions.
- The Future of Manufacturing: new manufacturing processes, automation, robotics, and workforce technologies that make production safer, more efficient, and more resilient.
- Industrial Intelligence: artificial intelligence, sensing, predictive analytics, and supply chain visibility tools that translate physical-world and industrial data into faster, better decisions.

Discovered Materials Closes $9M Seed Round to Accelerate the Adoption of New Materials for Semiconductor Chips

Discovered Materials, a company building AI agents that discover and accelerate the adoption of new materials for semiconductor chips, announces a $9M seed round. They also released hundreds of new materials discovered by frontier AI models, along with Material Discovery Bench - the first benchmark for agentic materials discovery on real-world semiconductor chip problems.

The round is led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and Peak XV Partners, and angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar. The funding will accelerate the company’s mission: making new materials discovery fast enough to keep pace with AI’s demand for compute.

Read more at Business Wire and discuss on Hacker News

Industrial Chemistry Startup Riven Systems Emerges From Stealth to Build AI Platform for Critical Minerals Processing /EIN Presswire/. Riven seeks to play a key role in building a competitive, U.S.-led alternative to China’s critical minerals supply chain by integrating autonomous laboratories, computational modeling, and AI within real-world infrastructure to develop and rapidly de-risk processing chemistry for domestic producers, reducing costs and timelines by orders of magnitude.
Princeton Critical Minerals raises $16M to boost lithium production /Axios/

AGent Energy Closes Series Seed to Unlock 200+ GW of Behind-the-Meter Generation Across Commercial, Industrial, and Institutional Sectors

AGent Energy, a trailblazing developer of AI-driven distributed power plants, announced it has closed an $11 million Series Seed financing co-led by Spero Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, with participation from Intrepid Investment Management and existing investors CIV and Zero Infinity Partners (ZIP). The round follows a $6 million financing from CIV and ZIP, which closed within two months of founding, bringing AGent’s total funding to $17 million in its first 12 months. It’s a striking vote of confidence in behind-the-meter generation as the next great frontier of U.S. energy infrastructure.

AGent is already dispatching in three of the largest wholesale markets in North America, having successfully delivered capacity during grid emergency events in PJM, MISO, and ERCOT. AGent will use the new capital to aggressively scale its team and accelerate its push to unlock 200+ GW of behind-the-meter generation across commercial and industrial facilities and the MUSH sector (municipalities, universities, schools, and hospitals), the properties with the highest concentration of on-site generation and the ones AGent’s team knows best.

Read more at PR Newswire

Alloy Robotics Secures $8M to Help Engineers Debug Robot Fleets with AI

Alloy Robotics, which builds AI agents that analyze robot data to identify the root causes of failures, has raised $8 million at an $80 million valuation, just over a year after its founding. Square Peg led the round, with pre-seed backers Blackbird, Airtree and Skip Capital returning. The round also included leaders and engineers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla, Waymo, Halter and Carbon Robotics, along with several of Alloy’s customers. The funding will support engineering hiring, U.S. expansion, and further development of Alloy’s models and agent platform.

Alloy brings together a fleet’s logs, telemetry, video, and sensor data with engineering context from Slack, Jira, and other systems that teams already use. Its agents continuously scan for anomalies, regressions, and recurring patterns, allowing engineers to investigate known problems in natural language while surfacing issues they might otherwise miss. Each finding links back to the underlying missions, timestamps, and signals so engineers can inspect the evidence themselves.

Buy Factory ???? Profit

David Rogers — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:02:36 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

AI coding tools let industrial engineers build custom software and connect messy plant data in hours rather than months. Instead of waiting on IT, teams can quickly spin up tailored dashboards to monitor live machinery or draft code for tricky shop-floor workflows that usually take forever to configure.

Replacing core systems of record like your ERP or MES is another story /X/. These platforms hold decades of fragile business rules, custom logic, and historical data. When AI-generated code makes even a tiny mistake, it can freeze a production line or mess up account balances across the entire company. For now, AI is fantastic for building quick tools around your existing systems but probably keep them away from pulling the plug on your core foundation unless you’ve mastered them like a process technology.

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Assembly Line

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

We Made a Knob for SmarterEveryDay to Print Millions

Slant 3D counters SmarterEveryDay’s claim /YouTube/ by arguing that while individual 3D printers take longer per part than injection molding, mass-production “print farms” achieve equal or higher overall throughput through massive parallelization. By converting the high capital cost of a single molding machine into hundreds of lower-cost printers running concurrently, manufacturers eliminate expensive tooling, avoid single-point failure risks, and gain the flexibility to iterate part designs instantly via software.

Loading Hondas in the Heartland: How Honda’s Indiana Auto Plant Ships its vehicles

Automotive finished-goods logistics relies on highly synchronized multi-modal transport, where factory workers precision-park new vehicles, shuttle crews, and use specialized connecting ramps inside enclosed rail auto-racks to rapidly roll vehicles across entire multi-car trains. While relocating assembly, such as Honda keeping the Civic in Greensburg, Indiana, rather than Mexico/Reuters/, allows automakers to bypass heavy import tariffs, it concentrates immense pressure on domestic rail infrastructure and local carrier yards to manage high outbound volume efficiently.

