Sweeping Innovation Bothers Industrial Incumbents

This week: hard tech competitions and seed funding, Starship testing, dry electrodes, open source hardware, 3D print Tungsten carbide–cobalt, injection molding AI, D-T fusion, physical AI intensifies

Feb 15, 2026

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

Competitions often act as a forcing function by establishing rigid deadlines and performance benchmarks that compel teams to move beyond theoretical research and produce functional prototypes. By requiring participants to demonstrate specific technical milestones under scrutiny, these events serve as a filter that separates speculative science from viable breakthroughs, effectively de-risking the core technology for potential investors. Ultimately, this concentrated pressure validates that a solution is both physically possible and commercially promising, providing the external credibility needed to transition a lab discovery into a scalable industrial company.

One notable example that started from a competition is Solugen. They started by building a prototype reactor using materials from Home Depot in order to win a 2016 MIT Entrepreneurship Competition. With $10K of seed funding, they later joined renowned startup accelerator Y Combinator. Flash forward a few years and today they are a multi-billion dollar company.

Some new competitions announced this week:

💰🏆 The AI for Industry Challenge is an open competition for developers and roboticists who want to tackle some of the hardest, high-impact problems that exist in robotics and manufacturing. Win a share of $180,000 prize pool. /Intrinsic/
- This competition targets a high-value bottleneck in modern manufacturing: electronics assembly. More specifically dexterous cable management and insertion, which today is a manual, repetitive process.
💰🏆 JLCPCB is running an open source hardware design contest, $85,000 in prizes, $30,000 first prize /OSHWLab/. To support this goal, OSHWLab Stars brings together a complete innovation path:
- EasyEDA – free, easier but more powerful hardware design
- JLCPCB – fast, affordable and reliable prototyping
- OSHWLab – open-source sharing and technical exchanges community

New in 2026: We are gifting a 1-year paid subscription to the first person to identify the content link AND cultural reference to the title/subject line of this week’s digest. Comment on this post with your guess before next week’s digest is released to be eligible!

Last week’s answer: Super Bowl LX featured some no-huddle offense in the heart of Silicon Valley, while Additive Drives raised funds for their electric motors without any rare earth materials.

Assembly Line

This week’s Industry 5.0 breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

🚀 SpaceX’s Starship Version 3 Testing is Epic! Why?

What the SpaceX acquisition of xAI means for industrial robotics /The Robot Report/
SpaceX is a master class in capital efficiency. The company is currently valued at $1.25T but only raised ~$10B up until 2024 /Quincy Lee on X/

🪟 The Glass Factory That Opened in the U.S. and Clobbered Its Rivals

✍️ Author: Gavin Bade

Competition from the Fuyao Glass America plant is threatening about 250 jobs at a rival glass factory operating since the 1950s. Vitro, the company that owns the longtime plant in Crestline, Ohio, has spent the past year considering whether to shut down, said Carlos Bernal, Vitro’s head of automotive glass.
“In any industry, long-term success cannot be achieved by price alone,” said Fuyao spokeswoman Stella Zhang. “Our prices are reasonable, and customers choose Fuyao based on a comprehensive evaluation of technological expertise, product quality, delivery reliability, and service excellence.”
Leaders at the Vitro factory say they have done everything possible to wring efficiencies out of their decades-old plant, such as installing new equipment and reducing the number of employees. But they still can’t match Fuyao’s prices.

🔋 Dry Electrodes Have a Wet Problem — Tesla Just Solved It

On January 28, Tesla’s Vice President of 4680 batteries, Bonne Eggleston, posted a single sentence on X: “Both electrodes use our dry process.”
The industry celebrated. And rightly so. Tesla had eliminated the toxic solvents, the massive drying ovens, and the energy bills that define conventional battery manufacturing.
But Tesla was already solving the next problem.
Dry electrodes carry an irony that has received little attention. The whole point of dry electrode technology is removing the solvent from manufacturing. Yet the finished electrode still needs to absorb electrolyte to function as a battery. And the binders that make dry electrodes possible, PTFE and PVDF, are fluorinated polymers — the same compounds used in waterproof coatings. They are inherently hydrophobic.

🦾🧠 Industrial AI Deployment: High-Precision Wire Insertion & Soldering

Joonho Lee@junja941

Here we show one of our experiments on AI + automation in factory. Built from certified industrial hardware, the system is fully compliant in the industrial enviroment. It achieved: 1. 99.4% SR (verified by actual QC tests) 2. 5.5 hours continuous run 3. Near-human takt time

12:12 PM · Feb 9, 2026 · 34.7K Views

9 Replies · 31 Reposts · 315 Likes

📖 We built a robot! This is a fully open source liquid handling robot that provides an industry-competitive degree of functionality at a very competitive cost. /Chory Lab/
📖 Exploring Open-Source Hardware from an Industrial Control and Automation Perspective /DigiKey/

🖨️ Researchers find a way to 3D print one of industry’s hardest engineering materials: Tungsten carbide–cobalt

Tungsten carbide–cobalt (WC–Co) is prized for its hardness, but that same property makes it unusually difficult to shape. The current process is wasteful and expensive for the yield produced, and an economically sensible method for creating these materials is long overdue.

WC-Co cemented carbides are important in fields that require high wear resistance and hardness, such as cutting and construction tools. Currently, these carbides are made using powder metallurgy, utilizing high pressure and sintering machines to combine the WC and Co powders to yield a manufactured cemented carbide. Though this method does produce highly durable and hard final products, a lot of expensive material is used, and the yield is suboptimal. The research proposed in this study utilizes the novel technique of additive manufacturing (AM, also commonly known as 3D printing) and the hot-wire laser irradiation method to produce cemented carbides without sacrificing hardness and durability, while also reducing material waste and overall cost.

