Reasoning through Machine Codes

This week: Industrial sectors revolutionized by AI (paid), agentic AI reasoners, robotaxi production launches, battery handling, stable electrochemical CO2 reduction, RoboArena and robot funds.

Jun 22, 2025

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Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

This week, Munich transforms into the epicenter of manufacturing automation as automatica 2025 opens its doors. The trade fair brings together 750 exhibitors across six halls, showcasing everything from industrial robotics to AI-driven production systems. Recent survey data reveals shifting attitudes toward workplace automation with 77% of German workers now support robot deployment in factories, primarily to handle dangerous and repetitive tasks. Meanwhile, China has leapfrogged Germany in robot density (470 vs 429 units per 10,000 workers), making competitive positioning urgent.

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Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

🧠🎛️ How Apollo Tyres is unlocking machine insights using agentic AI-powered Manufacturing Reasoner

✍️ Author: Harsh Vardhan, Deepak Dixit, Gautam Kumar

Apollo Tyres has started an ambitious digital transformation journey to streamline its entire business value process, including manufacturing. The company collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to implement a centralized data lake using AWS services. Additionally, Apollo Tyres enhanced its capabilities by unlocking insights from the data lake using generative AI powered by Amazon Bedrock across business values.

With the agentic AI Manufacturing Reasoner, the goal was to empower their plant engineers to perform corrective actions on accelerated RCA insights to reduce curing DCT. This agentic AI solution and virtual experts (agents) help plant engineers interact with industrial IoT connected to big data in natural language (English) to retrieve relevant insights and provide insightful recommendations for resolving operational issues in DCT processes. The RCA agent offers detailed insights and self-diagnosis or recommendations, identifying which of the over 25 automated subelements or activities should be focused on across more than 250 automated curing presses, more than 140 stock-keeping units (SKUs), three types of curing mediums, and two types of machine suppliers. The goal is to achieve the best possible reduction in DCT across three plants. Through this innovation, plant engineers now have a thorough understanding of their manufacturing bottlenecks. This comprehensive view supports data-driven decision-making and enhances operational efficiency. They realized an approximate 88% reduction in effort in assisting RCA for DCT through self-diagnosis of bottleneck areas on streaming and real-time data. The generative AI assistant reduces the DCT RCA from up to 7 hours per issue to less than 10 minutes per issue. Overall, the targeted benefit is expected to save approximately 15 million Indian rupees (INR) per year just in the passenger car radial (PCR) division across their three manufacturing plants.

🌿⛓️ A new app details where your food comes from — and just how fragile the global food system really is

✍️ Author: Ayurella Horn-Muller

The app identifies food flows through just about every major port, road, rail, and shipping lane across the world and traces goods to where they are ultimately consumed. The developers have crowned it a “digital twin of the global food system” and hope it will be used by policymakers and researchers working to better adapt to an increasingly fragile supply chain beleaguered by climate change. The model pinpoints critical global transportation chokepoints where disruptions, such as extreme weather, would have domino effects on food security and, in doing so, identifies opportunities for local and regional agricultural producers to gain a forward-thinking market foothold.

🚕🧠 Zoox Opens Robotaxi Production Site in California

✍️ Author: Edward Ludlow

Amazon's Zoox autonomous driving unit has opened a robotaxi production facility in California, which will be able to produce 10,000 purpose-built robotaxis a year once it reaches full scale. The company’s purpose-built robotaxi is akin to a shuttle and has no steering wheel or pedals, with four inward-facing seats. Zoox would need an exemption from US auto safety rules that require vehicles to have driver controls, though the Trump administration has said it’s working on changes to provide those approvals faster.

🔋 Battery Handling with a Güdel FP-5-HP Gantry

24M: The Next Level of American Battery Technology /Munro Live on YouTube/
A Battery That Lasts 50% Longer Is Finally in Production by Ion Storage Systems /WSJ/
Voltfang Secures €15 Million Series B Funding to Boost Grid Resilience Across Europe /Voltfang/

⚗️ Acid-humidified CO2 gas input for stable electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction

✍️ Author: Shaoyun Hao, Ahmad Elgazzar, Shou-Kun Zhang

Electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO2RR) enables efficient carbon utilization by converting CO2 into valuable products using renewable energy. Among CO2RR reactor designs, zero-gap membrane electrode assembly (MEA) electrolyzers stand out for their ability to achieve high current densities and energy efficiency. These electrolyzers typically incorporate gas diffusion electrode (GDE) for efficient CO2 mass transport and an anion exchange membrane (AEM) that separates the electrodes. However, their commercialization is limited by operational instability, primarily because of salt formation in the cathode chamber. This obstructs CO2 transport, causes flooding, and ultimately leads to electrolyzer failure. Although strategies such as binder engineering, pulsed electrolysis, and membrane modifications show potential, they still require further refinement to enhance stability and practical applications.