Shipping Ford Trucks Across the Country: A Look at How Autoracks are Loaded /YouTube/

Several major automakers implement autonomous end-of-line logistics, utilizing two distinct architectural approaches:

On-Vehicle Autonomous Driving (Tesla BYD, NIO, XPeng)

Tesla: Employs its onboard Full Self-Driving (FSD) software to have newly built vehicles drive themselves straight off the assembly line at the Fremont Factory /X/ and navigate over a mile to their assigned staging lanes and loading docks without human drivers.

Infrastructure-Guided Automation (BMW, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors)

BMW deploys an “Automated Driving In-Plant” (AFW) system across plants like Dingolfing and Leipzig /BMW/. Instead of relying on the car’s built-in sensors, the factory uses a stationary off-vehicle LiDAR infrastructure and cloud movement planners (developed with Seoul Robotics and Embotech) to remotely pilot 5 Series, 7 Series, and MINI Countryman models over 1 km through test tracks directly into logistics yards.

Mercedes-Benz & Audi use automated valet parking (AVP) and infrastructure-driven plant routing systems in plants like Factory 56 (Sindelfingen) /Audi/. External cameras and LiDAR networks track vehicle location and issue remote steering, braking, and throttle commands over local networks to move vehicles between production steps and staging bays.

BYD & Chinese EV makers leverage integrated smart-factory architecture to autonomously route EV units off assembly lines into yard staging. Utilizing factory-wide digital twin tracking alongside onboard camera/radar suites, vehicles self-navigate to charging pads, quality inspection lines, and shipping bays.

Inside a high-tech lab designing food for a hotter world

The video highlights high-throughput plant phenotyping using automated greenhouses equipped with 3D scanners, thermal sensors, and AI computer vision to continuously analyze crop performance under simulated climate stress. By mapping non-destructive traits like photosynthetic efficiency, root growth, and water retention to their specific plant genomes, researchers can dramatically accelerate traditional cross-breeding without resorting to genetic modification. The overall trajectory points toward creating climate-resilient, disease-resistant crops capable of maintaining food yields in a warmer, more volatile global environment.

Have you tried the Exponential Industry Arcade yet? Safety comes first in Hazard Sweep…

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Terraform Industries Hydrogen Electrolyzer Breakthrough

Last week the c team at Terraform Industries pulled off yet another first, the sustained production of >99.9% pure H2 from our vertically integrated, California-manufactured electrolyzer stack while it was coupled directly to a solar array at our Muroc desert test site.
Most commercial electrolyzers need carefully conditioned power from expensive battery-meditated backup systems. Ours runs directly off the sun. Clouds pass, the day turns to night, and we maintain purity from a stack whose Bill of Materials cost is well below $100/kW.
Terraform’s single-minded focus on capex reduction has allowed us to convert sunlight to hydrogen in an unprecedented demo at a cost below $2/kg. If that wasn’t enough, we have a crystal clear plan of steady execution to push that cost below $1/kg in the coming years.

Read more from Founder Casey Handmer on X

Oklo’s Groves Reactor Achieves First Criticality in Under a Year

Oklo Inc., an advanced nuclear technology company, announced that its Groves Isotope Test Reactor reached first criticality after achieving a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at low power. The milestone comes less than a year after groundbreaking and follows U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) authorization through the DOE Reactor Pilot Program (RPP).

The DOE’s RPP created a pathway that allowed engineering, construction, commissioning, and operational preparation to advance alongside DOE’s safety review and authorization. Groves demonstrates that the domestic nuclear industry can once again move from design through construction, authorization, and startup on timelines that are measured in months rather than years when developers, suppliers, and regulators work together on an integrated deployment approach.

Business Transactions

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

Hadrian Raises $1.37B Series D to Build Highly Automated Factories to Accelerate America’s Industrial Renewal

Hadrian, the advanced manufacturing company building highly automated factories for America, announced $1.37 billion in new equity financing to accelerate the buildout of the domestic manufacturing capacity needed to deliver America’s most critical defense, aerospace, and industrial systems.

The financing will support new factories, expanded R&D, and additional production capabilities as Hadrian builds the industrial infrastructure required to deliver complete mission-critical systems at speed and scale. At a time when demand for trusted U.S. manufacturing capacity continues to outpace supply, Hadrian is expanding the AI-powered production network needed to strengthen deterrence, accelerate delivery, and restore America’s ability to build.

