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Interesting Links

• Tesla’s Cybertruck body repair manual is a useful counterpoint to the open repairability question around gigacasting. If you replace several dozen stamped and welded parts with a few giant aluminum castings, does local damage become a total-loss event? The answer appears to be, treat the casting less like a sacred monolith and more like any other structural part: cut out the damaged section, bond and rivet in a replacement piece, and use a crash-durable adhesive like Fusor 2098 to restore the joint. Using glue may sound odd, but adhesives in automotives are not new; they’ve become standard fixtures in the assembly/repair playbook especially as more OEMs mix aluminum, steel, and composites in the same structure. The more interesting move is treating a gigacasting as a sectionable part. Depending on the damage location, a technician can cut areas like the rear end, underbody, or larger casting sections, then bond and rivet in a donor piece. Interestingly enough, the castings already come with sectioning reference lines molded directly into the part.

  • A bit more about crash-durable adhesives: Fusor 2098 is rated at 22 MPa (3,200 psi) tensile strength, and belongs to a broader category of two-part automotive repair epoxies. JerryRigEverything has a great demo showing why the word “glue” undersells what these materials are capable of, by literally lifting his Cybertruck with a single 2.5-inch glued joint.

• In 2014, Google and IEEE hosted a competition called The Little Box Challenge, offering $1M to anyone who could pack a 2 kW power inverter into under 40 cubic inches, about one tenth the state-of-the-art at the time. The Little Box Challenge, 10 Years Later asks what that prize money actually produced, and the answer is: no breakthrough in the traditional sense, but a revitalization of power electronics that led to surprising innovations in other areas. One group pulled the flying-capacitor topology long stuck in academia back into the running, betting that gallium-nitride (GaN) switches had matured, magnetics would be the limit on density, and computation and sensing could now handle the topology’s complexity. That design didn’t win, but a separate entry’s work on the ceramic-capacitor losses behind the 120 Hz ripple buffer later carried over to full-sine motor drives. Not all progress is direct in academia (or life), but curious exploration out in the open can become a public good.

• If you’ve ever managed a shared CAD folder out of Google Drive, you already understand the basic premise behind PDM/PLM even if you’ve never heard the acronyms before. At some point, the problem stops being file storage and becomes product control. How PLM works: a primer for engineers to top managers (or anyone, really) is a good plain English explainer of how those acronyms map to the real work around keeping files, part numbers, revisions, BOMs, approvals, and supplier handoffs tied to the same version of reality. PDM, or product data management, is the engineering layer: the vault, metadata, revision history, and parent-child relationships behind a CAD assembly. PLM, or product lifecycle management, extends that discipline past engineering into manufacturing, supply chain, quality, and the outside organizations that eventually have to build the product.

• Architecture of Consoles is an architecture and board-level archive of nearly every video game console ever made, starting from 1983 to 2012. In retrospect, some of these designs probably never should have seen the light of day, but the early race to commercialize gaming produced a few truly novel attempts to win the market. In the “fifth generation” of consoles in the mid-1990s, 3D was the new frontier, so every company made a different bet. Nintendo’s was the Virtual Boy, which faked stereoscopic depth by sweeping a single column of red LEDs across each eye with a mirror oscillating fifty times per second. It sold 770,000 units and halted production after a year.

• A 2026 version of the old Southern California aerospace corridor, shifting from primes into new-age startups and neoprimes. Click here for the interactive version, along with more regional maps like the Bay Area and Seattle.

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Startup News

• Standard Bots raised a $200M Series C round at a $1B valuation to scale U.S. built industrial robots. The company manufactures industrial robot arms that can be taught by demonstration, targeting factory tasks like machining, welding, palletizing, assembly, and inspection. They’re expanding its Glen Cove, New York facility to 70,000 sq ft and says it is on pace to deliver 10% of new U.S. industrial robot deployments by next year. The round was led by RoboStrategy, with participation from General Catalyst.

• Podium Automation raised a $18M Series A round to scale quick-turn manufacturing for industrial control panels, the electrical cabinets that control factory equipment and other automated systems. The Brooklyn startup uses software to connect customer requirements, eCAD design, component selection, and UL 508A validation, cutting panel lead times from 12+ weeks to under 4. Construct Capital led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Transition Ventures, Sunflower Capital, and Banter Capital.

• Fabri raised $13.5M in total funding to build a more automated approach to investment casting, the old foundry process used for complex metal parts. The MIT spinout uses 3D-printed wax patterns and production software to cut down on the labor-heavy parts of casting, especially mold prep and post-cast rework (read Issue #110 for a primer on the general methodology). Fabri is already shipping castings to customers including Lockheed Martin and RTX, and is setting up a second foundry targeted for full production in 2027.

• NOX METALS raised an $11.5M seed round to expand domestic metal supply for U.S. manufacturers. The company says it has shipped metal to hundreds of American factories since launching production seven months ago. The round was led by Hyperion, with participation from Palmer Luckey, Y Combinator, RoboStrategy, Operator Collective, and others.

• Neura Robotics raised a Series C round of up to $1.4B for humanoid robots, with the full amount reportedly tied to performance milestones. The Germany-based company is now one of Europe’s biggest robotics bets, with backing from a mix of U.S. tech giants and European industrial players like Nvidia, Amazon, Bosch, and Schaeffler.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Whoop is looking for an Embedded Engineer in Boston, MA

Mid-Level:

• Rivian is looking for a Product Design Engineer (Charging Products) in Torrance, CA

• Hadrian is looking for a Process Engineer (Sheet Metal Manufacturing, Special Projects) in Los Angeles, CA

Senior to Staff:

• Vast is looking for a Director of Satellite Engineering in Long Beach, CA

• OpenAI is looking for an Electrical Engineer, Robotics in San Francisco, CA

Internships:

• Tesla is looking for a Climate Controls Calibration Intern (Fall 2026) in Palo Alto, CA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Interesting Overview: Starlink's Phased Array Antenna

Internet access is near ubiquitous, yet it’s still surprisingly young infrastructure. It feels like a utility, something so embedded in daily life that you only notice it when it disappears. But unlike water, power, or gas, its quality still varies wildly depending on where you live, and the infrastructure is still early enough to be actively rewritten in real-time.

Short of deorbiting a satellite, the most interesting piece of Starlink that users can get their hands on is the user terminal, and this is one of the best technical breakdowns of how ‘Dishy McFlatface’ steers a beam at a satellite crossing the sky at 27,000 km/h.

Before Starlink, phased array antennas mostly lived in applications where cost wasn’t the binding constraint. Think applications like military radar, maritime terminals, or niche commercial satcom products running tens of thousands of dollars per unit. The reason is visible once Dishy is opened (and also why SpaceX subsidizes the terminal): it’s a 55 cm PCB covered with 1,280 small patch antennas, arranged in a hexagonal grid and coordinated by front-end modules and beamforming chips. A normal satellite dish points by moving the whole reflector, whereas a phased array antenna like Dishy points by coordinating many small antennas so they behave like one larger antenna.

There are finer points to the physics worth reading slowly, and Curtis does them full justice: flat patch antennas on the PCB, phase shifting to electronically steer a beam, and how tiny antennas constructively interfere into a signal 3,500 times stronger than any one of them alone.

A related note, in the same vein of how impossible businesses can become ordinary technology, is this perspective from Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and COO:

“I think engineers think better when they’re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time, with very few resources. Not when you have twenty years,” Shotwell said. “I don’t think there’s a motivation or a drive there.”

More From Around The Web

• Andrew McCalip, Varda’s head of R&D, went viral this week for building an ad network on Claude Code’s progress bar.

