Decentralized Energy and Production Networks

This week: 321 de minimis countermeasures (paid), decentralized energy grid plan, building general-purpose humanoid robots, time series databases, Caltech labs, rare earth free EVs, and open VLAs.

Jun 08, 2025

∙ Paid

Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

This week revealed something fascinating about our community. While our readership closely tracks America's manufacturing powerhouse states, with California, Texas, and Michigan leading both our subscriber base and national manufacturing employment, there's another audience that has always been a core focus: EI shows a pronounced concentration in the innovation and capital epicenters of California (28% of subscribers), New York (10%), and Massachusetts (7%).

Manufacturing remains geographically diverse across the U.S., with major hubs on both coasts and in the interior. In terms of absolute numbers, California leads the nation, with 1.22 million manufacturing jobs. Texas follows with 970,600 jobs, while Ohio and Michigan maintain their traditional industrial strength with 687,500 and 597,600 jobs, respectively. — Exponential Industry readership mimics the concentration manufacturing jobs by US States.

As we explore this week's developments in manufacturing AI and supply chain innovation, remember that the insights you're gaining are shaping production lines from coast to coast. My dream is to visit facilities in all 50 states, and it would be incredible if you could take 30 seconds and share Exponential Industry with a friend or colleague in Alaska (ConocoPhillips, Jacobs), North Dakota (Continental, Hess, EOG), Wyoming Ultra Resources (Ultra Resources, Exxon), Arkansas (Walmart), West Virginia (Dominion, Chemours, Dow), and Rhode Island (Lockheed, RTX, Textron, Teknor Apex) so we can build a network that spans all of the USA.

Share Exponential Industry

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

⚡☀️🔋🌬️ The Birth of The Decentralized Energy Grid

✍️ Authors: Cory Anderson, Kyle Harrison, Alexander Stratmoen, Aryan Afrouzi, Alice Ao

Tracing the evolution of the US electric grid from its centralized, monopolistic origins to today’s fragmented and overstretched system. The rise of distributed energy resources, electrification, and extreme weather have pushed the grid to a breaking point. In this deep dive, we unpack how software, storage, market reforms, and smarter infrastructure could enable a more decentralized, resilient “energy internet” for the 21st century.

🦾🤖🦿 Figure AI CEO on Building General Purpose Robots

Here's 60 minutes of Figure humanoid robot solving logistics, powered by their Helix neural network /Brett Adcock on X/
Tesla Loses Leader of Optimus Robotics Project /WSJ/
Agility Robotics CEO & Digit Show us Robots at Work /Bloomberg on YouTube/
Amazon Prepares to Test Humanoid Robots for Delivering Packages /The Information/ But still learning to walk /TFN/
How 1X Technologies’ Robots Are Learning to Lend a Helping Hand /NVIDIA Blog/
Humanoid Robots 2025-2035: Technologies, Markets and Opportunities /IDTechEx/

⏱️ InfluxDB v3: Why Rust Beat Go for Time Series Database

Customers typically use InfluxDB alongside Grafana and other tools for logs and tracing. In the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) sector, InfluxDB is used in deployments related to satellites, rockets, energy, mining, oil and gas. The platform serves between 3,000 to 4,000 customers, with a significantly larger base of users overall, Dix said.

The shift to Rust addressed three major objectives: support for infinite cardinality, enabling SQL querying and decoupling compute from storage to leverage lower-cost object stores. Development began in 2020 and took approximately four and a half years.

The Secret Lab Creating AI Drone Technology | Caltech Lab Tour

Newlab Detroit: The Entrepreneurs Moving Mobility Forward /Munro Live on YouTube/
This Marine Vet now quietly makes millions with rubber and polymer /Walker Diebel on YouTube/

New Product Introduction

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

🪙 First Sensor to Measure Heat in EV Motors Can Reduce Use of Rare Earths to Protect Magnets

Continental has developed a new sensor technology that measures the temperature inside permanently excited synchronous motors in electric vehicles (EVs) directly on the rotor for the first time. The e-Motor Rotor Temperature Sensor (eRTS) delivers significantly more precise measurement results than the current software-based temperature simulation – with a tolerance range reduced from 15°C to just 3°C. This enables vehicle manufacturers to reduce the amount of rare earth elements used to increase the magnets’ heat resistance and to improve potential motor performance, which also means greater sustainability. The eRTS is one of several sensor technologies for EVs developed by the E-Mobility Sensors (EMS) product center.