Read more at PR Newswire

Valor Atomics Announces a $1B Series B Led By Sequoia

Valar Atomics is excited to announce the closing of a $1 billion Series B financing led by Sequoia Capital. As part of this new partnership, Valar welcomes Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire to Valar’s board of directors. Sequoia was joined in this round by Apandion, Atreides Management, Conviction, Dream Ventures, HOF Capital, Point72, Riot Ventures, Snowpoint Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, and other both new and longtime investors. Finally, in addition to the $1B of equity, Valar is excited to announce the closing of a $200 million credit facility led by Erebor Bank, as administrative agent, and J.P. Morgan, alongside Crescent Cove and Hercules Capital.

The preliminary stage of Valar’s mission has been a success. Ward 250’s operability has been proven. More importantly, the speed and efficiency of a vertically integrated, hardware focused approach stands for all to see. So, what does the new Series B financing mean for Valar? It allows us to make the next mission critical evolution: Valar will transition from demonstrating the operability of an integrated reactor system to producing fleets of them en masse. This has been Valar’s mission since its inception. A project can build one reactor, but a fleet requires manufacturing. This series B financing is the fuel for this mission. It will allow us to fully execute a vertically integrated, hardware first approach; one that encompasses everything from reactor deployment and long-term operations to fuel production. Valar will not rely on outside suppliers for the fuel needed to deploy and operate. We will construct it ourselves in labs placed alongside the very reactors that same fuel will run. These reactors will bring unprecedented energy abundance that matches the scale of their production.

Mariana Minerals Raises $310 Million Series B Led by Khosla Ventures to Accelerate Critical Minerals Production

Mariana Minerals, a software-first, vertically integrated critical minerals company, today announced it has raised $310 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with continued support from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and new participation from Greenoaks, Halo Fund, Pax Ventures, StepStone Group, BHP Ventures, Washington Harbour Partners, Greycroft, General Innovation Capital Partners, Mitsubishi Corporation, In-Q-Tel (IQT), and Earthshot Ventures, with a number of additional strategic capital partners joining the round. This round brings the company’s total parent and project capital raised to date to approximately $400 million.

Mariana engineers, builds, and operates mines and refineries using its proprietary MarianaOS platform, which integrates capital project execution (CapitalProjectOS), refinery operations (PlantOS), and mine management (MineOS) into a single AI and machine learning stack. MarianaOS compresses traditional 5-to-10 year project execution timelines by roughly half and reduces commissioning timelines well below industry benchmarks.

Mariana’s Series B financing unlocks continued buildout of the company’s active project portfolio, including its flagship sites Copper One in Southeastern Utah and Lithium One in East Texas. Copper One, acquired by Mariana in late 2025, restarted mining operations under autonomous orchestration within 4 months and is ramping toward a production target of 50,000 metric tons of refined copper per year. Lithium One, which broke ground in Q4 2025, is the world’s first GWh-scale facility for producing lithium from oil & gas produced water, with commercial production targeted for the first half of 2027.

Read more at PR Newswire

LoopX Innovation Inc., a Physical AI company building machine intelligence for uncontrolled mining environments, announced it has closed a $4.05M Seed financing led by BDC Seed Venture Fund and Orion Industrial Ventures /Business Wire/

Shelfmark Raises $3.5 Million to Automate Manufacturing’s Most Underserved Production Lines and Make them Smarter Every Run

Shelfmark, a Physical AI company providing production intelligence for continuous-flow manufacturing, announced a $3.5 million seed round to bring greater autonomy to one of manufacturing’s most overlooked environments: the fast-moving lines that produce materials on reels, rolls and continuous webs. Led by Armory Square Ventures, with participation from Grand Ventures, Hyde Park Angels, Argon Ventures and Cultivation Capital, the round brings Shelfmark’s total capital raised to approximately $5 million.

At the heart of Shelfmark’s Physical AI engine is a perception system combining in-line industrial cameras, spatial sensing and proprietary deep-learning vision models that inspect and interpret high-speed continuous materials in real time under dynamic plant conditions. Shelfmark reports 99.5% defect-detection accuracy in customer deployments that have halved inspection labor costs and generated returns of up to 7x compared with manual inspection.

Read more at GlobeNewswire

NavVis Raises USD 85M Series D Round to Supply the Data Foundation for Physical AI /Business Wire/. NavVis combines survey-grade reality capture 10x faster than traditional methods with NavVis IVION, a collaborative enterprise cloud platform that turns spatial data into shared, trusted, always-current spatial twins.

Constraint Capital #8 - Situational Awareness of Kimi K3

David Rogers — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:01:10 GMT

We open with the two pivotal July events that roiled equity prices across the AI Buildout Supply Chain: Kimi K3 release and the Situational Awareness LP distress.

The Kimi K3 Frontier

First on July 16th Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, introducing a novel architecture and training recipe that delivers roughly 2.5 times the intelligence per unit of compute compared to its predecessor, Kimi K2 /Kimi/. The release triggered market volatility reminiscent of DeepSeek’s R1 launch in January 2025, which erased nearly $590 billion from Nvidia’s market cap in a single day.

