Factory Sounds Slosh No More

This week: Sound waves to distribute light for no-downtime drilling, anti-sloshing paint container filling, pseudo-bonds in composite materials, instant volumetric imaging, 3D AI foundation model.

Mar 09, 2025

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Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

The manufacturing events calendar is just beginning for 2025, with several major conferences and exhibitions that promise to showcase the latest innovations in industrial technology, data analytics, and AI applications for smart factories. I particularly look forward to NVIDIA GTC (March 17–20) for its cutting-edge AI and digital twin developments, Hannover Messe (March 31 – April 4) for comprehensive industrial transformation solutions, and AVEVA World (April 7-10) for its industrial software ecosystem insights. If you plan to attend any of these premier events, now is the perfect time to connect with me by responding to this email or messaging me in the Substack app.

We highlighted SiTime just a few weeks ago; now, Apple’s announced use of SiTime in iPhone 16e has fueled a stock rally. If Exponential Industry has impacted your product strategy or investment decisions or made you stop and think deeper about industrial technology, consider supporting the publication with a paid subscription ⏬

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

💿 Starlink Kit Production Factory in Texas, Producing 15k Starlink kits per day, Nearly 5.5M Annually

Using sound waves to distribute light to drill up to 9000 vias per second without optics path adjustments (no downtime) /YouTube/ (shown at :54 in the Starlink video) using Galvo, Acoustic Optical Deflector, and coordinated motion.
- “I think this will be the most efficient and fastest PCB line in the world later year. Less than 2 second cycle time.” /Elon Musk on X/
The factory in Bastrop, Texas, is set to expand by over 1 million square feet this year /PCMag/ and is the “largest outside of Asia” /Elon Musk on X/

🎨 Anti-sloshing Paint Container Filling Technology

3M and GM partner on first-ever robotic paint repair system on moving assembly line /3M/

🗜️ Inside A Multi-Process Manufacturing Shop Combining CNC, Blacksmithing, and Fire-Breathing Dragons

🧠🔁 The beast is back – the revival of Reinforcement Learning in the industrial sector

A New Way to Engineer Composite Materials

✍️ Author: Rachel Berkowitz

A new study led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) outlines a way to engineer pseudo-bonds in materials. Instead of forming chemical bonds, which is what makes epoxies and other composites so tough, the chains of molecules entangle in a way that is fully reversible. The research is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Traditionally, there are two ways to make polymer materials strong and tough. In the first, adding a setting agent creates a crosslinked network of polymer molecules held together by permanent chemical bonds. In the second, increasing the length of polymer molecule chains causes them to get more and more entangled, so they can’t come apart. The latter, Xu proposed, offers the possibility of a reversible design. She likened the concept to folded proteins that interact without chemical bonds to create sturdy structures in nature, and can later unfold into their constituent strands.

According to Xu, the Berkeley Lab study can readily be extended to other polymers and fillers. Polystyrene is one of the most common polymers and silica is a cheap nanoparticle; nonetheless, Xu hypothesizes that the results will apply to other composites as well. She imagines a future with particles that have other optical or magnetic properties, for example, to create composites for optoelectronic devices. “We can have both strength and toughness, just by modulating how the polymers are distributed,” said Xu.

New Product Introduction

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

🩻 ZEISS Lightfield 4D for instant volumetric high-speed imaging

ZEISS announces the launch of Lightfield 4D, a new microscopy technology based on the light-field principle. As a new imaging mode integrated into the new ZEISS LSM 910 and LSM 990 confocal microscope systems, ZEISS Lightfield 4D redefines the way researchers observe living organisms, especially in the neurosciences, cancer research, developmental biology, and plant sciences. It enables instant volumetric high-speed imaging, allowing researchers to image the dynamic processes of life in complete samples with unprecedented temporal resolution.

The new technology addresses the critical need for 4D imaging – combining volume and time to truly understand biological processes. Traditional optical sectioning techniques that rely on sequential image acquisition to create Z-stack images have long struggled with the limitations of sequential image acquisition, which introduces time delays and compromises the spatiotemporal accuracy of data. ZEISS Lightfield 4D overcomes these challenges by imaging entire 3D data sets at a precise moment in time, eliminating time delays within a captured volume.

