Issue #46 - The Future of Manufacturing
Special edition: big update on my Industry 4.0 landscape and recap of H1 2023.
👋 Welcome to Issue #46 👋
Hey there!
I hope you are enjoying your summer holidays.
As promised to many of you, I’ve updated my Industry 4.0 landscape which you can find at the end of this newsletter and in my blog post Industry 4.0 — Reinventing the Factory Stack. I’ve also summarized the market development of the past 6 months and some trends that I’m seeing in this newsletter edition.
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Best,
Robin
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II. Development in H1 2023 👇
Below is a recap of what happened in the manufacturing tech industry in the first half of 2023. What's your view? I’m curious to hear your take on it and any other comments.
🔥 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐭
Generative AI
Semiconductor & batteries
Subsidies & Inflation Reduction Act
ESG data
👎 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐡𝐨𝐭
Cohort based courses
Industrial metaverse
Offshoring (cont’d)
Blockchain (cont’d)
𝐎𝐧 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐬 & VCs
💰Fundraising: while the bar has increased, industrial startups continue to raise money in the current climate. I’ve seen fundraising rounds getting done from pre-seed to Series A/B but definitely at lower terms. Fundraising processes take longer and investors are doing much more due-diligence (again). And that’s good.
🚀 AI: there is an increasing interest in industrial startups that leverage AI and computer vision. Some recent examples include Deltia, Squint, and Inbolt.
💰VCs: investors continue to be interested in investing in manufacturing technology, especially if it is in the area of AI and robotics or if it is related to ClimateTech.
On acquisitions & IPOs
🤑 Acquisitions: Very few acquisitions happened in the first half of 2023 and I don’t see this changing in the next 6 months. Given the tight financing market and budgets, I don’t expect that we will see many acqui-hires either.
🔔 IPOs: No IPOs happened so far in 2023. Industrial startups that used SPACs in 2021 have suffered badly and some have raised more money to survive.
☠️ Shut-down: I’ve noticed the first shut downs of early-stage industrial startups that were not able to secure their next financing round. I expect this to increase in the second half of this year, unfortunately.
𝐎𝐧 𝐡𝐲𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐬 (Amazon Microsoft Google)
🤑 Public cloud spending continues to increase. While AWS dominates North America, Microsoft is leading in the EMEA region. Both could win large industrial clients in the past few years.
👩💻 Hyperscalers are investing heavily in AI solutions to win and upsell their solutions in the enterprise world.
𝐎𝐧 𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐮𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐫𝐬
⚙️ Capex investments: large industrial companies are setting up new factories, often heavily subsidized by the local government. This happens strongly in the US due to the Inflation Reduction Act but also in other Western countries such as Germany.
🤖 Automation: low-cost robots find increasingly adoption among SMBs and SMEs. Given the labor shortage, low cost robots are a great way to increase the productivity of the existing workforce. US companies ordered 11% more robots in 2022 than in the previous year.
Recent 100 additions by category
I’ve looked at the recent 100 companies that I’ve added to the landscape. Below is an overview of them by category. As you can see, the biggest category is Analytics & Efficiency (29.7%), followed by Robotics (17.8%), Shopfloor Guidance (10.9%) and Inspection (10.9%). This data underlines the observations mentioned above.
III. A big update on my Industry 4.0 Landscape
I just updated my Industry 4.0 Landscape in July 2023. There are nearly 600 active startups in this landscape. Click on the link below for a larger version.
If you think there is something missing, then please let me know.
You can find the landscape in high-resolution as a .pdf here:
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