Beyond raw model performance, Moonshot demonstrated Kimi K3 autonomously generating a functional 4 mm² semiconductor design in just 48 hours using the open-source Nangate 45nm cell library /Si2/. Every semiconductor design step from RTL synthesis down through placement, routing, and simulation was executed entirely within open-source flows, marking a significant milestone for AI agents tackling complex, long-horizon engineering tasks. Moonshot similarly showcased automated workflows across GPU compiler development, kernel optimization, digital asset creation, and scientific research.

Wall Street reacted swiftly as shares of EDA giants Cadence and Synopsys each fell approximately 9% in the following trading session as investors digested the implications for proprietary chip-design software /Yahoo! Finance/.

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.

Situational Awareness

Concurrently, Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness LP (SALP) fund entered July with heavy, highly leveraged exposure to the AI infrastructure complex. As the market spooked following the Kimi K3 announcement, SALP’s portfolio value plummeted 67%, triggering severe margin calls amid thinning liquidity across its core positions as first reported July 30th /FT/.

To satisfy those demands, the fund liquidated the bulk of its public equity book to Citadel and unwound its remaining leverage /WSJ/. While year-to-date performance remains positive at roughly +80%, the drawdown brought the fund dangerously close to permanent capital loss, an episode Aschenbrenner candidly characterized as “unacceptable” in a recent letter to partners /BI/. The forced transfer of these concentrated positions onto Citadel’s balance sheet effectively absorbed a major source of sell pressure, coinciding with a partial rebound across the impacted equities.

Aschenbrenner assumed that because a technology is transformative, the capital that builds it will earn its cost.
There is no relationship between those two things. In fact, it’s more likely not to be true.
/Porter Stansberry on X/

The July sequence illustrates how rapidly a perceived shift in model efficiency can reprice both enabling hardware and the leveraged funds positioned around it. But while financial markets reacted aggressively to Kimi K3’s compute efficiency, has any constraint really changed?

Let’s dive in starting from the top of stack...

Smashing Atoms for Engineering Design

David Rogers — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:01:51 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

The relocation of the 1937 Westinghouse Atom Smasher from Forest Hills to Cranberry Township ends a decade of decay for the world’s first industrial Van de Graaff particle accelerator. Early researchers at this site studied fundamental particle behaviors, laying technical groundwork for practical nuclear power, medical X-rays, and radar systems. Saving these physical remnants keeps historical engineering achievements visible to young inventors who are building new hardware. Seeing physical machinery from past technological leaps helps current developers solve the todays complex manufacturing challenges.

Try GeoSourced inside the Exponential Industry Arcade to trace historical discoveries, supply chains, and industrial culture. Can you pin global trade flows and locate significant technological heritage sites worldwide? 👇

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Assembly Line

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

The $1/Hour Robot Is Coming: Industry Leaders from ANYbotics, NEO, Boston Dynamics, & Agility Robotics Explain What’s Next

Almost $1 Billion Later, the US Still Can’t Make a Medical Glove

Establishing domestic nitrile glove production requires rebuilding a dead chemical process from the ground up. Workers must synthesize nitrile butadiene rubber by heating and cooling butadiene and acrylonitrile inside massive specialized reactors to strip out impurities. America abandoned this complex polymer refining thirty years ago. Restarting the industry means constructing multi-story chemical plants with five-hundred-thousand-dollar pressure vessels before a single glove rolls off an assembly line. Because domestic plants lack these facilities, local factories buy foreign raw latex from China, South Korea, and Italy to stay open.

Read more at Bloomberg

Flashback to July 2023, “Why America’s Largest Tool Company Couldn’t Make a Wrench in America“ /WSJ/

Applied Intuition: A Billion Intelligent Machines

The simplest way to understand Applied Intuition is that it builds the brains for machines, and the tools other companies use to build those brains. If a manufacturer wants its tractor, truck, or mining vehicle to drive itself, it can buy the intelligence from Applied Intuition or use its platform to develop its own.

The discussion centers on why the most important companies of the next 25 years will all be physical AI companies, Dana, their new agentic platform for developing and deploying these systems, and how the company raised a billion dollars without spending any of it.

We led Standard Bots’ $200 million Series C because we believe it’s the company built to reinvent the robot arm for physical AI and to bring the industry back to America.
In this public thesis we will dive into:
The birth of the robot
A typical robot arm’s hardware and software architecture
The technical limitations that hold back today’s arms
How Standard Bots is reinventing the arm from first principles

New Product Introduction

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

Agentic Engineering Harness: Arche Smith

Design for Manufacturability is what really matters in the end, so Arche integrated hundreds of real catalog STEP parts directly into its Smith’s model reasoning. Design with real parts!

Applied Electrodynamics’ WaveSight Brings Radio Frequencies into Human Perception

What would the world look like if we could see beyond visible light, across the entire electromagnetic spectrum?