• A collection of founder horror stories from VC pitch meetings.

• Lego continues to be the most useful medium for explaining mechanical principles.

• A DIY elevator for a shop loft. The full build instructions, and companion video.

• More related to Starlink: a black-box security evaluation of the user terminal.

• Mapping WHOOP data to calendar meetings to rank the most stressful coworkers.

Presented by Jiga: Manufacturing ≠ Transactions

Source custom parts with direct access to the manufacturers making them. No middleman, no black box. Jiga gives you a vetted network and one accountable partner standing behind every order. You know who's building your parts and communicate with them directly. AI-assisted operations handle supplier matching, quoting, quality verification, and production tracking, so the relationships stay human while the operations run at speed.

Interesting Diagram: Black Magic Design

A chaotic web of circles known as the Smith chart, that’s really a map to see how impedance changes along a transmission line and how much signal will reflect back.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Endurance Energy raised $54M in Series A funding to build offshore geothermal power plants that turn seafloor heat into baseload electricity.

• One of the first public examples of an unmanned surface vessel doing operational work for the Navy was a Saronic Corsair recovering two Apache crew members near the Strait of Hormuz.

• Reaxiomatic raised $7.25M in pre-seed funding for a stealth aerospace/defense hardware startup led by former Hermeus co-founder Skyler Shuford.

• Orbital raised $5M in pre-seed funding to build AI data centers in low Earth orbit, starting with a 2027 Pathfinder mission.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Interesting Links

• Application notes occupy a strange and useful corner of engineering writing. Simply defined, these are technical guides from component makers showing engineers how to design real circuits around their parts: equal parts practical, specific, occasionally funny, and one of the few places where the author is still allowed to sound like a person. At their best, they read like a senior engineer passing craft to an apprentice they will never meet, with some of the most memorable application notes now cultural artifacts of the early analog era. Jim Williams’ Switching Regulators for Poets: A Gentle Guide for the Trepidatious is one of the great examples that is a guide to the LT1070 switching regulator family, but really about making a feared circuit topology approachable to engineers. Williams walks through five working circuits of increasing difficulty: a 5V-to-12V boost, two –48V telecom supplies (one isolated through a transformer, one not), a 100W off-line switcher that rectifies the AC wall outlet directly, and a pair of loops driving a small motor and a Peltier cooler.

  • A switching regulator converts one DC voltage to another (up, down, or across an isolation barrier) by rapidly switching a transistor and using an inductor to transfer energy between input and output. More efficient than the linear regulators they replaced and common in nearly every modern electronic device; has a reputation for being difficult to design.

• SPICE, or ‘Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis’, began in the early 1970s at Berkeley as a circuit simulation program for analog electronics, and over time became part of the default workflow for circuit design. Describe a circuit in software, and it will tell you what the circuit should do before you build the thing on a bench. What’s All This Spicey Stuff, Anyhow? is Bob Pease’s four-part monologue about what was lost in that transition, and a warning against the seemingly innocuous habit of letting tools do your thinking for you. The broader point isn’t that SPICE was useless, but with newer and better tools it becomes easier to mistake output for understanding (think CAD, FEA, autorouters, now AI copilots). Every generation gets its own version of this trap that boil down to the same truth: tools should confirm your understanding, not generate it.

Once, a customer called me up and asked me how to get my LM108s to stop oscillating in his circuit. He explained it was a simulated LM108 with some simulated feedback resistors, and simulated switches and filters. Hmmmm. I asked if he has made up a breadboard, and if it oscillated. He said he had made it and it didn’t oscillate. Hmmmm. I asked him, “If you build up a breadboard and a computer model, and the real breadboard oscillated, but the computer did not, you wouldn’t be calling up to complain, would you?” He stopped and thought about it. He cogitated for a while. He said, “I’ll call you back.” And he hung up. He never did call back. I mean, what would you do?

• Bill Hammack, better known as The Engineer Guy, has another instant classic on the engineering behind bicycle helmets. A helmet has three jobs: prevent penetration, reduce peak impact force, and, in newer designs, limit rotational acceleration of the skull. The outer shell protects against sharp objects and keeps the foam intact while the expanded polystyrene liner (same material family as packing peanuts, much denser in helmet designs) does the real work by crushing on impact and spreading the impulse over a longer period of time. Most of the wave/honeycomb inner shells that protect from rotational injury make use of auxetic structures that crumple and fold in selective directions — a property that, unlike regular hexagonal meshes, also allows them to conform to the curved surface of a human head.

• The Toyota Production System (TPS) Basic Handbook is a 33-page primer on the ideas that became modern lean manufacturing, before half of them were converted into conference room names and corporate manufacturing theater. Just-in-Time (JIT) was coined by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937 because Toyota was too poor to carry excess inventory or equipment; the discipline means producing only what’s needed, when it’s needed, in the quantity needed. Jidoka, the system’s second pillar, is centered around the idea that automation makes intelligent decisions. Machines are designed to stop themselves at the first sign of trouble rather than keep running and compounding the defect. That automatic stop frees operators from monitoring duty and puts them to higher-leverage work. The core idea is to design the system so problems surface immediately, then fix the cause instead of padding the process with inventory, labor, or hidden workarounds.

• We highly recommend reading Casey Handmer’s Career Development Guide for Job Seekers in full. It’s written from the perspective of a former NASA/JPL engineer turned startup founder at Terraform, and is full of truthful career nuggets you rarely hear stated plainly.

Working at NASA (or any other company that’s big or old enough to have recursive process control meta-documents) has institutionalized you. If you insist on only working at companies with processes compatible to the very peculiar way things were done at JPL, you are cutting yourself off from 99.999% of the opportunity described in the previous paragraph. Therefore, to have the best chance of turning your career around in a productive way, you need to recognize this fact and take active measures to de-institutionalize yourself with maximum urgency and maximum effort.

• And one fun link to round out the week:

  • Testing the most popular 3D prints on MakerWorld - the standout is this standby dock for iPhones.

• A quick question for you: would you watch video podcasts/interviews from our team, or should we stick to writing and go even deeper? I’ve been increasingly tempted by expanding formats, but keep coming back to a line Dwarkesh wrote in his podcast strategy doc — if he, as a host, can’t extract real insight from hours of conversation, the audience won’t either.

Presented by Onshape: Professional Access, 6 Months Free

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Startup News

• PhysicsX raised $300M in Series C funding at a ~$2.4B valuation to expand its AI engineering simulation platform. The London-based startup builds models that predict how physical systems behave, letting aerospace, automotive, and semiconductor teams test design changes faster than conventional simulation workflows. The company expects revenue close to $50M this year and counts Applied Materials, Siemens, and Stellantis as customers. Temasek led the round, with Nvidia and Applied Materials returning as investors.

• Westmag emerged from stealth with $11M in seed funding to manufacture drone motors and robot actuators in the U.S. The company is ramping production in South SF, where it designs, winds, assembles, and tests motors and actuators on a shared production platform. Westmag says it already has committed customer orders for hundreds of thousands of units and is investing upstream in stator steel stamping and rare earth magnet finishing. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with Founders Fund, Lux Capital, NFDG, and Menlo Ventures participating.

• Red Metals raised $10M in seed funding to recover copper from scrap and turn it directly into copper rod. The Charleston-based startup is building a $70M facility in South Carolina that will sort copper from discarded products like electric motors and wiring, then skip several intermediate refining steps normally used in mined copper production. Red Metals says the U.S. collects roughly 1.6M metric tons of copper scrap annually, compared with about 2M metric tons of new copper demand, and plans to build its own supply chain from consumers, data centers, and other large scrap sources. Gigascale Capital led the round.

