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Shiny Machines says its full-stack system integrates software program and robotics to ship high-quality merchandise. | Supply: Shiny Machines
Shiny Machines Inc., which claims to be a pacesetter in “software-defined manufacturing,” final week introduced that it has raised $126 million in Sequence C funding. This brings the San Francisco-based firm’s whole funding to this point to $400 million.
Shiny Machines mentioned it’s going to use the most recent funding to launch product improvements, broaden its software program stack for elevated meeting flexibility, and develop strategic relationships with ecosystem companions.
“Adopting ecosystem-wide, software-defined manufacturing processes will ease the mounting burden from the business’s greatest challenges, together with a scarcity of expert workforce; growing older, inflexible methods; disparate and fragmented provide chains; and an total lack of requirements throughout the worth chain,” acknowledged Lior Susan, govt chairman and CEO and govt chairman at Shiny Machines.
Shiny Machines sees alternative for extra environment friendly meeting
“Presently, electronics manufacturing is outdated. It’s usually carried out manually, with remoted, inefficient processes that drive up prices,” asserted Shiny Machines. “With the proliferation of AI driving up demand for compute energy and AI {hardware}, the business faces a bottleneck throughout dozens of fragmented distributors that causes a provide chain visitors jam.”
The firm was based in 2018 by business veterans who noticed a singular alternative to unravel this bottleneck. Shiny Machines mentioned it’s taking a data-focused method to electronics manufacturing with robotics and software program. It mentioned its “full-stack” system gives centralized information visibility, traceability, efficiency benchmarking, and versatile automation.
Shiny Machines mentioned it makes use of laptop imaginative and prescient, machine studying, and software program in its synthetic intelligence spine for automated meeting. This AI {hardware} infrastructure can remodel how merchandise are designed and manufactured, it mentioned.
Digital ecosystem helps continuous enchancment
In Shiny Machine’s digital ecosystem, worthwhile information is consistently generated and communicated to a central hub, creating an engine for continuous optimization. Its Design from Automated Meeting (DFAA) software depends on this information community to offer digital design suggestions to shorten merchandise’ time to market.
By uniting this information community with agile robotics, modeling, and simulation, Shiny Machines mentioned it might probably help “microfactories” and trendy factories that exceed what conventional factories can obtain.
As well as, the corporate mentioned its robots use algorithms to make sure high quality management and traceability throughout meeting inspection. As soon as merchandise attain their finish of life, the corporate mentioned its versatile disassembly capabilities will help harvest and recycle elements, attaining full round manufacturing.
Shiny Machines will get help from NVIDIA, Microsoft, and extra
Within the spherical, $106 million in fairness was led by funding type funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. This additionally included participation from NVIDIA, Microsoft, Eclipse, Jabil, and Shinhan Securities. The opposite $20 million got here within the type of enterprise debt from J.P. Morgan.
“The demand for AI is catalyzing a metamorphosis in electronics manufacturing. Provide chains and manufacturing and meeting processes are being redesigned to drive sooner product innovation and time to market,” mentioned Matt Singer, managing director of BlackRock. “With blue-chip business leaders fixing on Shiny Machine’s software-defined options, the crew is uniquely positioned to speed up automation inside the manufacturing business and clear up a really troublesome, however crucial problem to satisfy the tempo of innovation and ship tangible ROI [return on investment] for companies.”
Shiny Machines mentioned this funding spherical not solely helps its imaginative and prescient, “nevertheless it additionally highlights the extreme strain that enormous cloud-compute suppliers are going through to scale AI infrastructure throughout compute, information storage, and associated community capabilities to satisfy growing demand.”
“By collaborating with expertise leaders resembling NVIDIA and Microsoft, Shiny Machines can ship versatile, built-in, and clever manufacturing options to our prospects, beginning with DFAA and persevering with – with unprecedented visibility – by way of each step of the method, proper by way of to the circularity of recycling,” Susan mentioned.
“As optimized manufacturing methods are sooner, extra resilient, and extra environment friendly than their handbook counterparts, our prospects are extra aggressive by way of price, their merchandise’ time-to-market, and buyer delight,” he mentioned. “And in a world the place we will now use AI and software program to show robotics methods the way to construct electronics, the chance to redefine how we’ll design and construct electronics is limitless.”
The firm, which has greater than 200 staff worldwide, lately introduced an integration and go-to-market partnership with Microsoft Azure. The companions mentioned this can allow an accessible, environment friendly, and data-driven manufacturing course of for electronics producers.