Read more from Founder & CEO Bilgehan Avser on X

Westinghouse Electric Company, which is owned jointly by Cameco and Brookfield Renewable Partners, has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 /Cameco/. Nth Cycle and Kensington proposed business combination to build U.S. domestic critical metals and rare earths capacity /SEC/

Business Transactions

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

🇺🇸☢️ Commonwealth Fusion Systems Raises Another $1 Billion

This capital raise is the single largest funding round among fusion energy companies worldwide since CFS announced its $1.8 billion Series B round in 2021. With this capital, and the $863 million the company raised last year, CFS has now raised a total of $4 billion. This $4 billion represents about 30 percent of the total capital raised by the fusion industry to-date, reinforcing CFS’ position as the world’s largest and leading fusion company.

CFS will use the funds raised to further accelerate its progress to commercialization. In parallel to completing the assembly of its SPARC fusion demonstration machine, CFS continues to move forward with development of the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant, called ARC, at the company’s Fall Line Fusion Power Station in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇺🇸🔋 Antora Closes $550 Million in Series C Funding to Meet Surging Energy Demand and Reindustrialize America /Business Wire/. The announcement comes on the heels of the company’s deployment of one of the largest battery storage projects in the world, a 5 gigawatt-hour system in South Dakota that advanced from initial construction to delivering energy in under 12 months. Antora is now scaling that proven approach, with a growing pipeline of signed agreements with hyperscalers and industrial leaders.
🇺🇸☢️ Antares Raises $470M Series C to Deploy Nuclear Microreactors for Critical Missions /Business Wire/ comes weeks after Antares took its Mark-0 reactor critical at Idaho National Laboratory. It was the first privately developed non-light-water reactor to achieve criticality in the United States in more than four decades.
🇬🇧☢️ Nuclear Turbines raises £15M for compact reactors it says could undercut fossil fuels /TNW/. The technical idea is a substitution. Nuclear Turbines replaces the steam turbine systems at the heart of a conventional plant with high-temperature turbine technology borrowed from jet engines and gas-fired power stations.

🇺🇸🛰️ K2 Space Raises $500M Series D at $6.8B Valuation to Scale Large, High-Power Satellites

K2 Space, the leading manufacturer of big, high-power satellites, announced a $500 million Series D funding round at a $6.8 billion valuation. Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ led the round, with participation from CapitalG, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, ARK Invest, T. Rowe Price Associates, and other existing investors.

“In addition to expanding our factory footprint and growing our accomplished workforce, we’ll also be scaling up the satellite itself,” said Neel Kunjur, K2 Space Co-Founder and CTO. “We’ll be introducing our 100kW Giga-class satellite in the second half of 2028, which will be the foundational platform for deploying massive amounts of compute on orbit.” In addition to building and deploying the Giga satellite, K2 will focus on delivering large constellation orders on schedule for its customers’ ambitious programs over the next 24 to 48 months. K2 Space’s next mission, Trinity, will launch multiple satellites in Q2 2027.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇺🇸💿📐🧠 ChipAgents Expands Series A Funding to $134 Million as Demand Grows for Agentic AI in Semiconductor Design

ChipAgents, the category leader in agentic AI platforms for semiconductor design, announced an additional $60 million in Series A2 financing, bringing the expanded round to $134 million just six months after its initial Series A close. The financing reflects continued investor confidence in the company’s commercial momentum, with new investor B Capital joining Bessemer Venture Partners, Micron, MediaTek, Ericsson, ScOp, and other existing investors.

The funding will support ChipAgents’ next phase of expansion as the company scales customer deployments, grows its engineering and go-to-market teams, and accelerates development of its AI-native semiconductor design platform. Since its founding in 2024, the company has raised more than $134 million.

Read more at Business Wire

💿📐🧠🤝 Synopsys Advances Agentic AI Chip Design with AMD and Microsoft /PR Newswire/. This milestone builds on the existing collaboration and previously announced agentic specification to RTL workflow, marking the first EDA applications available for evaluation on Microsoft Discovery. Customers can request evaluation access through Synopsys. AMD is actively evaluating the application of autonomous workflows to accelerate the development of their next-generation products.
💿📐🧠 Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence /arXiv and HuggingFace/. The RTL code is available on GitHub.

🇺🇸📐🧠 Engineering AI startup, P-1 AI, Announces Its Series A Financing Led by NEA, Adding Jeff Immelt to the Company’s Board

P-1 AI, Inc., the company building Archie, an AI mechanical and electrical engineer for industrial teams, announced the initial closing of its Series A financing round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The Series A, on the heels of the company’s $23 million seed round led by Radical Ventures in 2025, reflects strong product execution and commercial traction. “Interest in Archie from major industrial firms—employers of most of the world’s engineers—has been extraordinary and emphasizes the need to scale our product and deployment teams,” said Paul Eremenko, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “This capital will enable us to grow the team and 10X the compute for training custom models to meet customer needs.”

P-1 AI built Archie to maximize anthropomorphism so that it fits seamlessly into existing engineering teams and workflows. Archie today is at the level of a junior mechanical and electrical engineer, with quantitative intuition over the product design space and the ability to use complex engineering tools—the same tools his human teammates use. “Paul’s approach is distinctive: bringing advanced AI capability into the workflow of engineering and industrial teams in an engineer-native form factor. That matters,” said Immelt. “By fitting naturally into how engineers collaborate, P-1 AI can shorten cycle times, improve competitiveness, and deliver measurable results in mission-critical environments.”

