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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 frontrunner in “software-defined manufacturing,” final week introduced that it has raised $126 million in Collection C funding. This brings the San Francisco-based firm’s complete funding up to now to $400 million.
Shiny Machines mentioned it can use the most recent funding to launch product improvements, increase 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 old, inflexible techniques; disparate and fragmented provide chains; and an total lack of requirements throughout the worth chain,” said 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“Presently, electronics manufacturing is outdated.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 sometimes finished 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 site visitors jam.”
The firm was based in 2018 by business veterans who noticed a singular alternative to resolve 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 supplies centralized knowledge visibility, traceability, efficiency benchmarking, and versatile automation.
Shiny Machines mentioned it makes use of pc 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, invaluable knowledge 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 knowledge community to supply digital design suggestions to shorten merchandise’ time to market.
By uniting this knowledge community with agile robotics, modeling, and simulation, Shiny Machines mentioned it could 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 might help harvest and recycle parts, 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 kind 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 quicker 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 remedy a really troublesome, however essential problem to fulfill 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, “however it additionally highlights the extraordinary stress that enormous cloud-compute suppliers are dealing with to scale AI infrastructure throughout compute, knowledge storage, and associated community capabilities to fulfill rising demand.”
“By collaborating with know-how 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 means of each step of the method, proper by means of to the circularity of recycling,” Susan mentioned.
“As optimized manufacturing techniques are quicker, extra resilient, and extra environment friendly than their handbook counterparts, our prospects are extra aggressive when it comes to 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 techniques how you can construct electronics, the chance to redefine how we are going to design and construct electronics is limitless.”
The firm, which has greater than 200 workers 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.
