Silicon Valley wants to build highly automated factories from scratch. This startup is betting on the ones America already has.
Harmoni, which makes custom tablets and AI software for factory floors, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, the company told Business Insider exclusively. It declined to disclose its valuation. Harmoni has around 40 customers and expects to add another 10 this month, with aerospace and defense making up its largest customer segment.
The funding comes as the US tries to reindustrialize after years of offshoring. Some startups, including Hadrian and Machina Labs, are building new factories designed to rely heavily on robots and automation. Harmoni, by contrast, is targeting the roughly 280,000 American factories filled with traditional machinery and workers.
“We’ve built this specifically to arm these guys to compete with these autonomous factories,” cofounder David Caputo told Business Insider.
Harmoni, which was founded in 2023, is competing in a crowded market where manufacturers already rely on a patchwork of software. Companies, including MachineMetrics and Datanomix, track machines and production, while other tools track workers, machine maintenance, and the steps required for specific jobs.
Harmoni’s pitch is that factories should not have to stitch all those systems together themselves — a problem Caputo and his cofounder, Adam Ellis, a longtime manufacturing consultant, said they repeatedly encountered while working with factories.
At the center of Harmoni’s system are custom tablets that attach magnetically to factory machines and can connect with equipment ranging from modern systems to machines built during World War II. Workers can use the tablets to clock in, pull up instructions, track jobs, and report problems from one place.
Shokoufeh Mirzaei, chair and professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at Cal Poly Pomona, said large companies like Amazon are far ahead on automation, while many small and midsize US factories lack basic analytics and run on technology that predates the internet.
“We find the average factory is behind the automation curve and they use very old, legacy systems,” Mirzaei told Business Insider. Many manufacturers are reluctant to replace expensive equipment, she said, but are open to retrofitting existing machines.
‘Speak to the machines’
Caputo first saw how much factory work remained manual more than a decade ago after leaving investment banking to start a firm that invests in manufacturers. The first time he walked a factory floor, he panicked.
“I remember walking around the shop floor and thinking, ‘Oh my God, I made a mistake,'” Caputo said. Workers were lining up to clock in one by one, carrying USB sticks containing the programs needed to operate the machines. “This can’t be how things are being done,” he said.
After failing to find software that tied together the machines, workers, and processes on the factory floor, Caputo teamed up with Ellis in 2020 to build it themselves.
Harmoni is now adding AI to its existing system. Its new product, HAL, uses the information Harmoni collects from its tablets to answer questions and take actions on the factory floor.
Because the system already knows which machine is running, what job is underway, and what happened on previous runs, workers can ask HAL questions without first supplying that context. A worker could ask why a machine is running more slowly than expected, tell HAL to file a maintenance request, or flag the issue for the next operator. Caputo said that HAL allows workers to “literally speak to the machines.”
WessDel, a San Jose manufacturer that makes precision components for aerospace and defense companies, has used Harmoni since 2024. Before Harmoni, workers had to line up at three different kiosks to clock in and manually enter information about their machines — tasks that Jeff McKay, WessDel’s vice president, said could take nearly an hour of a worker’s day. Now, workers can badge in by tapping their ID cards on Harmoni’s tablets, which also automatically record machine activity.
William Melek, a University of Waterloo engineering professor and director of its RoboHub, said tools like Harmoni’s could help manufacturers cope with long-term labor shortages. A Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute study estimates US manufacturers could need 3.8 million additional workers by 2033, with about half of those jobs potentially going unfilled. Still, Melek said, technologies that automate parts of factory work could also draw pushback from unions concerned about their impact on jobs.
Caputo said Harmoni is designed for factories that will continue to rely on people, with the goal of cutting repetitive administrative tasks rather than reducing head count. Many of Harmoni’s customers, he added, already struggle to find enough workers.
Some believe factory floors could eventually be staffed by humanoid robots. If that happens, Caputo said, Harmoni’s system could coordinate them too. But he thinks that future is still a long way off.
“The technology is just not there yet,” he said.
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