Read more at GlobeNewswire

🇬🇧🤖🧠 Kinematic Trees raises £585,000 to scale robotics intelligence using principles of brain evolution /Kinematic Tree/. Funds will be used to build Kinematic Trees’ commercial, robotics and software engineering teams across London, Nottinghamshire and Sheffield in the UK, in line with product development, international deployment and major advancements in the robotics industry.

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Retrace the Forks for New Industrial Breakthroughs

David Rogers — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:02:31 GMT

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

You can literally retrace all the forks in the tech tree and just look for “Here’s what we knew at the time”, and then you can insert what YOU know NOW, in 2026, and see if the other forks that weren’t pursued would bear fruit today.
You have to remember we arrived at many of those things by making decisions with incomplete information.
/Object Zero on X/

That’s the core thesis of Exponential Industry. By systematically retracing historical tech-tree forks and pairing them with modern materials, advanced manufacturing, and AI that augments the tacit knowledge of the original researchers and their networks, we can bypass the incremental dead-ends of today’s dominant technologies. History is littered with good ideas abandoned under incomplete information; the work of Exponential Industry is to surface the entrepreneurs and capital that can turn those abandoned industrial technology detours into high-probability exponential breakthroughs.

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Assembly Line

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

You can now 3D-print the core of an MRI scanner.

A machine that hospitals pay $1.1 million to $3.4 million for has been broken open. The OSI² ONE and its educational siblings deliver real images of heads and limbs for a fraction of the cost, using a permanent-magnet Halbach array, 3D-printed structures, and fully open designs.

This is not a toy or a simulation. Working systems already produce in-vivo images in Leiden, Utrecht, Berlin, and Uganda.

The magnet alone has 396 carefully oriented neodymium cubes in a cylindrical Halbach array with costs totaling about $1,370. A complete scanner lands between $28,500 and $68,000 depending on the console and coils you choose.

Why NVIDIA & BlackRock Are Betting $2.3B on This Startup

A visit to PsiQuantum’s quantum computer factory in Milpitas, California - the last production chip fab to close its doors in Silicon Valley, now ground zero for the world’s largest quantum computer.

BBC Tech Now’s Adrienne Murray has rare access to Microsoft’s Quantum Lab in Denmark to find out how the chips are being developed /YouTube/

Performant robotic manipulation with real-world reinforcement learning

✍️ Authors: Kun Lei, Huanyu Li, Dongjie Yu, et. al

Real-world robotic manipulation in homes and factories demands reliability, efficiency, and robustness that approach or surpass skilled human operators. We present a real-world reinforcement learning (RL) framework, RL-100, for achieving complete task success under a predefined evaluation protocol built on diffusion visuomotor policies. RL-100 unifies imitation and RL under a single clipped proximal policy optimization surrogate objective applied in the denoising process, yielding conservative, stable improvements across offline and online stages. To meet deployment latency, a lightweight consistency distillation compresses multistep diffusion into a one-step controller for high-frequency control. The framework is task, embodiment, and representation agnostic and supports both single-action and action-chunking control. We evaluated RL-100 on eight diverse real-robot tasks, from pushing and bowling to pouring, cloth folding, unscrewing, multistage juicing, and long-horizon box folding. Under our predefined protocol, RL-100 achieved 100% success in the evaluated trials (1000 of 1000 episodes), including up to 250 of 250 consecutive trials on one task. It matched or surpassed expert teleoperators in time to completion. Without retraining, a single policy attained ∼90% zero-shot success under environmental and dynamics shifts, adapted in a few-shot regime to substantial task variations (86.7%), and remained robust to human perturbations (about 96%). Our juicing robot served customers continuously for about 7 hours without failure when deployed zero-shot in a shopping mall. These results suggest a potential path to deployable robot learning by starting from human priors, aligning training objectives with human-grounded metrics, and reliably extending performance beyond human demonstrations.

The Hidden American Manufacturing Advantage

WattFactory

The Variety Trap

The West’s manufacturing strategy is changing…

2 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Glen Turley

New Product Introduction

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

CuspAI Launches ‘AI Materials Foundry’ a Global Network to Accelerate Breakthrough Discoveries

Software-led materials discovery requires four things: high quality training data at scale, to make AI predictions reliable; compute powerful enough to screen at molecular resolution across billions of candidates; synthesis infrastructure to move from digital design to physical reality; and domain expertise to interpret what the machine finds and know what to do with it.

CuspAI’s AI Materials Foundry assembles all four, for the first time, providing the production infrastructure for industrial materials discovery. Rather than relying on the physical constraints of a single, isolated laboratory, CuspAI’s ecosystem approach creates a compounding intelligence loop: breakthroughs achieved within the network have potential to accelerate discovery timelines across the entire global value chain.

