Shop Talk
Capturing this week’s zeitgeist
Our friends David Ariens and Willem van Lammeren from The IT/OT Insider are launching an operational guide to fix communication breakdowns between industrial plant networks and business software applications. They are joined by Nikki Gonzales of Automation Ladies, former OSIsoft technical chief Richard Beeson, author Jon Smart, and InfluxData executive officer Evan Kaplan to release the definitive guide you need to bridge the divide and unlock the full potential of your teams by aligning people and technology.
Click the image below to register ⤵️
📖 Pre-order your copy on Amazon or learn more about the book and bonus materials at itotinsider.com/handbook.
Please spread the word of Exponential Industry by sharing the publication 👇
Assembly Line
This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.
The Hidden Pillar of Robotics Research is Deployment
In ten months, we’ve scaled to 60+ paying customers across moving goods, making deliveries, inspecting sites, providing security, preparing food, as well as operating inside warehouses, factories, and data centers. Mobility accounts for 10% of our revenue, including AMR solutions that account for 4%. The remaining ~90% comes mainly from manipulation tasks. We have crossed 100M ARR. And 50M has already been recognized since starting deployments 10 months ago.
Together with NVIDIA and Foxconn, we are deploying the Skild Brain on dual-arm manipulators for high-precision assembly of NVIDIA Blackwell systems — work that changes with every product cycle and used to mean reprogramming every robot on the line /NVIDIA/.
At Sumitomo Wiring Systems, we are working towards deploying S1 to automate processes in wire harness manufacturing that were considered “impossible” to automate. With Mitsui & Co., whose supply chains serve 1.4 million meals a day across Japan, we are piloting general-purpose robots powered by S1 in commercial kitchens.
34,000 Pre-Orders, $2.4 Billion Pipeline: Inside Europe’s Newest Humanoid Robot Unicorn /Forbes/. Catch up with founder and CEO Artem Sokolov, who started the company in May 2024 with roughly $30 million of his own money, to ask about Humanoid’s plans, go to market strategy, order book as well as its relatively unique path to scaling production and how the company will approach competition.
Motive Secures More Than $1.3 Billion in Growth Financing from General Catalyst /PR Newswire/ with ARR crossing $600 million.
🎣🍣 The Machine That Could End Japan’s Sushi Empire
Shinkei built a robot that kills fish with computer vision and millimeter precision, all in the hope of making American seafood more humane and much better to eat. Its Poseidon machine automates ike jime, the Japanese practice of spiking a fish’s brain and bleeding it soon after capture /Shinkei/. The usual alternative can leave fish suffocating on a boat while stress and blood damage the meat. Poseidon identifies each fish, finds its brain, makes the cuts, and sends it into the cold chain in about five seconds. It is surgical accuracy at industrial speed, performed on a rolling deck covered in salt water. What could go wrong?
⛏️ DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation Announces $73 Million to Advance Domestic Mining Technology
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI) selected four projects for $73 million in funding through DOE’s Mine of the Future initiative to establish domestic testing grounds for innovative mining technologies.
Innovative Wireless Technologies, Inc.: Establishing a multi-state national testbed across underground and surface sites (WV, CO, VA) to test, validate, and accelerate digital networking, automation, and safety technologies in real-world mining conditions /IWT/.
University of Arizona: Developing a nationally accessible underground proving ground in Sahuarita, AZ, centered on advancing mine electrification, energy management, and operational de-risking for critical minerals.
Curators of the University of Missouri (Missouri S&T): Building a multi-facility proving ground in Rolla, MO, integrating underground technology testing with advanced comminution (crushing/grinding) research and workforce training.
Southern Methodist University: Repurposing an instrumented Texas drilling site in Navasota to construct the world’s first “synthetic mine” test facility for repeatable testing of autonomous systems, downhole sensing, and drilling workflows /Hoodline/.
Read more at DOE
Hidden Factory
Unseen patterns in emerging industrial technology
New Product Introduction
Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services
🏭🦾🤖🦿 XPENG Robotics Production Line Officially Launched
XPENG’s robot production lines are the world’s first automated production lines for advanced humanoid robots, deeply integrating the mature automotive-grade quality systems of the smart electric vehicle industry with precision manufacturing for humanoid robot. Built to automotive-grade quality standards, it establishes a quality system for mass production of advanced humanoid robots. Designed for scale from day one, with over 80% of core processes automated, the lines deliver a high-precision, highly flexible, and intelligent manufacturing system, ensuring consistent critical-process quality and laying the foundation for scaled production and rapid capacity expansion.
Read more at XPENG
Unboxed Automotive Assembly at Scale
Our unboxed process for Cybercab assembles vehicle modules in parallel & frames the car in one step at the end.
