Issue #6 - The Future of Manufacturing
Welcome to Issue #6. This issue focuses on autonomous mobile robots, IoT data platforms, automating CNC machines and current trends in the German startup landscape among others.
🔥🔥🔥 I'm writing this newsletter for 6 months now and just wanted to quickly say thanks to all the 500 subscribers 🔥🔥🔥
I hope you enjoy reading it and if you do so, any feedback, shares or links are much appreciated 🙏
Disclaimer: thoughts and opinions expressed in the newsletter are my own.
What I enjoyed reading
🤖 Forbes published an overview of mobile robots where they highlight the differences between automated guided vehicles (AGVs) which carry goods from A to B on predetermined paths and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) which can take several routes from A to B depending on obstacles or congestions. There are quite a lot of startups in the area of AMRs that raised a significant amount of money such as Fetch Robotics ($48M), 6River Systems ($46M) and Geek+ ($62M). I recently had a good conversation with Frederik, the CEO of the Munich-based robotics startup Magazino. In his view, the market for AGVs is quite competitive and decreasing hardware costs lower the barrier to entry.
🧐 The Economist summarizes the current trend in the German startup landscape from e-commerce and to the emphasis on science and manufacturing. To name a few examples, they are highlighting Lilium, Konux or Navvis (all Munich-based btw). Berlin remains the center for entrepreneurs but other German cities are catching up and we are also seeing this in our deal flow, especially for B2B. On top of this, Munich-based Celonis, the leading process mining software, just announced that their existing investors – Accel and 83North – doubled down on the company and invested an additional $50M Series B on a $1bn valuation, adding another Unicorn the European landscape. I’m particularly excited that they can serve as a role model for more Enterprise SaaS companies in Munich and other German and European regions of course.
🤓 Prasad Akella who is the founder and CEO of Drishti, an industrial startup that I covered in my newsletter, underlines in his recent article why he doesn’t expect that robots will significantly replace humans in factories anytime soon. In his eyes, there are mainly three reasons:
1) the robot population is not growing fast. The International Federation of Robotics estimates there will be 3M robots in 2020 up from 1.8M in 2016.
2) robots have limits when it comes to mass customization and
3) it takes a lot of resources from programmers to process engineers to run the robots in the factory.
🎙️ This is a bit out of scope but here is a Tweetstorm by Suhail, the founder of Mixpanel, which is pure gold and I highly recommend every early-stage founder to read his learnings. These learnings include:
1) focus: Your first 5 hires will be the difference between life or death. Choose carefully. Be picky.
2) the importance of the early hires: Your first 5 hires will be the difference between life or death. Choose carefully. Be picky.
3) flat growth at the beginning and low burn: Growth may be flat for the first 9 months. It's gonna be okay. Almost every company has experienced this: Airbnb had to sell cereal in-between, Slack failed as a gaming company first, Tesla sold only 147 cars after 6 years!
About industrial Startups and Companies
🤖 I have seen a bunch of startups that are trying to combine cameras, sensors and computer vision to make robots more intelligent and teach them how to pick and place items. When I was visiting Osaro in their office last year I was quite amazed by how far they have already come with their technology (here is a recent sneak preview from Hannover Messe). This MIT Technology Review article highlights the potential of such AI-equipped robots for pick and place and other Sisyphean tasks and takes Osaro as an example.
🤑 The IoT data platform Cratescored a big Series A and just raised $11M lead by US-based Zetta Venture Partners which are well-known for their AI-focused investments.
Since many industrial companies are betting on Microsoft Azure already, I think it makes complete sense that Crate launched its first hosted offering on Azure.
The company has $1M annual run rate and 30 customers so it looks like this could be a good benchmark – besides the technology of course – what is needed to get investors exciting.
🏭 London-based and EntrepreneurFirst alumni CloudNCraised a £9M Series lead by Atomico. The company is trying to automate the programming of CNC milling machines which is still a very manual and timely process. I’m pretty excited to see that growth investors such as Atomico are also getting very excited about industrial startups and I think there is more to come.
Additional thoughts on recent development
Engineering Tools: CAD, CAE and Simulation Software
I talked to a bunch of entrepreneurs who are building products in the areas of CAD, CAE, and simulation. One interesting observation is that there haven't been many big exits in the last years. The most notable was probably Solidworks that got acquired by Dassault Systems 20 years ago. Besides OnShape and SimScale there are not many startups that have raised more than $10M. If you are an entrepreneur building a company in the CAD, CAE and simulation space, I'd love to hear from you.
You will find a great overview of CAD and CAE tools and the consolidation and acquisitions overtime here.
Enterprise Sales Reading Material
I'm looking for the best articles about Enterprise Sales including insights about lead qualification and sales processes. If you have any links, please share them with me.
Industrial Landscape
It took me quite some time but I did a big update on my industrial landscape and added more than 30 companies last month. The biggest increase has been in Robotics, Analytics / Efficiency and Predictive Maintenance. There are now ca. 200 companies in the landscape (see below).
Thanks to everybody for supporting this newsletter and for sending me interesting links. As always, any input, shares, and feedback are always warmly welcome 🙏
Robin
P.S. I will be in Stockholm and Munich in July, let me know if you want to meet.
P.P.S. I will do a coaching session at Daho.am in case this is interesting for you.