• Mach Industries raised $300M in Series C funding to scale production of autonomous defense systems. The company has five systems in development, including a jet-powered VTOL aircraft, high-altitude weapons glider, airborne surveillance platform, low-cost counter-drone interceptor, and long-range munitions launcher. Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital led the round.

• Helion raised $465M in Series G funding to build Orion, its first fusion power plant, with a target to deliver electricity to Microsoft as early as 2028. The Washington-based company has now raised $1.5B total and is using the capital to scale manufacturing and move from prototype machines toward commercial deployment. Helion’s reactor uses pulsed magnetic compression, then attempts to convert the expanding plasma’s magnetic-field energy directly into electricity instead of using heat to boil water and spin a turbine. Thrive Capital led the round.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Shinkei is looking for a Build Mechanical Engineer in El Segundo, CA

• Hermeus is looking for a Propulsion Development Engineer in Los Angeles, CA

Mid-Level:

• Snap is looking for an Electrical Signal Integrity Engineer in Boulder, CO

• Doordash is looking for an Electrical Engineer (Dot) in Oakland, CA

Senior to Staff:

• unspun is looking for a Head of Textile Engineering in Emeryville, CA

• Prolific Machines is looking for a Senior Software Platform Engineer in Emeryville, CA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Interesting Presentation: Building a 100 Robot Data Factory

An emergent trend in modern robotics is the premise of a data factory. We usually think of factories as places that turn raw materials into finished goods — think stamped steel into cars, resin into molded parts, silicon into chips. In robotics, a new version of this idea is taking shape, one where the input is robot operation itself and the finished product is training data.

Tutor Intelligence’s Data Factory 1 is a 100 robot farm of bimanual manipulators that the company says collects up to 1,000 hours of demonstration data per day. Each robot has two 6-DoF arms, stereo RGBD cameras on each wrist, and a fleet of remote operators to supervise in real time (one operator per robot, or 1:N) and intervene when a robot gets stuck.

The core bet echoes a familiar lesson from hardware development: you learn best by building and testing things in the real world, not by perfecting them in simulation or on static datasets. The founders framed it as sending robots to kindergarten where operators demonstrate tasks, the robots attempt them autonomously, and when they fail, a human steps in with a correction that gets folded back into the model. The more robots deployed, the faster edge cases surface, and the faster the policies improve.

A related but distinct idea is emerging in life sciences with Medra also operating a fleet of one hundred robots in a dedicated facility. While Tutor’s factory uses robotic arms to produce training data as its finished product, Medra’s approach is to give models a body to work with for wet lab experiments. Similar approaches: one factory outputs data, the other outputs experiments.

Interesting Video: Meditative Machining

Machining ASMR, and a man using a lathe with the confidence of someone who knows exactly which rules are optional.

Interesting Chart: USB-C Power Delivery Basics

USB-C power delivery is a deterministic sequence: two configuration channel pins (CC1 and CC2) detect cable orientation, establish source and sink roles, and bring the connection up safely at 5V. From there, USB PD negotiates higher voltages over the active CC line, and in higher-current cases, also checks the cable’s own rating before allowing more power through.

This is also in part how you end up with a “universal” serial port - the port itself is universal, but what it agrees to do is very much not.

DRCY: AllSpice’s AI Design Review Agent

Meet DRCY, AllSpice’s AI-powered agent built specifically for hardware design reviews. DRCY runs first-pass checks on schematics and datasheets to surface critical errors early, such as config errors, voltage mismatches, and much more. Hardware teams can spend less time on rechecks, more time innovating, and ship with confidence.

Give DRCY a try here.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Layup Parts raised $42M in Series A funding to build a faster quoting and manufacturing workflow for custom carbon fiber and fiberglass parts.

• Terra AI raised $20M in Series A funding to build subsurface modeling software for mining, geothermal, and carbon storage.

• Volition was acquired by Siemens Digital Industries Software, expanding Supplyframe beyond electronics search and sourcing into mechanical and industrial parts.

• Volund Manufacturing raised $12M in seed funding to build small gas turbine engines for drones and low-cost missiles.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Interesting Links

• In honor of the Fitbit Air launch: the wearable accuracy landscape plotted by heart-rate accuracy vs. sleep staging across the major devices. Measured against a chest strap for HR and a Dreem 2 EEG headband for sleep stages.

• Building the American Actuator Company is Parth Ingle’s account of why the hard part of brushless motor production turns out to be the factory, not the motor. Actuator and motor design can feel abstract (especially when dealing with electromagnetics), but the build sequence is less exotic than it sounds. Simply follow the order of operations: 1) machine the housings and rotors, 2) wind the stators, 3) insert the magnets, 4) press-fit the subassemblies and close the motor, 5) run QC. The more interesting engineering lesson is the tooling decision. Saturn’s thesis is that in the medium-complexity production regime, building custom line machinery can outcompete specialized toolmakers, especially when factoring in lead times. An OTS magnet-insertion machine cost $12k+ and took 45 days to ship; their in-house version cost $900 and can dispense glue and push arc magnets into a rotor in about 60 seconds. Their next CNC mill design is expected to cost ~$7k and replace an ~$80k commercial machine. Instead of waiting months or debugging machines they didn’t design, Saturn’s bet is that by owning tooling, they can stand up lines faster and encode the process internally. Equally important, Parth notes that QC and metrology are not areas they want to spend cycles on. Good to know what you don’t know.

• A good argument for synchronous modeling comes from Matt Lombard, a SolidWorks expert best known for the SolidWorks Bible, who spent most of his career writing best-practice guides for the opposite paradigm. Before the recent AI CAD wave, this was the dominant CAD debate: should models preserve the history of how they were built, or should the final geometry be all that matters? History-based CAD treats the feature tree as the source of truth; synchronous modeling treats the geometry as the source of truth. Lombard’s point is that a lot of CAD “best practice” exists to manage the fragility of history-based models. The catch is that the best direct-modeling workflows, especially NX, are usually locked behind enterprise licensing. Plasticity is a tool we’ve heard of in recent conversations that offers the same basic promise: direct modeling for complex CAD, at a fraction of the cost.

“I found models that had all of the history of how a person got to where they were: add some geometry, cut some away, add more, cut more. Every change was a new feature. From a history-based point of view, people who modeled like this looked like idiots. But from an independent point of view, why not? They were just doing what was intuitive. Why should it matter how you got where you are?

When the only method you have is history-based design, you spend a significant amount of effort just making that run properly. But it turns out most of that is unnecessary. Stop worrying about ‘how,’ and put more energy into design. Or just go home earlier every day.”

• A grab bag of useful supplier lists, new prototyping tools, and other things worth checking out:

  • itera.co is a new prototyping tool for building reconfigurable, single-layer circuit boards with liquid metal traces. The technical lineage looks like it follows recent work from the MIT Media Lab and Michael Dickey’s research group at NC State on programmable continuous electrowetting. The basic idea is to move gallium-based liquid-metal droplets across a flat surface using small voltages. Laser-patterned graphene regions on the surface can then make the metal move forward, stop, or reverse direction. In effect, the liquid metal becomes a rewritable trace instead of fixed copper traces. (AJ, the founder, has been a longtime Hardware FYI reader, and we’re especially curious to try it ourselves).

    

  • On supplier lists, see Cove Design’s preferred vendor list (4/26) and partsmadefast.com, a WIP directory for quick-turn manufacturers. Anecdotally, almost every company keeps its own preferred vendor spreadsheet by process. You work with the shops you trust!

