Shop Talk
Capturing this week’s zeitgeist
Heard on the Floor
All of us who are technologists are going to give you a story and that’s what we need to do to build a narrative. That story is going to be wrong. 100% will be wrong. I don’t know exactly where it’s wrong, I don’t know how wrong it will be, but it is wrong. And what you’re investing in is someone to drive the bus, not the bus itself. So the idea is right, the direction is right, and the team is what you care about. Can they make the right technology decisions and pivots to actually drive the bus to something that matters?
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⛽ Companies are building new sort technologies like Bloom Energy. There’s a Bloom Energy deal for building a couple gigawatts in Arizona /Pinal Post/. If that works, amazing. That might be the technological advance we need to keep going. But, it hasn’t really been proven out yet. And those economics are very different than what you see on the grid.
Naveen Rao, Founder and CEO of Unconventional AI, on “Why Robotics Will be 100X Bigger Than Coding Agents & Software Investors are F***ed” /YouTube/
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Assembly Line
Thought provoking stories across the industrial world.
♨️ Google’s Geothermal Power Plant is Unraveling
Fervo Energy: Big Tech’s Clean Energy Bet Is Unraveling — Hidden Setbacks, A Litany Of Existential Issues & A Commercial Build Out Destined For Failure /Morpheus Research/
🎛️🧠 A New Industrial AI Tech Stack Formed at IMTS 2026
IMTS 2026 drew 91,295 registrants /Report/. North America’s largest manufacturing technology show grew 2.6% on 2024 and, for the first time, had a dedicated Industrial AI Arena.
A new industrial AI stack is forming. Based on more than 30 interviews at the show, IoT Analytics sees knowledge graphs, AI agents, and new interfaces such as MCP forming a stack that the traditional ISA-95 automation pyramid does not describe.
MCP servers are now a must-have, and hardware is next. Industrial software vendors are adding MCP servers fast, while Anthropic’s new Model Hardware Standard (MHS) aims to do the same for machines.
Read more at IoT Analytics
Everything You Missed at IMTS 2026! /Autodesk on YouTube/
✈️🛢️ Advancing the Future of Aviation with Arcadia eFuels and Hydrogen
Plug Power and Arcadia eFuels are advancing the future of sustainable aviation fuel (e-SAF) through a strategic partnership spanning more than 1 GW of potential electrolyzer projects across Europe and the Americas.
Jet Set, Risk Ready: Notes on eSAF insurability /NARDAC/
Sustainable Aviation Fuel Review of Technical Pathways /DOE/
Why Young Commercial Airplanes Are Being Scrapped /CNBC on YouTube/
🦾🤖🦿 The hopes and risks of bringing humanoid robots into our homes
New Product Introduction
New and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services
🤖🧠🌎 Zero-Shot to New Robots: Introducing Dream-1
Dream-1 is our first World Action Model available through a public API that can be used all around the world. Out of the box, it can control unseen robots for unseen tasks in unseen environments.
How much does it cost to run Dream-1? We want you to know exactly what to expect before you try it. Running the model costs just $3 per hour for Dream-1, or $2 per hour for Dream-1-flash. Each call to the model returns 1.6 seconds of actions, so an hour is 2,250 calls: about $0.0013 an action for Dream-1, and $0.0009 for Dream-1-flash.
Read more at Dream Labs
Flapping Airplanes is researching radical new techniques to improve the efficiency of AI. They have developed the world’s most complete megakernel framework. It can already perform entire training runs, serve inference, play video games, and even do all three simultaneously in a single kernel. But we’ve barely scratched the surface of GPUs, and we think they’re more flexible and valuable than most believe.
🌳🧠 Plants can speak using electricity, so Electric Plant built an AI model to decipher their language
Justin Mast wound up partnering with Lee von Kraus, a neuroscientist who has worked with DARPA, to found Electric Plant, which has been spending the past three years collecting data to build a large language model, Bombadil, capable of interpreting the subtle electrical signals coursing through a plant’s stem and relaying details about the plant’s needs to growers.