SmolVLA: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model trained on Lerobot Community Data

SmolVLA, a compact (450M), open-source Vision-Language-Action model for robotics that runs on consumer hardware. Pretrained only on compatibly licensed, open-source community-shared datasets under the lerobot tag. Supports asynchronous inference for 30% faster response and 2× task throughput.

🌙 Japan's ispace fails again: Resilience lander crashes on moon

✍️ Author: Kantaro Komiya

ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the lunar surface during its touchdown attempt on Friday, marking another failure two years after an unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join U.S. firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace in making successful commercial moon landings amid a global race that includes state-run lunar missions from China and India.

Resilience, ispace's second lunar lander, had problems measuring its distance to the surface and could not slow its descent fast enough, the company said, adding it has not been able to communicate with Resilience after a likely hard landing.

Read more at Reuters and Nikkei Asia

Voyager Announces Launch of Initial Public Offering /Business Wire/
Impulse Space Secures $300 Million Series C to Accelerate the Future of In-Space Mobility /Business Wire/
How NASA Is 3D Printing Wind Tunnel Tools to Speed Up Space Testing /YouTube/

TradingView chart — Tesla shares tumble as Trump-Musk feud erupts /BBC/

Business Transactions

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

Cybernetix Ventures Raising $100M Fund as Robotics and Physical AI Enters Accelerated Growth Phase /PR Newswire/

🇺🇸 Anduril Raises $1.5 Billion to Rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy

Anduril Industries announced it has secured $1.5 billion of funding for its Series F round to hyperscale defense manufacturing. This funding will enable Anduril to increase hiring, enhance processes, upgrade tooling, increase resiliency in its supply chain, and expand infrastructure. Anduril is also investing in Arsenal, the manufacturing platform for modern warfare. With Arsenal, Anduril’s goal is to manufacture and produce tens of thousands of autonomous weapons systems, addressing the urgent needs of the United States and our allies.

Co-led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, Anduril’s Series F values the company at $14 billion and includes new investors Fidelity Management & Research Company, Counterpoint Global, and Baillie Gifford, as well as significant commitments from existing investors, including Altimeter and Franklin Venture Partners.

🇫🇷 Fabriq Raises €22 Million to Become the Global Standard in Industrial Performance

Founded in 2019 by Octave Lapeyronie and François Déchelette, Fabriq is now deployed across more than 600 industrial sites in 43 countries and reached profitability in 2024. This strategic position enabled the company to secure a €22 million funding round led by Expedition Capital and its long-standing investor, OSS Ventures. The new funding will help accelerate hiring, expand the solution, and develop sales across Europe and North America.

Fabriq enables real-time tracking of performance indicators (accidents, defects, productivity, lead times, etc.), problem identification and resolution, daily meetings, field routines, checklist creation, and more effective team collaboration.

🇩🇪 Manex AI Closes €8 Million Seed Round to Enable Autonomous Factories

Manex AI (formerly Datagon AI), an AI-driven software platform for industrial quality management and process steering, announced a €8M seed round to build the control layer for autonomous manufacturing. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and BlueYard Capital, with participation from Capmont Technology and the CDTM Venture Fund. Manex AI is the first provider of manufacturing optimization agents, enabling autonomous factories.

Manex AI's first product platform, Qualitatio, integrates into every aspect of the manufacturing process, from order to production to getting the product in the customer's hands. This complete view of product data from start to finish enables Manex AI to help companies optimize for efficiency, quality, and operational excellence across manufacturing operations.