Read more at Business Wire

By uniting advanced semiconductor packaging materials with high-efficiency data center thermal management, Solstice Advanced Materials and Element Solutions seek to create a specialized end-to-end platform capturing high-margin demand across every critical hardware layer of the expanding AI supply chain /Solstice/.

RTX’s Pratt & Whitney Valox™ 1500 Engine Completes Key Design Milestone

Pratt & Whitney, an RTX business, has successfully completed a key design milestone for its Pratt & Whitney Valox™ 1500 engine, a new powerplant intended for semi-autonomous collaborative platforms. A comprehensive digital assessment confirms the design is on track to deliver an optimal mix of performance, affordability, and speed to market.

Leveraging proactive investments in digital engineering, Pratt & Whitney has significantly de-risked the development timeline and is now focused on maturing the design for follow-on ground testing. In late 2025, Pratt & Whitney received a contract award valued at more than $10 million from the U.S. Air Force to advance the engine design.

Business Transactions

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

TruArc Partners Closes on $1.2 Billion for TruArc Partners Fund V /Business Wire/ focused on middle-market investments in specialty manufacturing and business services

ATOMS is announcing a $1.7B equity investment with lead investor a16z

With the ATOMS launch a few months ago, there was a huge amount of interest after many years of ninja level stealth. My vision letter outlined Physical AI in industry, but it cruised at a fairly high altitude. I figured this moment would be a good time to connect the dots between our bold vision for the future with the actual business we are building /Travis Kalanick on X/, and bring to life what A16Z and other great investors see in it.

The impetus for this transformation is Industrial AI - Systems of software, sensors, robotics and AI used to automate the operations of entire industrial sectors. Industrial AI is getting ready to power the next Industrial Revolution. Tesla calls it Amazing Abundance. We call it the Age of Atoms.

Sila Secures $300 Million in Private Funding to Ramp Gigascale Anode Manufacturing and Strengthen America’s Technology Sovereignty

Sila, an advanced battery technology company, today announced it has secured $300 million in a private equity round led by Atreides Management, and Sutter Hill Ventures. The round is joined by 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc, and other existing and new investors. The raise will accelerate U.S. production of Sila’s silicon-carbon (Si/C) anode technology, Titan Silicon® and support a planned Phase 2 expansion at Sila’s plant in Moses Lake, Washington.

Sila’s team pioneered the modern silicon-carbon (Si/C) anode, a breakthrough technology that delivers 20-40% higher energy density than traditional graphite, enabling batteries that are smaller, lighter, and capable of ultra-fast charging. By pairing American intellectual property with gigascale manufacturing in the United States, Sila is building the blueprint for supply chain security of critical technology.

Read more at Business Wire

Sofab Inks Secures $6 Million Seed Round to Break the Reliability Barrier for Perovskite Solar /PR Newswire/

Arrakis Comes out of Stealth With $38M to Help Industrial Enterprises Compete in the AI Era

Arrakis, the AI deployment company helping industrial companies install AI agents for mission-critical operations, announced a $30 million Series A led by Blossom Capital, with participation from existing investor Accel, which also led the company’s $7.5 million seed round.

Arrakis combines elite forward-deployed AI engineers with a model-agnostic enterprise AI platform and applied AI research tuned to industrial operations, letting companies leverage their data to train, deploy, and scale custom AI agents in weeks, not quarters. The result is an AI transformation executed at warp speed, using the right model for the right task, and giving companies full control over performance, resilience and cost. Arrakis operates to the strictest data and security standards: customer data and IP remain theirs, and the company never uses them for third-party model training. Rather than replacing existing technology stacks, Arrakis deploys AI agents into existing systems, improving operational throughput without multi-year migrations. The company ties a significant proportion of its fees directly to customer outcomes, aligning its commercial model with the value delivered.

Read more at Business Wire

1872 Launches Autonomous Steel Fabrication Factory Model in Cincinnati and Closes $15 million Seed Funding Round

1872, a startup focused on AI-native manufacturing, announced its opening, introducing what will be an automated steel fabrication factory model in Cincinnati’s Camp Washington neighborhood. The company, founded by three former SpaceX engineers, is propelled by a $15 million seed funding round, one of the largest in Ohio history, made through private funds advised by The O.H.I.O. Fund, a private fund investment adviser seeking to generate strong returns for investors while creating economic growth in Ohio.

1872 introduces a unique AI-based factory automation solution to an industry that has struggled to innovate and has been unable to keep up with rising demand for steel products in the modular construction and infrastructure markets. The company’s proprietary system integrates AI software that understands the physical world with advanced automation from companies such as Ohio-based Path Robotics. This technology automates heavy fabrication tasks that have traditionally relied on manual labor, now in critically short supply. Early automations are in place at 1872, with the company expecting to achieve its full autonomous vision in 2027.

Read more at Business Wire

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[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…

2 months 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:

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(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.
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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…

3 months 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.

