The US manufacturing industry is at a crossroads: try catching the leaders where they are or beat them to where the industry is headed.
Edward Mehr sits firmly in the second camp. The thesis of his robotics-enabled manufacturing startup, Machina Labs, is that America’s reindustrialization needs to be distributed and flexible. Trying to build the centralized, traditional factories China has perfected is a lost cause.
“It’s going to be a miracle to catch up if you want to replicate what they have,” Mehr told me.
“It’s just not the right chess move. We need to try to see if we can leapfrog and then do the next generation.”
We’re still in the early stages of robotics in factories. Mehr said the industry is still five years away from a major, ChatGPT-like breakthrough. But there’s no shortage of companies giving it a go, including giants such as Tesla and Amazon.
The opportunity is huge, with the manufacturing industry accounting for trillions of dollars. It’s also a brutal business to break into. If a robot doesn’t immediately help you cut costs or improve efficiencies, there’s not much point pursuing it any further. (Example: Amazon’s recent “Blue Jay” warehouse robot.)
Machina Labs, which specializes in producing complex metal structures for the defense, aerospace, and automotive industries, sees its value-add on two fronts. Its robots can switch between different manufacturing operations, saving the time it would take to retool a factory to produce a new product. It’s also portable, meaning there’s no need to custom-design factories for specific productions.
The space is crowded, and Mehr acknowledged that competitors are also pursuing portability or flexibility, but typically not both.
“We’re almost rethinking a lot of the manufacturing processes from scratch,” he said. “If you go to our factory, things are being built in a way that you cannot see in any other place.”
Like many robotics players, Machina Labs now needs to prove its thesis at scale.
The company raised a $124 million Series C round earlier this month from investors including Lockheed Martin Ventures and Toyota’s venture arm. It’ll use that cash to build a new 200,000-square-foot factory.
The factory will feature 50 robots and initially serve Lockheed Martin. The goal is to produce a few thousand structures every year. That’s a significant step up from its current factory, which runs 10 robots and has an annual production of a few hundred.
But what about the humans? Tensions are already high around AI’s impact on white-collar jobs. Are blue-collar workers headed to a similar fate?
Machina Labs’ new factory will include about 150 human workers, which Mehr said is roughly equivalent to the number of humans who’d work at a robot-free factory. The work is different, but no one seems to be complaining.
Mehr said a recent internal survey found that employees’ interest level in the job was exceptionally high. (So much for AI fatigue!)
“You’re working with robots. You’re working with software. Compared to previously, you had these instructions. You’d follow it daily, over and over again,” he said. “Now, you almost feel like you’re playing a game.”
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