This streamlines automation & reduces the line size by half, unlocking much greater production capacity.
The first real revolution in automotive manufacturing in over a century
Watch Robotaxi on X
Lumafield Unveils Saturn Large-Format Industrial X-ray CT Scanner to Inspect Complex Assemblies and Dense Materials /Lumafield/
Business Transactions
This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.
🇺🇸🚇 The Boring Company Series D Funding Round Announcement
The Boring Company completed a $3 billion Series D funding round at a $23 billion valuation. The round was led by investment entities affiliated with the United Arab Emirates, with participation from venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Vy Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Temasek, Shamal Holding, Baron Capital, and Human Capital. The company will use the capital to increase headcount across engineering, production, and operations teams. Additionally, the funds will accelerate research and development for its proprietary Prufrock tunnel-boring machines and finance the expansion of underground Loop transit networks in target markets.
The company’s core technology centers on its proprietary Prufrock tunnel boring machines and the Loop transit architecture. Unlike conventional tunnel boring machines, Prufrock is engineered to launch directly from the surface and re-emerge without deep excavation pits, mine continuously while simultaneously erecting precast concrete tunnel segments, and operate remotely to eliminate personnel inside the tunnel. The Loop architecture uses dedicated, underground point-to-point tunnels that route autonomous electric passenger vehicles directly to destinations without intermediate stops. Deployments include the operational Las Vegas Loop network which has been approved for 68 miles and 123 stations, with active planning and expansion underway in international and domestic markets such as Dubai and Nashville.
🇺🇸🦾 Maven Robotics Raises $100M Series A for the World’s First General-Purpose Robotics System for Industrial Work
Maven Robotics, an intelligent industrial robotics company, announced $100 million in Series A funding from RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Ventures, among others. Maven designs, builds, and deploys intelligent robotics for logistics and manufacturing. Founded in 2024, the company has created the world’s first general-purpose robotics system for industrial work.
Maven designed its system from first principles for complex physical environments and rigorous industrial requirements. The system integrates hardware, software, and AI across every layer, including the robot, the fleet, the factory, and the Maven network. Maven’s robots master real tasks that deliver immediate impact, industrial-grade reliability and intelligence that compounds at scale. The company started with mixed-case palletizing and tote handling, two workflows that represent an estimated $80 billion addressable market, and has recently begun expanding into more complex material handling and assembly workflows to address a market in excess of $1 trillion.
Read more at Globe Newswire
🇺🇸🦾🖥️ Antioch Raises $32M to Bring Software Speed to Physical AI Development
Antioch, the simulation platform for physical AI, announced a $32 million Series A led by Greylock, with participation from A*, Category Ventures, Box Group, and Icehouse Ventures. The company’s prominent angel investors include Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Adrian Macneil, CEO of Foxglove; and Ian Andrews, an NVIDIA executive and former Groq executive. Antioch enables robotics and autonomy teams to develop, test and validate AI systems in high-fidelity simulation, scaling from a single experiment to thousands of parallel evaluations before real-world deployment. The company is led by second-time founders, and alumni of Tesla and Meta Reality Labs.
The funding will accelerate Antioch’s product development, expand its engineering team, and deepen its simulation capabilities as demand grows across robotics, drones, industrial automation, fixed perception and other Physical AI applications.
Read more at Newswire
🇬🇧⚙️ CloudNC raises $20M from Nimble Ventures and Lockheed Martin’s fund as its AI reaches 1,000+ machine shops
CloudNC has secured a $20 million funding round led by US-based venture capital firm Nimble Ventures. The round saw additional participation from Calculus Venture Capital, early backer Entrepreneur First, and LM Ventures, the venture arm of Lockheed Martin. The fresh capital is earmarked to drive commercial go-to-market operations, broaden customer support and partnerships across key international markets, and accelerate the adoption of CloudNC’s software including rollout of Quote Agent, a new AI tool launching later in 2026 designed to automate and expedite precision machining cost estimates and quotes, eliminating an expensive administrative bottleneck for machine shops.
Technologically, CloudNC differentiates itself by tackling the complex, manual process of CNC programming through its flagship AI product, CAM Assist. Unlike legacy setups where machinists spend hours manually writing machining strategies and toolpaths, CAM Assist integrates directly into mainstream CAM platforms (such as Autodesk Fusion, Mastercam, and Siemens NX) to generate optimized toolpaths in seconds while leaving expert operators in control. CloudNC also separates itself from software-only competitors by running its own operational precision manufacturing facility in Chelmsford, UK. The software has reached significant scale, deploying across more than 1,000 machine shops globally across major industrial clients such as Major Tool and Machine and Lockheed Martin, while actively pursuing FedRAMP cloud-security certification to unlock sensitive US defense agency workloads.
Read more at TFN