Automation Leading with Consumer Markets

This week: Founder Mode for Industrial AI (paid), metal powder sintering, challenge the technology-first mentality, smart order execution, engineering AI ambition-execution gap, printegrated circuits

Jul 06, 2025

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Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

While enterprise AI adoption grabs headlines with billion-dollar investments and productivity promises, the real automation breakthrough is happening in our streets, spas, and backyards. Consumer markets are becoming the launching ground for AI-powered automation as a service, and for good reason.

At DTW Fanuc changed their large banner from a factory robot to a commercial kitchen cobot, Aescape has launched a robomasseuse services, and Waymo is operating robotaxis in three cities 24/7. — Automation is taking on a Consumer-first Go-to-Market approach as I experienced first-hand this past week

Unlike manufacturing floors where precision is paramount and errors costly, consumer applications offer something crucial for emerging AI systems: forgiveness. When your robotaxi takes a slightly longer route or your AI smart grill suggests questionable instructions, the stakes are manageable. This tolerance for imperfection creates the perfect training environment for AI systems to learn, adapt, and improve at a scale beyond what’s possible within industrial environments.

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

🪙 T-Sintermint Line: The New Frontier in Minting Production

Born from the collaboration between ABC Bullion and the Italian company Coinatec, this new process is set to radically transform the minting industry, thanks to a completely new approach based on metal powder sintering.

🧠🎛️ Retrocausal's Zeeshan Zia on AI as Manufacturing Worker Copilots

"If the operator is about to put the tip of the soldering iron at the wrong place, the system offers an alert right there and then, helping them reduce that scrap rate from 30% down to 3%," says Zeeshan Zia, CEO & Co-founder of Retrocausal, describing a process his team helped a medical device manufacturing client improve. His story showcases how enterprise partners want AI that understands human activities, not just fancy interfaces.

Can AI be your new 3D printing guru? Sorta. /Tom's Hardware/
Novelis' IT BRM of Manufacturing & Operations Pushpal Jagdale's approach to manufacturing transformation challenges the technology-first mentality that derails most digitization efforts. /Manufacturing Intelligence/
Chief Technology Officer of HighByte, Aron Semle, dives into the concept of Industrial DataOps /The Manufacturing Executive/

📋 How we Built a Smart Manufacturing Order Execution Panel with FlowFuse

✍️ Author: Sumit Shinde

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a solution architect about how the lack of integration between the shop floor and business systems often leads to missed opportunities and financial losses. He also mentioned that while many manufacturers want to bridge this gap, they often hesitate — mostly due to concerns about complexity of integration or fear of disrupting existing operations.

🧠📐 Reimaging CAD/CAM with Toolpath AI

Editor-in-Chief Steve Plumb sits down with Al Whatmough, CEO of Toolpath Labs, to explore the potential of AI in manufacturing. Drawing from his experiences as a machinist, high school teacher and former Autodesk executive, Whatmough shares his thoughts on bridging the gap between design and production, creating a more connected, efficient manufacturing ecosystem through intelligent automation.

How AI can help Startups Bring Much-Needed Breakthroughs to Engineering Software /BMW i Ventures/
The Engineering AI Ambition-Execution Gap: What Our New Global Survey Reveals /Simscale/
How Geomiq is rewiring custom manufacturing for speed and scale /Tech.eu/
AI and Physics-Based Modeling: A Force Multiplier for the Future of Hardware /Katie Vasquez/

📶 How Cracked Engineers Recreated World-Class RF Research in 30 Hours on Social Media

Vik's Newsletter

How Cracked Engineers Recreated World-Class RF Research in 30 Hours on Social Media

Welcome to the weekday free-edition of this newsletter that is a small idea, an actionable tip, or a short insight that takes less than 5 minutes to read. If you’re new, start here!Upgrade to a paid subscription for all the benefits! Stay ahead in semiconductors.📈…

13 days ago · 35 likes · 4 comments · Vikram Sekar

New Product Introduction

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

🪑 How a chair is redefining how we approach design and innovation

✍️ Author: Maryann Dennehy

Ta.Tamu is the result of a four-year dialogue between Patrick Jouin’s intuitive design approach and Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Designers and engineers redefined how a chair could be reconsidered by challenging traditional design methods, pushing formal and structural limits, and inventing new ways to minimize material.

