Issue #2 - The Future of Manufacturing
Welcome to Issue #2. A lot of stuff is happening at the moment, it's quite a challenge to keep up with the latest development. This issue focuses on cobots, 3D printing, customization and the automation of jobs.
I hope you enjoy reading it. Any feedback, shares or links are much appreciated.
Disclaimer: thoughts and opinions expressed in the newsletter are my own.
What I enjoyed reading
🌿 Martin Casado, co-founder, and CTO of Nicira that got acquired by VMware, wrote a very good guidepost for tech founders who are going to the market when no market exists aka after greenfield opportunities. I highly recommend this article for every founder in manufacturing as he also stretches the problem of the 'innovation-friend zone'. Unfortunately, I see quite a lot of founders who get stuck in these innovation departments.
In particular, one sentence stood out: "Why would these companies pay so much just to learn? The answer is that what’s expensive for a startup is actually cheap for big companies seeking to experiment, learn, and place multiple bets outside".
🤖 Every week I read at least one article about the automation of jobs and the transformation of workers. The WSJ underlines this trend by taking garment workers as an example. According to them, this impacts especially poor countries because automation is replacing the workers there and brings back production to western countries. McKinsey also wrote a longer piece about implications for jobs, skills, and wages. Turns out that up to 375 million workers may need to switch occupational categories according to them.
🤓 For applications where there is already some competition, companies are trying to differentiate by offering unique features for their customers. This is also a common trend in manufacturing. A Gartner research analyst highlights that companies should try to minimize customizations for back-end applications by applying what he calls “best-fit” approach.
About industrial Startups and Companies
🎙️ Esben H. Østergaard, co-founder and CTO of Universal Robots, wrote an interesting thought paper about what he calls Industry 5.0. He thinks that for mass personalization manufacturing companies need collaborative robots (cobots) that bring the human touch to the masses. In general, cobots is a current trend in manufacturing many people are highlighting at the moment. Here is a short video from Bloomberg explaining the concept including a portrait about Rethink Robotics.
🤑 Munich-based robotics company Magazino just announced that it raised nearly $25M for further growth. The company is building mobile robots that automate the handling and transport of goods within intralogistics, in a flexible and scalable way. Very interesting that the fulfillment company Fiege and eCommerce giant Zalando invested in the round as well.
🤖 Major iPhone assembler Foxconn is betting big on AI and automation. They want to invest at least $342M to deploy artificial intelligence applications in all the manufacturing sites. Given their scale, this can have a massive impact. Foxconn's panel arm Innolux, for example, will most likely cut 10,000 jobs this year due to automation in manufacturing.
🖨️ DesktopMetal introduced a new 3D design software tool called LiveParts. It's a big step towards democratizing additive manufacturing since users don’t need to have any prior experience or knowledge of it to use the tool. Another interesting company in that space is nTopology. It's a software for generative CAD which means that it uses "complex algorithms to generate thousands or even millions of iterations of a design to see which potential iteration works best".
Speaking of companies such as DesktopMetal, I'm quite bullish about startups with a full-stack approach in manufacturing (hardware + software).
Additional thoughts on recent development
Trip to SF and the Valley
During my trip to SF, I had the pleasure to meet some founders in the manufacturing space. Big thanks again to Nick from Plethora, Nikunj from Falkonry and Sameer from Element Analytics for taking the time (among others). I have the impression people there think sometimes more radical about this space, e.g. let's not help factories to digitize but let's built the factory of tomorrow from scratch. This might be also easier in an environment where there is simply more capital available.
Coursera for Manufacturing
As written above, the automation of jobs is a hot topic at the moment, not only in manufacturing. Companies that want to keep their employees have to focus on re-training them and empower them with tools. As an example, VW has more than 2000 people who only create and run workshops to train employees. I don't know if you can productize that ("Coursera for Manufacturing") but it is an area I want to dive deeper.
Manufacturing Landscape
I updated my landscape about Industry 4.0 companies and added 30+ companies to the landscape. Anything still missing? Please, let me know. New interesting companies include Hyperganic, Innoactive, Wandelbots and of course Landing.ai.
Thanks to everybody for supporting this newsletter and for sending me interesting links. Again, any input, shares, and feedback are always warmly welcome.
Robin
P.S. I’m back in Munich in 3 weeks. If you have somebody in mind who I should meet there, I would be very happy about any suggestions or intros.
P.P.S. You enjoyed reading this? Please share.