  • Matternet’s SPAC filing offers a rare look at the economics of one drone delivery company. 15 years after founding, Matternet did $393k in revenue last year, lost $31M, and is now pursuing a reverse merger to raise another $33M.

• Frontier LLM labs are attempting to prove that cheap symbolic reasoning can transform vast amounts of white collar work. World models are the same bet placed on 3D space, that a model trained to predict how physical scenes evolve can generalize to manipulation the way transformers generalized to language. Chris Paxton’s overview maps three competing families doing this with different architectures and contested names, which is probably the most accurate signal of where the frontier actually sits. The field roughly splits into three camps: action-conditioned world models, which predict future states from robot actions; video world models, which generate the desired future scene and recover actions afterward through inverse dynamics; and joint world-action models, which try to predict the scene and the action together. Many of the approaches use the word “dream”, which is particularly apt for the desired functionality.

Presented by Protolabs: Design for Moldability Toolkit

​​Designing plastic parts for injection molding means balancing cost, quality, and manufacturability, and small geometry decisions can drive big changes in lead time and tooling complexity. Protolabs’ Design for Moldability Toolkit is a practical resource for engineers working through common molding challenges like draft, wall thickness, undercuts, gating, and shut-offs. Protolabs also provides automated design analysis on CAD models to highlight features that can be adjusted before cutting a tool. Use it to reduce quoting advisories and accelerate production readiness. Accelerate your design today.

Startup News

• Itera emerged from stealth with $12M in seed funding to build reconfigurable “fluid circuit boards” that use electrowetting to move liquid metal traces across a glass substrate. The idea is to let engineers test real components on a physically rewired circuit without waiting for another PCB spin. The claim is still early, but the bottleneck is very real: electronics iteration is traditionally gated by board fab, assembly, and bring-up cycles. The round was led by Upfront Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Colle Capital.

• Alfred, a stealth physical AI startup backed by Sam Altman’s Hydrazine Capital, is raising at a $40M valuation. The product is still under development, but the publicly reported pitch appears to be an ‘AI-assisted engineering toolchain’ for shortening R&D cycles across automotive, defense, and robotics. Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, and Chapter One are also backing the round.

• Picogrid raised $45M in Series A funding to build middleware for modern defense systems. The El Segundo startup connects sensors, drones, software, edge compute, and other military systems so operators can field new hardware without rebuilding the network each time. Picogrid says its platform is already deployed with U.S. and allied forces and supports 100+ defense systems from vendors like Skydio, Northrop Grumman, Neros, and others. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round.

• Thea Energy raised $100M in Series B funding to expand manufacturing for its stellarator fusion magnets and begin construction of Eos, its demonstration reactor. The company’s bet is that stellarators (twisted magnetic fusion reactors) can be made more manufacturable by using smaller, software-tuned planar magnets to shape the plasma field inside a simpler reactor geometry. The demonstration reactor is targeted for 2030, with a commercial Helios reactor planned for 2034. U.S. Innovative Technology Fund led the round.

• The U.S. government is reportedly in talks to fund domestic drone companies, including companies like Neros, Unusual Machines, and Performance Drone Works. The proposals under discussion include debt and equity financing, which could give the government ownership stakes in strategic drone suppliers.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Neros is looking for an Electrical Engineer in Torrance, CA

Mid-Level:

• Overland AI is looking for a Mission Success Program Manager in Seattle, WA

• Hadrian is looking for a Manufacturing Engineer, DFM in Los Angeles, CA

Senior to Staff:

• The Exploratorium is looking for an Exhibit Engineer in San Francisco, CA

• OpenAI is looking for an Actuator Design Engineer in San Francisco, CA

Internships:

• Astranis is looking for a Reliability Test Intern (Fall 2026) in San Francisco, CA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Interesting Manufacturing Process: Thermoforming and the Art of the Niche

Last week, a post crossed my feed about a homemade thermoformer used at OAM USA.

The machine caught our attention, and the business behind it was an equally interesting proposition that raised a few questions. What is thermoforming? Who buys these parts? And how seriously should we take the claim that most new U.S. manufacturing businesses can be started for under $25K?

Thermoforming itself is a relatively simple process compared to its more advanced plastic manufacturing counterparts. Instead of injecting molten plastic into a mold, the process starts with an extruded flat sheet of thermoplastic. The sheet is heated until it softens, pulled over into a mold using vacuum, pressure, or a mechanical plug, then cooled until it holds the shape.

The appeal is the relatively low cost of tooling: molds can be made faster and cheaper compared to most plastic tooling, especially for large, thin-walled parts like trays, covers, liners, and enclosures. The tradeoff is limited part geometry, difficulties in maintaining uniform part thickness, and a process that works best when the part is fundamentally a formed shell.

In the context of this discussion, OAM USA maps cleanly to an example with standard use cases. The company makes plastic slip-on panel covers for trucks as a more affordable alternative to conventional rust repair. They started as a custom service at an auto body shop, prototyped with a nearby university, and built their own factory once they couldn’t find a local manufacturer.

Shops that find this kind of niche tend to keep it: older products with strong followings keep generating parts demand long after OEMs lose interest, and the capital floor can be as low as whatever you can invent to solve the problem - in this case, a homemade thermoformer built from a welded steel frame and a vacuum pump.

Useful references: James Throne’s Understanding Thermoforming, plus this shorter Overview of Polymer Processing primer. One textbook even gives the same example in the abstract: aftermarket plastic parts for older vehicles.

More From Around the Web

• On a related note: using thermoforming again, this time for instant-quote plastic packaging.

• A personal essay on getting a circuit tattoo. Part low-pass filter, oscillator, and meditation on why “schematic capture” is a beautiful phrase.

• Blue Origin’s New Glenn static fire explosion. Check out Scott Manley’s reaction to the initial failure and implications on pad damage, future New Glenn launches, and NASA lunar missions.

• Founder reflections on one year of building an engineering software startup for physics modeling. Related: a good argument for slow coding with LLMs.

• Dyson has a farming division now selling strawberries in the UK.

Presented by Jiga: Build Real Supplier Relationships

Most hardware teams are stuck choosing between two bad options: instant-quote platforms that hide suppliers behind a black box, or local shops that hit capacity walls right when you need them most. One trades away relationships for speed. The other offers trust but can’t scale.

Jiga gives you direct access to vetted manufacturers with reliable capacity from prototype through production. You speak directly to the people making your parts. And when you come back, they already know your specs and technical needs. Same shop, same knowledge, consistently reliable quality without starting over every time.

Learn more here. 👇

Interesting Chart: Top CNC Machine Tool Builders

Mapping CNC machine tool builders by revenue.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Shift, an AI data collection startup, launched with a simple proposition: free home cleanings in exchange for egocentric video data of cleaners doing household tasks, captured through a camera-equipped hat and used to train future home robots.

• One of the first indications of what The Bot Co. is building comes from an Airbnb damage lawsuit: a low, wheeled robot with an arm and dual grippers.

• Autodesk agreed to acquire MaintainX for $3.6B, expanding its software suite further into maintenance and operations workflows.