🦾 Amazon launches a new AI foundation model to power its robotic fleet and deploys its 1 millionth robot

We're also introducing a new generative AI foundation model we've designed to make our entire fleet of robots smarter and more efficient. Called DeepFleet, this AI technology will coordinate the movement of robots across our fulfillment network, improving the travel time of our robotic fleet by 10% and enabling us to deliver packages to customers faster and at lower costs.

🖨️💿 “Printegrated Circuits” Bring the Smarts to 3D Printing

✍️ Author: Alfred Poor

3D-printed objects have one major limitation; it’s not easy to make them “smart.” Adding digital processors and other components remains a challenge, as does adding conductive traces to, for example, detect when someone is touching the object. This is particularly true for the average hobbyist or even university lab—printed electronics technology exists that uses flexible silver inks and semiconductor materials, but the materials and machinery are way out of reach for such groups.

Oliver Child, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bristol, in England, has been working on the problem. After a stint in the semiconductor business, he has found a way to merge his digital-electronics experience with his love of 3D printing. He has created a process that allows someone to embed a physical microcontroller—such as an Arduino—in a 3D printed object. He calls the result “printegrated circuits.”

Business Transactions

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

Uber-Backed Moove Raising $1.2 Billion in Debt for Expansion to help it finance a rollout of an autonomous-driving fleet with Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and expand in the US, people familiar with the matter said. /Bloomberg/

🧠🦾 Genesis AI Emerges From Stealth with $105M to Build Universal Robotics Foundation Model and Horizontal Platform for General-Purpose Physical AI

Genesis AI, a global physical AI research lab and full-stack robotics company, emerged from stealth with a mission to unlock unlimited physical labor. The company is building a universal robotics foundation model (RFM) and a horizontal robotics platform, raising $105 million co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Bpifrance, HSG, and visionary leaders Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel.

Genesis brings a data-centric, full-stack approach to physical AI – building a scalable and universal data engine that unifies high-fidelity physics simulation, multimodal generative modeling, and large-scale real robot data collection. Its simulation stack, developed entirely in-house, will generate rich synthetic data at scale, together with a more efficient and scalable real-world data collection system. This dual engine of synthetic and real data bridges historically siloed domains to collect the largest-scale, most diverse, and highest quality data to train RFMs.

⚡ British robotics company AssetCool raises €11.5 million to scale rapid robotic grid upgrade technology globally

Leeds-based AssetCool, a DeepTech company innovating advanced robotics and coatings for power lines, raised an €11.5 million Series A funding round to scale its proprietary robotics technology globally. The oversubscribed round was led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP), with participation from Extantia Capital, Taronga Group, and existing investor Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, managed by Mercia Ventures. This new funding builds on the support of additional investors including Kero Development Partners and Northern Gritstone.

Founded in 2016, AssetCool develops advanced robotics and functional coatings for energy infrastructure. Its core platform reportedly increases the capacity and efficiency of power lines through direct application of thermal-management nanomaterials.

🚮 Woodchuck Secures $3.75 Million Seed Funding to Revolutionize Waste-to-Energy for Construction, Manufacturing & Bioenergy Industries

Woodchuck, a climate impact startup transforming waste into energy with advanced AI, announced it has raised $3.75 million in seed funding led by an investor syndicate headed by Mason Fink. Additional partners include NorthStar Clean Energy, a CMS Energy company, Alloy Partners (formerly High Alpha Innovation) and Beckett Industries.

The U.S. construction industry generates over 41 million tons of wood waste annually, the majority of which ends up in landfills. This represents not only a significant environmental challenge but also a missed opportunity to repurpose valuable resources. Woodchuck’s platform leverages cutting-edge AI to identify, sort, and process wood waste, diverting it from landfills and converting it into high-quality biomass. By doing so, the company provides a sustainable energy solution while helping construction and manufacturing companies reduce waste-hauling costs by up to 30%.