Trained on more than 4 million hours of recordings across 100 species and a range of environments, Bombadil is the most species-diverse foundation model ever built on biological signals. It reads a plant's health state directly from the plant's own electrical activity, rather than inferring it from the soil, the weather, or what the eye can see.
Read more at TechCrunch
Electric Plant Company Launches From Stealth With $11.2M in Funding and a Foundation AI Model for Plants, Bombadil /Business Wire/
Kodama Raises $7 Million to Scale Physical AI for Forestry /GlobeNewswire/
Business Transactions
Top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.
Robot factories and hypersonic missiles: JPMorgan Chase’s first $5 billion of defense investments /CNBC/
Former OpenAI exec has quietly built $1.5 billion startup, Arda Industries, betting AI can revive U.S. manufacturing /CNBC/
🇺🇸🦾 Tractian’s $130M Series D Values the Company at $1.4B to Scale Physical AI for Asset-Heavy Industries
Tractian, the leading Physical AI platform for asset-heavy industries, announced a $130M Series D round led by Sapphire Ventures and co-led with M&G's Catalyst. The round values the company at $1.4 billion and accelerates its evolution from predicting failures to protecting the full health of every critical machine an operation runs on. New and existing investors such as N47, General Catalyst, Bosch Ventures, 53 Stations, Monashees, Endeavor Catalyst, Norte Ventures, and Y Combinator also participated.
Read more at Tractian
🇺🇸🦾 Formic Raises $50 Million to Scale Physical AI Across American Manufacturing
Formic, the commercialization platform for physical AI, announced it has raised $50 million in growth capital. The financing includes a Series B led by Mercato Partners, with participation from Light Ray Ventures, Lightscape Partners, Citi, and other new and existing investors, as well as debt financing from S2G Investments.
Formic takes responsibility for the outcome of its systems, not just the installation. Formic’s Robot-as-a-Service model combines equipment, deployment software, field operations, maintenance, financing, and performance monitoring into one platform, all for one recurring monthly payment. The result is a single accountable partner responsible for bringing robots into production and keeping them productive, with no upfront capital investment required from the customer.
Today, Formic operates hundreds of robots across more than 100 facilities in over 30 states. Its fleet runs at 99.6% uptime, and 97% of customers renew. Applications span palletizing, case packing, machine tending, kitting, assist work, and more across food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, chemicals, aerospace, defense, packaging, and the broader U.S. industrial base.
Read more at Business Wire
🇸🇪🔋 Holyvolt Raises $45M to Scale AI-Powered Discovery Engine as the West Races to Develop New Battery Materials
Holyvolt, the AI-powered battery materials discovery company, announced $45 million in funding, backed by Zone II,CC.VC and a handful of angels from the finance sector. Existing investors include Fifth Wall. Holyvolt’s Discovery Engine connects proprietary AI models to automated labs that build and test real battery cells, so each round of results improves the next prediction. The funding will expand Holyvolt’s AI capabilities, laboratory capacity, and scientific team, while advancing its nickel- and cobalt-free DRX cathode materials toward commercial deployment.
Holyvolt’s lab is Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a San Diego company it merged with in a $73 million deal in March /TNW/. Founded by Scripps chemist Peter Schultz, Wildcat built a high-throughput system that tests thousands of battery materials in parallel. Over 18 years, the company says, the platform has run more than 225 projects for more than 85 customers, including BMW, and tested more than 500,000 cells.
Read more at WebWire and Fortune
Flexible solid energy storage module /WO2025230455A1/
🇫🇮 The Donut Lab Solid-State Battery Situation is Crazy /Ziroth on YouTube/ as they went to court and released some new data! /I Donut Believe/
🇸🇪 Northvolt’s struggles: a cautionary tale for the EU Clean Industrial Deal /Bruegel/