Open Value Chains Create Industrial Efficiency

This week: Open Process Automation, Open Source Battery Report 2024, and Open AI Inference System reduce costs and foster innovation; Tesla paints a major breakthrough with reactive injection molding

Mar 02, 2025

∙ Paid

Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

Well it seems Hitachi took may have taken our advice to heart with their new Process Pulse platform, applying the familiar pizza tracking experience to complex business workflows. By translating the transparency and real-time updates that consumers love about pizza delivery apps into enterprise process management, they're addressing a universal pain point in business operations - the need to know exactly where things stand at any given moment. As discussed in our ‘Custom Quote’ section a few weeks ago, this visibility doesn't just satisfy curiosity; it reduces anxiety, eliminates unnecessary follow-up communications, and creates a more efficient system for all stakeholders. Hitachi's implementation shows how consumer-inspired interfaces can effectively transform enterprise software when the focus remains on simplicity, visibility, and practical value.

Last week's 'Custom Quote' provided insights into the mathematics of innovation. Get Custom Quote and a plethora of bonus reads with a paid subscription ⬇️

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

🚖🎨 Reactive Injection Molding (RIM) for the Cybercab Panels

Enter Tesla’s “unboxed” vision, a manufacturing remix that’s less assembly line, more Lego set. Instead of shuffling a car down a conveyor belt, Tesla builds it in modular chunks—think front, back, and middle—then snaps them together like a high-stakes game of automotive Tetris. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s VP of engineering, calls it a “step change in cost,” and Elon Musk touts it as the key to slashing production expenses by half once ramped. Just think... no paint booth which could be 20, 30, or 40% of traditional auto line capex... gone. RIM fits here like the missing puzzle piece: those lightweight, colored Cybercab panels streamline the process, ditching paint shops and trimming waste. It’s not just novel—it’s the glue that makes unboxed mobile, scalable, and downright transformational.

Listen to Tesla’s VP of Engineering Lars Moravy Discuss RIM in Full

🚌 Design for transport:

Polestar 3 Underbody engineering - A look beneath the surface /Munro Live/
How are buses made? The process of mass-producing buses in Japan, a country that values quality. /ProcessX/

💬 Why IT and OT Don’t Get Along

The best way to explain the divide is with a real example. At one plant I worked with, IT pushed for a routine security patch rollout across all company-managed servers. For office computers, this was a non-issue—install the update, reboot, and move on. But in OT, that same update risked taking down a critical SCADA system, which had been running uninterrupted for months. The OT team refused the update, citing production risks, while IT insisted that leaving an unpatched system exposed the plant to cybersecurity threats. The standoff escalated until upper management had to step in, ultimately delaying the patch indefinitely. The result? IT saw it as a failure in security compliance, while OT viewed it as a win for operational stability.

Read more from Vladmir Romanov at The Automation Navigator

🦾🧠 Unmatched autonomy with Maple Advanced Robotics Inc. MARI

Moving toward real-time collaboration:

Miller Electric Mfg. and Novarc Technologies announced a strategic partnership aimed at transforming the welding industry with artificial intelligence. /GlobeNewswire/

🔋 How Battery Cells are Born

Below is a focus on the most popular class of battery cell chemistry: lithium ion. Lithium-ion batteries, particularly NMC (Nickel Manganese Cobalt) and LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate), dominate due to their relatively high energy density and rechargeability.

Read more from Justin Lopes at Worth Overdoing

📖 The 2024 Battery Report is Available for Download

"I can say The 2024 Battery Report is the best report to date without any hesitation. I have seen battery industry professionals at multiple events and presentations this year citing the report. It has become the go-to reference guide for the industry which is amazing considering that it is both open source and a volunteer effort."
Charlie Parker, Co-Author

🇬🇧 Cooking up more batteries:

Scientists cook up a green recipe for recycling lithium-ion batteries using vegetable oil /University of Leicester/
UK battery start-up backed by Britishvolt investors aims for £1bn gigafactory /FT/

🦾🧑‍🏫 FACTR: Force-Attending Curriculum Training for Contact-Rich Policy Learning

Many contact-rich tasks humans perform, such as box pickup or rolling dough, rely on force feedback for reliable execution. However, this force information, which is readily available in most robot arms, is not commonly used in teleoperation and policy learning. Consequently, robot behavior is often limited to quasi-static kinematic tasks that do not require intricate force-feedback. In this paper, we first present a low-cost, intuitive, bilateral teleoperation setup that relays external forces of the follower arm back to the teacher arm, facilitating data collection for complex, contact-rich tasks. We then introduce FACTR, a policy learning method that employs a curriculum which corrupts the visual input with decreasing intensity throughout training. The curriculum prevents our transformer-based policy from over-fitting to the visual input and guides the policy to properly attend to the force modality. We demonstrate that by fully utilizing the force information, our method significantly improves generalization to unseen objects by 43% compared to baseline approaches without a curriculum.