New Product Introduction

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

📐 Duro Unveils Duro Design, the First AI-Native PLM for Modern Hardware Engineering

Duro, a leading PLM platform for hardware engineering, relaunched its product as Duro Design, a cloud- and AI-native PLM rebuilt from the ground up to help manufacturers launch products up to three times faster. Duro Design connects design, supply chain, and manufacturing data through a unified digital thread. Built from customer and industry feedback, the platform replaces rigid, legacy PLMs with a cloud- and AI-native system that's fast to deploy, easy to configure, and avoids vendor lock-in.

🤖🥇 RoboArena: Distributed Real-World Evaluation of Generalist Robot Policies

RoboArena is a community-run, real-world benchmark for evaluating generalist robot policies, instantiated currently on the DROID robot platform. You can submit your policy to be evaluated by our pool of volunteer evaluators, or become an evaluator yourself. RoboArena evaluations differ from traditional robot evaluation in one key principle: instead of standardizing the set of tasks for which all policies are evaluated, we allow evaluators to pick any environment and task of their choice for each evaluation. The only requirement is that evaluations are done pairwise, maintaining the same task and environment for the policies in the pair. By aggregating a large number of double-blind, pairwise evaluations across a network of institutions, we can considerably scale evaluation diversity, which we show is essential to comprehensively evaluate generalist policies. The RoboArena benchmark will be running live through 2025, with potential extensions beyond.

Business Transactions

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

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son is planning a trillion-dollar industrial complex in Arizona to build robots and artificial intelligence, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. potentially playing a key role. /Bloomberg/
China’s Wuhan Sets Up USD139 Million Humanoid Robot Fund /Yicai/

🇺🇸 Applied Intuition Closes Series F at $15 Billion Valuation, Accelerating Vehicle Intelligence Across All Moving Machines

Applied Intuition, Inc., the leading vehicle intelligence company for automotive, trucking, construction, mining, agriculture and defense, announced it has closed a $600 million Series F fundraise and tender offer at a $15 billion valuation. This fresh round of funding, co-led by BlackRock-managed funds and accounts and Kleiner Perkins, will propel Applied Intuition into its next phase of vehicle intelligence, deeper product expansion, and global team growth. Other new investors in the round include Franklin Templeton, Qatar Investment Authority, Abu Dhabi Investment Council, Premji Invest, Stripes, Greycroft, BAM Elevate, and 137 Ventures. Existing investors participating in the round include Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Lux, BOND, Elad Gil, Addition, and Tribe Capital.

🇩🇪 Helsing raises €600m to invest in European technological sovereignty

Helsing, the leading European defence technology company, announced its €600 million Series D funding round. The round was led by Prima Materia, alongside existing investors Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, Plural, General Catalyst and SAAB and new investors BDT & MSD Partners. This strategic funding accelerates Helsing’s leadership in all-domain defence innovation.

🇺🇸 Uncountable Secures $27M in Series A Funding to Accelerate AI Adoption in R&D

Uncountable, a leading platform for digital transformation in industrial research and development, announced it has raised $27 million in an over-subscribed Series A funding. The round was led by Sageview Capital, a growth-oriented investment firm focused on supporting innovative technology-enabled businesses, with participation from SE Ventures, the specialist venture fund backed by Schneider Electric, and all existing investors Teamworthy, 8VC, and MK Capital. As part of the investment, Caitlin Vorlicek, Principal at Sageview Capital, and Mike Crowe, former CIO of Colgate-Palmolive, will be joining the board of directors. The investment will enable Uncountable to deepen its AI and machine learning capabilities, expand enterprise partnerships in QA/QC/PLM environments, and further scale customer support to meet growing demand across regulated and data-intensive industries.

Uncountable offers a cloud-based solution purpose-built for R&D environments, enabling enterprises to unify experimental data, accelerate product development cycles, and deploy AI-driven optimization tools. The company has driven profitable growth over the past 9 years, scaling to 90 employees and serving 120+ industry-leading customers including Sika, Beiersdorf, Mondelez, and Clariant.

🇺🇸 Fiber Global Raises $20 Million Series A to Scale Circular Building Materials Platform

Fiber Global, a pioneer in sustainable building materials, announced it has raised $20 million in Series A funding. The round was led by DBL Partners, with Founder and Managing Partner Ira Ehrenpreis joining the Board of Directors. The capital will support Fiber Global’s mission to transform abundant global waste streams into scalable, sustainable building materials, starting with expansion of its U.S. manufacturing footprint.