Eaton scales industrial manufacturing with Bambu Lab’s 3D printing technology /Bambu Lab/. Check out more of Pawel Slusarczyk’s work over at:

New Product Introduction

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

🚙 Additional Ford Universal EV Platform Details Will Be Shared /Ford Authority/ on Feb 17, 11am EST /CEO Jim Farley on X/

📐 Emmi AI released their first Digital Engineer for Injection Moulding

Injection moulding is basically like making a waffle. Except the waffle iron costs more than a Ferrari, and the mould has a mind of its own.
The simulation of injection moulding itself is highly complex, involving multi-physics calculations that model the transient flow of viscous plastic through thin-walled geometries at extreme temperature and pressure conditions. In other words, it is tedious and takes ages.
NeuralMould allows engineers to select from a range of geometries, a plethora of different materials, and place injection gates arbitrarily. An engineer can now real-time test multiple scenarios to optimize process KPIs and avoid frozen flow fronts.

Read more from Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Johannes Brandstetter on LinkedIn

📐🖨️ With the updated Gemini Deep Think, you can turn a sketch into a 3D-printable reality. Deep Think analyzes the drawing, models the complex shape and generates a file to create the physical object with 3D printing /Google/ but can it print a Macaw drawing? /Ali G on X/

☢️ Helion Achieves New Industry-First Fusion Energy Milestones, Accelerating Path to Commercial Fusion

Helion, a Washington-based fusion energy company, announced that its Polaris prototype has set new fusion industry benchmarks, becoming the first privately developed fusion energy machine to demonstrate measurable deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion and achieve plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius (MºC). Both milestones mark significant breakthroughs in Helion’s vision to make commercially viable fusion energy a reality and are firsts for the private fusion industry.

Helion began operating its 7th-generation Polaris prototype at the end of 2024. This January, it became the first and currently only private fusion energy machine to use deuterium-tritium fuel, demonstrating the company’s ability to operate and show scaling across multiple fuels. Helion was also the first company to receive regulatory approval to possess and use tritium for the purpose of demonstrating fusion energy production. Achieving thermonuclear fusion using deuterium-tritium fuel is one step in Polaris’ testing program. The company will continue testing to reach optimal temperatures for deuterium-helium-3 fusion, a fuel Helion will use for commercial operations.

Business Transactions

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

💰 Anduril in Talks to Raise Billions at Over $60 Billion Valuation /Bloomberg/
💰 Positioning for Seed Funding /mHub/. It’s important for founders to remember fundraising is often a numbers game. Don’t focus on trying to convince every investor that you’re the one. Focus instead on getting a couple of yeses, knowing that there may be a whole lot of nos.

🇺🇸🦾🤖🦿 Apptronik Closes Over $935 Million Series A with New $520 Million Extension Round

Apptronik announced a $520 million Series A-X funding round, with participation from existing investors including B Capital, Google, Mercedes-Benz and PEAK6, and new investors including AT&T Ventures, John Deere and Qatar Investment Authority (QIA). The Series A-X extension round follows a $415 million oversubscribed initial Series A raise in 2025, bringing Apptronik’s total Series A to more than $935 million and total capital raised to nearly $1 billion. After the initial Series A announcement, Apptronik continued to receive substantial inbound investor interest, leading the company to open the new extension of its Series A at a 3x multiple of the Series A valuation, underscoring strong investor confidence in Apptronik’s vision for AI-powered robots that support people in every facet of life.

🇺🇸📦🧠 Gather AI Raises $40M Led by Smith Point Capital Management to Scale its Physical AI Platform for Global Logistics

Gather AI, the leader in Physical AI for logistics, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Smith Point Capital Management. The investment includes participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Tribeca Venture Partners, Bling Capital, Dundee Venture Capital, XRC Ventures, and new investor The Hillman Company. To date, the company has raised $74 million.

While traditional AI processes text or images from the internet, Physical AI learns from the real world. Gather AI’s models are trained on millions of proprietary warehouse images, allowing robots to see, count, and verify static and moving inventory in complex environments where standard sensors fail.

Customers achieve 99.9% inventory accuracy, reduce manual counting effort by up to 80%, and improve productivity by 5x. Most customers realize ROI in under six months. This automated oversight transforms warehouses into intelligent nodes that optimize working capital and ensure end-to-end supply chain reliability.

🇺🇸🛩️ Natilus Raises $28 Million Series A to Commercialize Family of Hyper-Efficient Blended-Wing Aircraft

Natilus, a U.S.-based aerospace manufacturer of blended-wing aircraft, announced it has secured $28 million in Series A financing. The financing was led by Draper Associates and includes strategic investors with focuses on aerospace, defense, and global freight logistics including: Type One Ventures, The Veterans Fund, and Flexport. Also participating are new investors New Vista Capital, Soma Capital, Liquid 2 VC, VU Venture Partners, and Wave FX.

Natilus has attracted broad buy-in across defense, air freight and commercial aviation markets for the game changing economics that its blended-wing-body platform enables. Leveraging improved aerodynamics, capacity, and efficiency, its family of blended-wing aircraft cut fuel usage by 30% and carbon emissions and operational costs by 50%. This latest funding will allow Natilus to complete manufacturing of its first full-scale prototype of regional cargo plane KONA, which is expected to fly in the next 24 months. Natilus will also further invest in the development of its second aircraft, HORIZON EVO, a 200+-passenger aircraft intended to compete with the Boeing 737 MAX and Airbus A321-neo. Today, Natilus also debuted its transition from a single-deck to a dual-deck aircraft, implementing modifications to the profile and interior that substantially enhance passenger experience and safety.

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