New Product Introduction

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

📖🎛️ A “quantum leap forward”: We’re pioneering a new automation technology that could transform manufacturing

ExxonMobil helped lead the development of a new control system architecture that uses the same types of technologies that power the internet and smartphones. This new technology is called Open Process Automation (OPA) and they're proud to be the first company in the world to deploy it at scale at a commercial operation – at their Resin Finishing Plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The plant makes high-quality adhesive resins used in products like tapes, sealants and medical adhesives.

OPA can deliver a range of benefits, but the big two are:

Reduced costs: We estimate OPA will cost at least 20% less over its lifespan compared to traditional industrial control systems.
More innovation: With OPA, we can quickly implement new applications that optimize the performance and output of our refining and chemical sites. Such optimization can result in improved efficiency and better products for customers.

🖨️3️⃣ Prusa EasyPrint: Slice on Your Phone, Tablet, or Laptop! (Early Access)

Ever since I built my very first 3D printer, I’ve been driven by the idea of making 3D printing more accessible. Part of that was dreaming about a slicer that runs on any device and is so seamless that anyone can use it. And we’re finally making it happen! After countless hours of development and testing, I’m proud to introduce Prusa EasyPrint! It’s a total game-changer: slicing on phones and tablets has never been easier. And yet, I think this is one of those features that will feel completely normal in a few months, and we’ll wonder how we ever lived without it.

🧠 Magma: A foundation model for multimodal AI agents across digital and physical worlds

Microsoft researchers are bringing that vision closer to reality with Magma, a multimodal AI foundation model designed to process information and generate action proposals across both digital and physical environments. It is designed to enable AI agents to interpret user interfaces and suggest actions like button clicks, while also orchestrating robotic movements and interactions in the physical world.

Business Transactions

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

🇮🇹 P101 Presents State of Italian VC, highlights that the growth of Italian Venture Capital (VC) has been ongoing for over a decade, following a steady trajectory that has transformed the sector into an industry capable of contributing to the country’s innovation ecosystem development.

🤌 What got funded in Italy this week?

Arsenale Bioyards raises €9.5 million to cut biomanufacturing costs /EU-Startups/
NanoPhoria Bioscience Awarded €17.5 M from the EIC /Business Wire/
Truesense Secures Strategic Investment from The Hashgraph Group to Advance Blockchain and AI-Driven Ultra-Wideband (UWB) Technology /PR Newswire/

🇩🇪 Quantum Machines Raises $170M as Its Customer Base Exceeds 50% of Companies Developing Quantum Computers

Quantum Machines (QM), a leading provider of advanced quantum control solutions, announced it has raised $170 million in Series C funding, bringing the company's total funding to date to $280 million. The investment comes as the majority of quantum computing companies now rely on QM's technology to build and scale their systems. The highly oversubscribed round was led by PSG Equity with participation from Intel Capital, Red Dot Capital Partners and existing investors, and marks one of the largest rounds of funding in the quantum industry.

🇵🇱 Nomagic picks up $44M for its AI-powered robotic arms

A fast-growing Polish startup called Nomagic, which builds robotic arms for picking, packing, and moving in logistics operations, has raised $44 million in funding. The company plans to use the money for both technology and business development, including breaking ground on its first effort to sell its robots to customers outside Europe, specifically in North America. Leading this Series B is the VC arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), a development bank co-owned by more than 70 countries and two European Union institutions.

Read more from Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch

🇨🇦 Nexera Robotics secures $4.5m investment to scale next-generation robotic grasping technology /PR Newswire/

🇺🇸 VerAI Discoveries Secures $24 Million in Series B Funding

VerAI Discoveries (VerAI), a pioneering AI-driven mineral asset company, is pleased to announce a $24 million first closing of its Series B round. The investment was led by Insight Partners, a global software investor specializing in high-growth technology and software investments, with continued support from existing investors Blumberg Capital, Chrysalix Venture Capital, and Orion Industrial Ventures. The new capital will help accelerate the testing and economic development of VerAI's 60+ mineral projects with its exploration and development partners, while expanding the company's portfolio and continuing to refine and advance its platform.

🦾🤖🦿 Apptronik and Jabil Collaborate to Scale Production of Apollo Humanoid Robots and Deploy in Manufacturing Operations

Apptronik, the AI-powered humanoid robotics company, and Jabil (NYSE: JBL), a global leader in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain solutions, have announced a pilot and strategic collaboration to build Apollo humanoid robots and integrate them into specific Jabil manufacturing operations. This includes the production lines that will build Apollo humanoid robots, paving the way for Apollo to build Apollo.