• Stark, a German defense startup, is reportedly seeking €300M at a €2.5B valuation to scale autonomous strike drones and loitering munitions

• Texas released a new automated vehicle registry showing Waymo leading with 577 registered vehicles. Fleet registrations are an imperfect proxy for deployment, but still a useful snapshot of AV activity in the state.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Interesting Links

• Bambu Lab built one of the best consumer 3D printers on the market, partly by standing on top of the open-source slicer ecosystem. A firmware update last year added an Authorization Control System that gated third-party slicers behind Bambu Connect, turning a workflow change into an open-source licensing fight. The backlash now has two useful artifacts: a GitHub fork of OrcaSlicer/Bambu Studio that restores the blocked third-party workflows, and Louis Rossmann daring Bambu to do something about it. The old workflow was mostly local where users model and slice, send the file over LAN or SD card, and print. The new workflow pushes more of that process through Bambu’s software and cloud infrastructure, giving the company visibility into print activity and leverage over which third-party tools are allowed to work. The legal hook is AGPLv3 Section 10: Bambu Studio derives from PrusaSlicer, itself a Slic3r fork, and the license forbids adding further restrictions on the rights it grants. The Software Freedom Conservancy has also opened a formal investigation and launched Baltobu, a reverse-engineering project targeting Bambu’s proprietary networking layer. Great hardware can create captive audiences, but post-purchase restrictions are exactly how companies turn the most loyal customers into the people maintaining forks around it.

• A year and a half ago, we shared Jim Belosic’s A Bootstrapper’s Guide to ReIndustrializing America, one of the best operator-written pieces on building a manufacturing business from the shop floor up. The advice was less about industrial policy and more about access; make modern equipment easier to buy and finance, easier to operate, and people can build real businesses around it. The WSJ follow-up lands as a clean Part II: SendCutSend just raised $110M after demand started outrunning the bootstrap playbook. The company has been running 35,000+ overtime hours, maxing out credit lines to add equipment, and looking at new facilities where real capacity is no longer a $500K machine purchase but a mid-eight-figure buildout. A good reminder on raising capital from leverage, not urgency - I’ve said no to VC inquiries for years now. We’re profitable, I didn’t need the money, and we were just barely keeping up with demand. I was never desperate. When you’re desperate, that’s when you get into bed with the wrong people and end up giving half your company away.

• A code-trained AI model can inspect a Git repo, read the commit history, modify a function, and run the tests; given a STEP file, the same model gets something much dumber: a sealed B-Rep solid with no parameters, no history, and no obvious way to recover design intent. Benjamin Hall’s argument is that the future of CAD is open because models need source, history, and feedback loops, not sealed solids. Zoo’s KittyCAD Language is the cleanest version of the upstream half: a text-based, parametric DSL that compiles to B-Rep geometry, while the kernel layer remains mostly proprietary. Blake Courter’s Omega work at Gradient Control Laboratories points in the same direction from the code//3D interface side, with early signs in our testing of versioned, iterative improvement. The broader point is that engineering is a search problem, not a generation problem; text-to-CAD is only the opening move. As models like Claude connect to Fusion and the major AI labs start eating CAD the way they ate coding, iterative improvement is the next domino.

  • Fun fact: Cursor originally explored CAD copilots before it became the AI coding IDE everyone knows today. Same diagnosis, four years earlier: “They wanted to know why their models weren’t converging. Why weren’t there enough patterns in the CAD models’ construction to learn to autocomplete?“

• Corrosion is less a single failure mode than a slow negotiation between a metal, its environment, and time. Sometimes the result is broad and obvious, like uniform corrosion spreading across an exposed surface. Other times it is local and dangerous, like pitting corrosion, where small holes form with very little total material loss before a part fails. “Never paint rust,” writes Stewart Brand. Corrosion costs the world roughly $2.5T a year, about 3.4% of global gross domestic product (GDP), per a 2016 National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE) figure cited in his corrosion section in Maintenance of Everything. The report calculates that available best practices could shave 15–35% off the total, $375–$875B in annual savings.

  • The Golden Gate Bridge is a great example: painting runs continuously, with locations prioritized by inspection of corrosion progress. Surface prep involves stripping rust with chipping hammers, using flame dehydration torches to drive moisture out from between plates and rivet heads, and getting primer on while the steel is still hot (and dry).

• The ABCs of Gearing is a great introductory gear reference from KHK Gears. Shigley’s is still the canonical textbook answer, but if you’re new to designing with gears, learning the calculations, or just trying to understand terminology, spend an hour walking through KHK’s catalog and technical notes.

  • The Introductory Course (1/3)

  • Basic Guide (2/3)

  • Guide for Practical Use (3/3)

• And a couple fun links to round out the week:

  • Someone took Cybertruck’s “wade mode” quite literally.

  • A torus gear.

Presented by Protolabs: Quality Manufacturing at Speed

Protolabs is the world’s fastest digital manufacturer, supporting product development from early prototypes through production. Upload a CAD file to get instant DFM feedback and real-time pricing within hours, then move into manufacturing with lead times as fast as one day. With in-house capabilities across injection molding, CNC machining, 3D printing, and sheet metal fabrication, Protolabs helps teams iterate quickly without sacrificing quality. Learn more at Protolabs.com.

Startup News

• CircuitHub raised $28M in Series A funding ($48M total to date) to expand its automated PCB assembly platform. The company operates a highly automated PCBA factory built around a robotic architecture platform designed for high-mix production. The company reports 2M+ boards shipped, 133M+ parts placed, and routine 2–3 day turnaround on 1-off prototypes without premium pricing. The capital will fund a 10× capacity expansion through 2027 in Massachusetts and support expansion into Europe. The round was led by Plural and Sten Tamkivi.

• Amca raised $300M in Series B funding at a $1B+ valuation to expand its vertically integrated aerospace and defense manufacturing platform. The company develops and produces critical components tied to programs like the F-35 and major commercial airliners, and now operates six factories across California, Iowa, and New York. Amca says its internal platform, RAPID, cuts time from development to production-grade hardware by 67% versus typical industry lead times, by integrating engineering, qualification, and certified production. The round was led by Caffeinated Capital with participation from Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, Construct Capital, and others.

• From YC’s latest batch (P26):

  • Synphony is deploying robots that pick strawberries in commercial fields, targeting one of agriculture’s most labor-intensive tasks.

  • Nine Fives launched to automate hardware test infrastructure, specifically modern RF test equipment for manufacturers of radio devices in cellphones, drones, and satellites.

• Texture raised $12.5M in Series A funding to expand its grid operations software, bringing utilities and grid operators onto a unified data and workflow layer. The platform consolidates data from legacy systems into a single operating model for asset visibility and load management. Texture is already working with dozens of utilities and OEMs, supporting use cases like transformer health monitoring, distributed energy coordination, and virtual power plant operations. The round was led by VoLo Earth and Equal Ventures.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Sponsored:

• Tuurny is looking for a Senior Mechatronics Engineer (Full-Stack Robotics) in Sunnyvale, CA

• Highland Technology is looking for a Senior Electronics Design Engineer in San Francisco, CA

Early Career:

• Apptronik is looking for a Firmware Engineer in Austin, TX

Mid-Level:

• Crusoe is looking for an Electrical Engineer in Arvada, CO

Senior to Staff:

• Gravitics is looking for a Chief Engineer (Spacecraft) in Seattle, WA

Internships:

• Formlabs is looking for a Build Team Intern (Fall 2026) in Somerville, MA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Quick note: I hope everyone gets some real time off this long weekend. Last week was the first break I’ve taken in a while, after an insane five-month sprint across writing, growth, a conference, and a few new initiatives all at once. Sometimes hard things are worth doing because they stretch what you think you can take on. Hope you get rest this weekend — call it preventative maintenance, then back with more room to take on the next thing!

Interesting Presentation: The Torture Device Between PCBs and Production

Deeply useful, deeply unglamorous problems is a good way to describe the ethos of the hardware test world. Test fixtures are boring infrastructure, but every scaled hardware sector depends on them: automotive, consumer electronics, robotics, basically any industry with circuit boards that needs to ship at volume.