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.

Read more at Bloomberg

🇨🇳🚙🏭 Inside NIO’s AI factory, where cars build themselves /The Korea Herald/. In this 100 percent automated process, where 941 robots orchestrate every movement, NIO EVs roll off the line at a rate of “one car every minute.” To boost production efficiency, NIO adopts the “Island production method,” replacing conveyor belts with a fleet of autonomous rovers that transport vehicles and components between workstations.
🇩🇪 SAP Gives AI Product Oversight to CEO and COO in Reshuffle /Bloomberg/

🦾 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.

New Product Introduction

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

🇺🇸☢️ 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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This weeks digest:

Exponential Industry

Introducing Exponential Industry Scholar

Key Capabilities of Scholar

Availability & Pricing

Half a Billion Manufacturing Technology Orders

Shop Talk

Assembly Line

📸🧠 How to Make a Robot Better at Its Job? Give It Eyes.

🦾🧠🎛️ Agentic Robotics Solves an Industrial Production Problem

🦿 Unitree G1 Actuator Teardown: How This Humanoid Robot Moves

Hidden Factory

New Product Introduction

🦾 Universal Robots Unveils Gen 7, a new platform for industrial automation and physical AI deployment

🛰️🖨️3️⃣ Orbital Matter Tests 3D-printing Concept for Building Large-scale Space Structures

Business Transactions

🇯🇵 CADDi Raises $114 Million in Series D at $1.2 Billion Valuation

🇺🇸 Samson Sky Secures $80 Million Investment for Production of the Switchblade Flying Car

🇺🇸 Vecna Robotics Raises $31 Million to Meet Demand for Flexible Dock-to-Dock Automation

Constraint Capital #9 - Land, Power, Shell

When AI Models Build Their Own Supercomputers

Shop Talk

Assembly Line

The Hidden Pillar of Robotics Research is Deployment

🎣🍣 The Machine That Could End Japan’s Sushi Empire

⛏️ DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation Announces $73 Million to Advance Domestic Mining Technology

Hidden Factory

New Product Introduction

🏭🦾🤖🦿 XPENG Robotics Production Line Officially Launched

Unboxed Automotive Assembly at Scale

Business Transactions

🇺🇸🚇 The Boring Company Series D Funding Round Announcement

🇺🇸🦾 Maven Robotics Raises $100M Series A for the World’s First General-Purpose Robotics System for Industrial Work

🇺🇸🦾🖥️ Antioch Raises $32M to Bring Software Speed to Physical AI Development

🇬🇧⚙️ CloudNC raises $20M from Nimble Ventures and Lockheed Martin’s fund as its AI reaches 1,000+ machine shops

The Battery Gold Mine

Shop Talk

Assembly Line

A Tour of the Slate factory

Inside One Company’s Bid to Loosen China’s Rare-Earth Grip

How Australia is turning abandoned gold mines into giant batteries

SpaceX Lays Groundwork For Turbine-Blade Factory to Solve Data Center Power Crunch

Hidden Factory

New Product Introduction

Z1T: Sparse Transformer‑Like Models for Probabilistic Hardware

Helogen Announces October Missions to Advance Commercial Manufacturing in Orbit and Establish First Regulatory Pathway

Business Transactions

Reframe Systems Raises $40M to Industrialize Homebuilding and Expand Microfactory Network

Atira Raises $17.5 Million To Build AI Orchestration Platform For Industrial Sales Engineering

Caterpillar and FieldAI Advance AI-Powered Industrial Innovation

Actuators, Agents, and Orbit

Shop Talk

Assembly Line

Deploying Megapack At Scale

Unitree G1 Knee Actuator Teardown

Zetta ζ: An Efficient Closed-Loop Embodied Harness for Self-Evolving Physical Intelligence

New Product Introduction

Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

GeoField — verified generative engineering for shelf brackets

Hidden Factory

Business Transactions

Starcloud Raises $250 Million at $2.3 Billion Valuation to Scale AI with Orbital Data Centers

Voya Energy Unveils Metal Fuels Energy System, Closes $35 Million Series A

Motion raises $2M to bring humanoid robots to European factories

Supersonic Aviation AI Buildout

Shop Talk

Assembly Line

What’s Wrong With Germany?

AI Buildout Stretches Deeper Into Manufacturing Supply Chain

Unitree Sees Robots Reaching ‘Mass Market’ Within Decade

The HydroGym reinforcement learning platform for fluid dynamics

Hidden Factory

New Product Introduction

Introducing GEN-1.5 by Generalist AI

Heart Aerospace - X1 First Flight

Business Transactions

Gravis Robotics Raises $200M for Construction Autonomy

Mafix Raises $5.4 Million to Commercialize Silicon Fertilizers that Remove CO2

Rivian Spins out Micromobility Business into New Startup—Also, Inc.

We Work at Fords

Shop Talk

🦾 Universal Robots Unveils Gen 7, a new platform for industrial automation and physical AI deployment