Backflip AI unveils 3D AI foundation model

✍️ Author: Srabanti Chakraborty

Backflip AI unveiled a new 3D AI foundation model /Backflip AI on X/ that fundamentally accelerates how manufacturing plants are repaired and improved to prevent costly downtime. The new technology enables anyone to automatically create 3D models of replacement parts from 3D scan data, which can then be quickly manufactured via conventional means like CNC machining or 3D printing.

Backflip’s developments reduce the technical barriers to entry for designers, engineers, and technicians to recreate 3D models of parts that they don’t have CAD files for. The tools also make 3D scanning significantly easier, eliminating a long-standing challenge for the technology and those who use it.

Business Transactions

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

🇺🇸 Zeitview Secures $60M to Advance AI-Powered Inspections of Global Critical Infrastructure

Zeitview, the leader in visual AI for critical infrastructure, announces a capital raise of $60 million led by Climate Investment, with participation from current investors Valor Equity Partners, Union Square Ventures, Upfront Ventures, Euclidean Capital, Energy Transition Ventures, Hearst Ventures and Y Combinator.

“With this capital, Zeitview will accelerate our buildout of Visual AI that is instant, predictive and unlimited,” said Burton, “and increase investment in our Insights software platform to support our customers across their critical infrastructure assets, throughout their lifecycle, anywhere in the world.”

🇺🇸 TDK Ventures Invests in Glimpse, Builders of a Next Generation Battery Quality Management Platform

TDK Corporation (TSE: 6762) announced that subsidiary TDK Ventures, Inc. is investing, through its Fund EX1, in battery quality management company Glimpse’s $10M Series A Round. Glimpse will use this investment to propel scanning throughput and serve new lighthouse customers in the battery and non-battery segments. Glimpse’s mission to drive high-yield battery manufacturing while preventing failures and recalls in battery-powered products aligns perfectly with TDK Ventures’ Fund EX1 mandate to enable safe energy transformation.

Less than a year since launching its X-ray powered quality management solution, Glimpse is proud to include some of the world's leading producers of battery cells and battery-powered products among its customers, including Lucid Motors and NASA. Over the course of this year, Glimpse has drastically improved battery cell CT images’ throughput by a factor of 30 and has set its sights on achieving sub-second scans while maintaining high image quality. While increasing the amount of data available to quality control (QC) teams, Glimpse is also innovating on the way QC teams share and review data. The Glimpse Portal, an end-to-end encrypted web application, allows teams to analyze and share 3D CT scans collaboratively from any standard company-issued laptop. Glimpse has unveiled a free 1000-cell demo to help users understand the power of accessible 3D CT scan data.

🇬🇧 From high school science project to $18.3M: AI-accelerated enzymes are coming for fast fashion’s plastic waste

Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign is now a 30+ strong multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists, and software engineers. The startup will use the new funding to scale up production of its plastic-eating enzymes. This means transferring the biorecycling process from the labs where the team has been developing the enzymes to their first production facility this year, which Nathan says will be able to gobble through 150 tons per year of waste once it’s up and running.
The Series A round is led by the climate-focused fund Extantia Capital, with Day One Ventures, Happiness Capital, Kibo Invest, Lowercarbon Capital, and others also participating alongside Inditex, and a $1 million grant from the U.K. government. Epoch Biodesign’s total capital raised to date is now $34 million, including the latest raise.

🇺🇸 Nitricity announces $10M in fresh funding for first-of-a-kind organic fertilizer plant in Central California

Nitricity Inc., a California startup electrifying the production of nitrogen fertilizer, today announced $10 million in project funding from a strategic mix of capital providers that includes Elemental Impact and Trellis Climate to build a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) organic fertilizer facility in Delhi, California.

Nitricity's FOAK plant represents a major milestone, marking a 100-fold increase in production capacity to achieve commercial-scale volumes. Slated for operation in 2026, the plant's full production capacity is already sold out through 2028 under binding offtake agreements with local organic growers. Located in Merced County, the project is expected to create approximately 20 jobs supporting fabrication, deployment, and maintenance.

MasterControl Acquires Qualer to Transform Asset Management for Life Sciences Companies

MasterControl, a leading provider of quality and manufacturing software solutions for life sciences, today announced the acquisition of Qualer, a cloud-native asset management company that simplifies tracking, calibration, and maintenance of critical assets and equipment across lab and manufacturing facilities. The acquisition extends MasterControl's ability to enhance life science product development by enabling organizations to manage quality, manufacturing, and asset performance in a single integrated platform.