From Joe & Duncan over at FixturFab, How to Design Custom PCB Bed-of-Nails Test Fixtures is an hour-long workshop that walks through the basics of functional test fixtures for PCBs, better known as the bed-of-nails contraptions that sit between every assembled circuit board and the question of whether it works.

Simply defined, a bed-of-nails fixture is a mechanical test jig that presses spring-loaded pogo pins into predefined test points on a PCB, turning dozens or hundreds of electrical contacts into one repeatable manufacturing test station. Anything built and shipped at scale needs some version of a test station (whether it’s mechanical, electrical, software, firmware), and for circuit boards, a functional test fixture answers behavioral checks like: are the voltage rails in spec, can the board talk over USB/UART, do the sensors respond, or do components like the motor driver behave as expected?

A useful framing is that functional test != prototype bring-up. On the bench, “does this board work?” is a debugging question, but in manufacturing, it has to become a repeatable go/no-go process: contact the board, exercise the major functions, log the result, and set explicit failure handling.

Despite bed-of-nails fixtures being around for decades, the workflow is still surprisingly fragmented for something this old. INGUN sells the fixture and probe hardware, instrument vendors sell the measurement stack (NI Test Stand, Acroname), CMs can build fixtures as part of manufacturing programs, and low-volume teams hack together hand-wired test rigs. Joe & Duncan are trying to turn fixture procurement into a configurable product.

Also see this cool video of a cobot automating board loading at a test station.

More From Around the Web

• For the long weekend, Vehicles of the Imagination is a fun and charming book of 1,500+ imagined vehicles; part cartoon archive, part reminder of what it feels like to dream with no limits.

• McMaster-Carr now has an active YouTube channel. Recent videos explain DIN rail components and breakaway tamper-resistant nuts.

• A console-based audio visualizer for the terminal or desktop. See below for a fun and quirky demo.

• The more you know: tolerance expectations in industrial 3D printing. Or when you should print on expensive, industrial machines.

• A side-by-side look at Starship’s heat shield across Flights 10–12. The tiles are what let Starship survive atmospheric reentry; full coverage on Flight 12 here.

DRCY: AllSpice’s AI Design Review Agent

Meet DRCY, AllSpice’s AI-powered agent built specifically for hardware design reviews. DRCY runs first-pass checks on schematics and datasheets to surface critical errors early, such as config errors, voltage mismatches, and much more. Hardware teams can spend less time on rechecks, more time innovating, and ship with confidence.

Give DRCY a try here. 👇

Interesting Video: Exploring Wing’s Delivery Drone Workshop

A tour through Wing’s drone workshop, tracing the aircraft from hand-laid composite prototypes to foam airframes, custom propellers, and an in-house wind tunnel for propulsion testing. Over the last few years, drone delivery is starting to emerge as real logistics infrastructure: Zipline has done 2M+ commercial deliveries, Wing is the most credible U.S. consumer challenger at 750k+, and Meituan/Keeta is the Chinese equivalent wildcard.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Faraday Future raised $25M through convertible notes, bringing recent financing to $70M as the struggling EV company is repositioning around robotics with plans to ship 1,500 units by year-end.

• GE Vernova is expanding its grid equipment footprint through the $5.3B acquisition of Prolec GE, a North American transformer manufacturer.

• Quartermaster raised $43M in Series A funding to scale a ship-mounted sensor system that turns commercial vessels into a distributed maritime sensing network for intelligence and ocean monitoring.

• Star Catcher raised $65M in Series A funding to build an orbital power grid that beams solar power to satellites through their existing solar arrays.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Interesting Links

• In a wide-ranging interview spanning education, automation, and the long game of platform building, Eben Upton gives an inside look on how Raspberry Pi grew from an education charity into a $1.3B+ publicly traded industrial giant. The interesting inversion is that while the education brand is still what most people recognize, the business is now mostly industrial: $800M in annual revenue with 80% coming from industrial applications like display infrastructure at Heathrow, elevator systems, ISS deployments, and now OpenClaw agents. The Colossus team continues to do some of the best founder interviews we’ve come across — here are a few ideas worth surfacing:

  • Reshoring and the practical advantages of factory proximity. Raspberry Pi has assembled their computers in Wales with Sony Electronics as their CM for over a decade. Upton attributes a lot of Raspberry Pi’s price and performance advantages to 14 years of engineers walking the factory floor and asking “what do you hate about building this?”

  • The best automation win is often a fixable design constraint. After years of capital investment in dextrous cobot arms to handle USB connector assembly (5 robots to 1 human operator), the connectors were redesigned themselves so standard pick-and-place machines could handle it. The current process barely uses the same automation from before, opting for simpler Cartesian pick-and-place machines.

  • On platform serendipity and the long game. Build something general-purpose, cheap, and capable enough, and it gets pulled into whatever the current thing happens to be. The deeper flywheel is user-facing: people learn on Raspberry Pi, carry it into industry, and eventually the ubiquitous education product creeps into real infrastructure.

• Killed by Google is a running graveyard of every product Google has shut down. Toggle the filter to hardware and you get the lineage: Google Glass, Cardboard, Dropcam, Clips, and more, most defunct within a few years of launch. When a company that size ships something, people assume a level of seriousness behind it with real capital, multi-year support, and an ecosystem worth buying into. While true, Alphabet has always operated under the philosophy with products almost as experimental launchpads: ship broadly, let usage reveal the truth, and prune aggressively when something doesn’t become strategically essential. How Google Works is the canonical inside account of the philosophy around empowering ‘smart creatives’ that produced both Maps, Android, Waymo, along with the long list of shuttered products above.

  • On product philosophy, Apple sits at the other end of the spectrum: often late to a category, sometimes painfully so, but much more reluctant to ship until the engineering, product, supply chain, and support model are ready to hold up for years. Apple is reportedly lining up its first foldable iPhone for the beginning of the John Ternus era.

• OpenLab is another initiative from the same person behind OpenME, this time aimed at documenting the tools and equipment that belong in any serious engineering lab. The level of detail gets granular down to exact part SKUs and purchase links (no surprise coming from David Malawey), while also providing the organization logic for turning a pile of lab equipment into a working prototyping environment. IGAN-330 wire cutters are recommended over the cheap stamped-steel versions.

• If at first you don’t succeed, wait forty years and try again. In 1985, Polaroid engineer William Freeman sketched and patented a three-sided zipper for a Scientific American design contest — a fastener that could flip between flexible and rigid, turning soft objects into structured ones on demand. Despite not winning, he stored the prototype in his garage waiting to be discovered again. Forty years later, now an MIT professor, he revived the concept with CSAIL collaborators using tools that simply didn't exist when he first drew it up (geometry generation with Rhino and 3D printing), and the result is the Y-zipper system: a system that generates custom three-sided zippers from four motion primitives: straight, bent, coiled, and twisted. Material choice changes the use case with PLA for heavier loads or TPU for easier flex. In testing, PLA Y-zippers survived 18,000 open/close cycles before failure. Design files are linked for anyone who wants to print the mechanism at home.

• From EPRI’s Power Intelligence Report, data centers already account for more than 20% of total electricity use in Virginia, with forecasts showing that share could rise to 39–57% by 2030.

• And one fun link to round out the week: Figure has been livestreaming its F.03 humanoids sorting packages for the past ~5 days. The task is to detect the barcode, pick up the package, and reorient it face-down on the conveyor. The full tour of BotQ is also worth a watch.

Presented by Protolabs: Print it Better with Industrial 3D Printing

Protolabs’ industrial 3D printing services are built for teams that need production-quality parts quickly, backed by engineering expertise. With 120+ industrial machines covering six 3DP technologies and a wide range of processes, materials, and secondary operations, Protolabs helps you match the right technology to performance and printability requirements. Quality control includes documented work standards, in-process checks, and optional inspection reporting.

Whether you’re prototyping or scaling to end-use production, Protolabs helps you Print it Better.

Startup News

• Aetherflux, now rebranded as Cowboy Space, raised $275M in Series B funding at a $2B valuation to expand from space-based solar power into orbital data centers and launch vehicles. The company’s new plan is to build a rocket whose upper stage becomes the data center once it reaches LEO instead of launching a separate satellite payload. The first mission later this year is a small Apex-built satellite to test infrared power beaming, then the first orbital compute node planned for next year, and 1 MW data-center upper stage targeted for 2028. Index Ventures led the round.

• Anduril raised $5B in Series H funding at a $61B valuation to expand manufacturing capacity, R&D, and defense production infrastructure. The company reported $2.2B in 2025 revenue and the broader strategy is still the same: software-defined defense systems, autonomous platforms, and factories built for high-rate production rather than low-volume bespoke programs. Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz led the round.

• Config raised $27M in seed funding to build the data layer for robotics foundation models. The Seoul and San Jose based startup records human physical tasks, converts that motion data into robot-usable training data, and sells it to manufacturers building their own robotics AI. The company says it has collected more than 100,000 hours of human motion data, with a nearly 300-person data operation across Asia, and is targeting 1M+ hours. Samsung Venture Investment led the round, with participation from Hyundai, LG, SK Telecom, and others.

• Mind Robotics, RJ Scaringe’s robotics lab spun out of Rivian, raised another $400M in funding. The company is developing industrial robotics for next-gen factory automation.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Cobot is looking for a Robotics Assistant in Seattle, WA

Mid-Level:

• Windborne Systems is looking for a Firmware Engineer in Redwood City, CA

• K2 Space is looking for a Satellite Mechanical Engineer in Los Angeles, CA

Senior to Staff:

• Saildrone is looking for a Senior Electrical Engineer in Alameda, CA

• Lumafield is looking for a Head of Application Engineering in Boston, MA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

Access Every Link We’ve Ever Shared 🎞️

Refer three friends to Hardware FYI and unlock our full archive.
Missed an issue? Hunting for that one link? Every tool, guide, and article we’ve ever shared is in here.

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P.P.S. 20,000+ engineers, founders, and operators read this newsletter. If you want to reach them, get in touch.

Share

A quick note: we’re publishing at a slightly reduced cadence this week and next while we’re in the final stretch of putting on Kinetic. Planning a conference, it turns out, is a lot like planning a wedding: exciting, stressful, oddly personal, and lots of small details. Thanks, as always, for reading!

Interesting Guide: Fundamentals of Noise, Vibration & Harshness Testing

The engineering behind perceived quality is often tactile before it is analytical. A system can meet its specifications and still feel cheap, loose, or unfinished. Much of that judgment happens below conscious analysis; we feel it before we can explain it. NVH, short for noise, vibration, and harshness, is a field within automotive and mechanical engineering focused on unwanted sound and vibration in engineered systems.

The car you’re driving almost certainly has NVH engineered into it, and while the discipline is most formalized in automotive work, the same fundamentals apply anywhere a system is judged both by what it does and by how it feels and sounds.

For a practical introduction, Toyota’s training manual is a great plain-English guide written for technicians diagnosing how noise and vibration move through a vehicle. The basic vocabulary: sound is propagating energy, noise is unwanted sound, vibration is what you feel, and harshness is the combined tactile and audible response, typically in the low-frequency range (~15–300 Hz).

On the applied side, NVH is best described as a source-path-receiver problem. Identify what’s creating the noise or vibration, trace how it moves through the structure, then decide where to intervene: quiet the source, isolate the path, or treat the receiver with damping, absorbers, barriers, stiffness changes, or better mounts. While the mental framework is simple, almost nothing about applying it is. Real systems like cars are extremely complex to model from first principles, so most of the work is empirical: instrumenting the system, figuring out which resonances matter, adjusting stiffness or damping, and going back to the rig to see whether anything moved.

From two engineers writing about automotive testing in the late 1990s:

Automotive NVH testing, while extremely complex in practice, is conceptually pretty simple. Excitation from either the engine, powertrain, the road surface, or the air passing over the vehicle excites the structure and makes noise … Perhaps the most fundamental problem in automotive NVH testing is that the industry regularly builds products it can’t analyze. The limitations may be either technical (nobody knows how) or economic (we know how, but it is too expensive). The result is that testing is currently an inseparable part of the product development process.

Presented by SOSV: Physical AI Founder–Investor Matchup

Half the battle in fundraising is finding investors who actually understand what you’re building. For founders in robotics, manufacturing, and industrial AI, SOSV is hosting a free, virtual matchup pairing founders with active investors in the space, structured around curated 1:1 meetings.

Details here.👇

More From Around the Web

• A clever flex PCB trick used for mounting EKG electrodes.

• Core Memory gets a first look at Tesla’s new Semi factory in Nevada.

• The system-level RF architecture behind airport body scanners.

• In praise of the cowboy engineer, who knows the first version does not need to be elegant; it just needs to exist.

Engineering is a discipline that follows strict rules of mathematics and science, but someone had to discover those rules first. We know that 316 stainless steel has a melting point of between 1370°C and 1400°C, but do we even remember how we acquired that information in the first place? We know it because of what we call “Cowboy Engineers.” Melting points were discovered because someone once took a piece of 316 stainless steel and turned up the furnace until the steel melted. We know the bend radius of tubing and elongation percentages of mandrel wires because someone once bent and stretched these materials past their limits. — Component Supply

• YC’s latest Request for Startups list is worth reading (though applications have closed); you can tell hardware has entered the mainstream when Shenzhen is now part of the standard startup vocabulary.

• We’ve now sold past the venue count for Kinetic and have fewer than 10 tickets left! Use code ‘newsletter’ for last-call discounted pricing.

  • Also, our friends at Studio 45 are hosting a kickoff reception on Monday, 5/11.

Interesting Chart: Vehicle Noise and Vibration Phenomena

From VIT’s NVH and CAE Laboratory: a frequency map of the main noise and vibration phenomena in a vehicle.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Lime, the Uber-backed company behind shared e-scooters and e-bikes, filed to go public showing $886.7M in 2025 revenue and a business that has outlasted much of the first micro-mobility cycle.

• Panthalassa, an ocean energy startup building floating wave-powered data centers, raised $140M in new funding to scale its pilot manufacturing facility and begin commercial deployments as AI compute demand pushes power generation into more exotic frontiers.

• Astranis raised $450M in new capital, including a $300M Series E round and $155M in debt financing, to expand production of its small GEO communications satellites as it targets growing demand from commercial telecom operators and U.S. military programs.

• Moment Energy raised $40M in Series B funding to scale its second-life EV battery storage systems, turning retired automotive packs into modular grid-scale storage.

• Skyroot Aerospace raised $60M at a $1.1B pre-money valuation, becoming India’s first space-tech unicorn as it prepares Vikram-1 for the first orbital launch attempt by an Indian private company.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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P.S. Kinetic (May 12-13, SF) our inaugural conference is one week out! Final call for registration — tickets here.

Interesting Presentation: Commercializing RF Black Magic

There's a running joke in electrical engineering that RF engineering is akin to "black magic." It’s hard to argue the point, especially from an outside perspective when analog RF circuitry often looks alien by nature.

The phrase is only half-affectionate since RF designers spend years, if not decades, building intuition through fab cycles, lab measurements, and accumulated tribal knowledge. In RF design and at high frequencies especially, the schematic stops being the source of truth: every trace becomes a transmission line, every parasitic capacitance is part of the design, and a half-millimeter shift in layout can move a filter off its intended frequency behavior. It’s one of the few engineering disciplines where a simulation can look beautiful and be completely wrong, and the designer only finds out after board fabrication.

Michael Frei from Arena Physica recently gave a talk at CDFAM Barcelona that positions AI-assisted EM design as a direct response to this. His framing is sharp: humans have great physical intuition for mechanical systems because we grew up dropping things and bumping into walls, but none of us have an intuitive sense of how an electromagnetic wave propagates through a copper pattern on a circuit board. Arena Physica’s approach hinges on the idea that machines can internalize EM interactions the same way LLMs handle language, with a two-model loop for EM design. Heaviside answers the forward question: “If I draw this copper pattern, what will it do electrically?”; Marconi answers the inverse question: “If I want this frequency response, what copper pattern should I draw?”

Their approach draws directly from academic research, most notably the recent Princeton paper Dall-EM (previously shared in Issue #140), which demonstrated diffusion-based RF filter design at 10–30 GHz with roughly 25 seconds of inference time. Arena Physica’s bet is that the same idea works as a foundation model rather than a one-off demo: faster inference, trained on roughly 10 million geometries plus decades of simulation data, with lab measurements added as a third data leg to help close the sim-to-reality gap.

The honest question Frei leaves open (and worth considering here as well) is whether designers still need intuition for why one of these structures works, or whether specifying the behavior and getting back a manufacturable layout is enough. Worth watching in full if you’re curious how generative design is creeping into the historically least-automated corner of electrical engineering.

Interesting Video: I Broke 100 Epoxy Bonds to Find the Strongest

Joe Barnard from BPS.Space ran nearly a hundred destructive tests on fiberglass coupons trying to crack the code on strong, repeatable epoxy bonds for fin attachments on his high-Mach amateur rockets. For those with the time, it’s worth a watch not just for the test methodology, but as a reminder that empirical testing pairs best with tapping into the tacit knowledge of people who do this for a living. The short answer from months’ worth of epoxy stress testing data was, counterintuitively, the simplest prep configuration he tested: a 10-second acetone wipe followed by IPA on a lint-free cloth. It also happened to be a tip he got from a stranger who runs bond prep for composite structures on NSSL-certified launch vehicles.

The main lesson: stop optimizing for peak performance from a single datapoint. Consistency across samples is the spec; peak strength without repeatability is an outlier.

DRCY: AllSpice’s AI Design Review Agent

Meet DRCY, AllSpice’s AI-powered agent built specifically for hardware design reviews. DRCY runs first-pass checks on schematics and datasheets to surface critical errors early, such as config errors, voltage mismatches, and much more. Hardware teams can spend less time on rechecks, more time innovating, and ship with confidence.

Give DRCY a try here. 👈

More From Around the Web

• Short-form application notes from applications engineers. Here’s one on the DS3232M real-time clock.

• A list of robotics startups that raised $50M+ in 2026.

• Beej’s Guide to Git is a great resource for understanding Git syntax.

• AAA tested EVs on a dyno at 20°F, 75°F, and 95°F. Heat cut range by 8.5%. Cold cut it by 39%.

• 2D simulation model of wire-arc additive manufacturing: a welding arc lays down steel layer by layer, while the model tracks where the part melts and reheats.

• BadgesBadgesBadges makes custom PCB event badges.

• Sponsored: Zoo is hosting a virtual makeathon from 4/28–5/5 - build something in Zoo Design Studio, and the best entries win a Bambu Lab 3D printer and two years of unlimited compute.

  • If you’re attending Kinetic, you can also win a Bambu Lab 3D printer in-person!

Manufacturing & Startup News

More leftovers from our weekly research:

• OpenAI leased a 200k+ sq-ft industrial building in Richmond, CA for its robotics expansion, taking over a site originally built for Moxion, the failed mobile battery startup.

• Commonwealth Fusion Systems became the first fusion power plant developer to request grid interconnection, applying to connect its planned 400 MW Fall Line fusion plant in Virginia to PJM’s power grid.

• JuliaHub raised $65M in Series B funding and launched its agentic AI platform for modeling, simulation, controls, and digital twins for industrial systems.

• BioOrbit, a London-based space biotech startup, raised £9.8M in seed funding to manufacture crystallized cancer drugs in orbit.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Interesting Links

• If you’ve ever chased a yield issue, a bad batch, or a mysterious machine fault, you’ve already learned that manufacturing data is only useful when it preserves context. Manufacturing data is abundant. Manufacturing context is not. This MESA primer is a useful breakdown of the types of manufacturing data and where they live: production, process, product, equipment, quality, supplier, environmental, financial, and the other data categories that accumulate around a factory. For an engineer, these are the breadcrumbs used to reconstruct what happened across the line, from the machine that made the part and the recipe that was active to the material lot, sensor traces, maintenance history, and first appearance of the defect. This is the old Industry 4.0 promise in plainer language: connect the factory’s physical state to its digital record, then use software to ask better questions about why yield moved, what changed upstream, and what to do next. The hard part is that those breadcrumbs are almost always split across disparate factory systems, spreadsheets, PDFs, and tribal knowledge.

  • Defining factory systems in plain english: MES tracks how work moves through the line, ERP knows the order and material record, SCADA controls and monitors equipment, historians store machine data, quality systems hold inspection/nonconformance records, and everything else lives in spreadsheets, documents, or an operator’s head.

• After reading a viral post over the weekend about an AI agent deleting an entire company database from a single command, the current “maximize token usage at all costs” phase of AI adoption feels familiar to the early 3D CAD era and the Death of the Draftsman. A new tool arrives that is genuinely capable and powerful, everyone rushes to reorganize work around it, and only later do teams learn where judgment, controls, and process still matter.

  • Related reading: The AI Great Leap Forward on the strange incentives that appear when usage becomes the goal.

• Digital manufacturing is the phrase people use when they mean “the factory should behave more like software,” which is both basically right and mostly incomplete. Industry 4.0 is Dead is a good read for understanding why the clean-room version of the original idea never really survived contact with the factory floor, and what’s worth remembering now that agents and better software are bringing the broader project back into the conversation. A similar implementation in practice today, this perspective from Justin Lopas at Base Power is useful context — though note it sits one layer up, at operations rather than the shop floor: he effectively had his team rebuild the operations software layer around their factory, trading off-the-shelf SaaS for in-house tools tied directly to their workflows and data. As he put it, “Token costs might actually equal the cost of buying the SaaS, but cost isn’t the point” when the tools are perfectly tailored and infinitely customizable going forward.

• Broken PCBs and reverse engineering are one of the cleanest ways to turn a finished product back into a set of design decisions. This repo cracks open a Boosted V2 Extended Range battery pack and partially reverse engineers the Battery Management System (BMS), with microscope shots of the PCB, an annotated IC inventory, and a working UART debug video. The chip-by-chip datasheets (TI’s BQ769x0 15-cell monitor, a BQ76200 NFET driver, a Microchip dsPIC33 MCU) are a working starting point for anyone wanting to spec their own e-skateboard, scooter, or go-kart pack. A small note of caution: high-power packs are powerful, unforgiving, and require a bit of scrutiny. The author knew what he was doing and still ended up with a dead MCU, à la “Game-over... I killed it”. If you’re starting out, find something smaller (ie. toy drone battery, dead Bluetooth speaker) and work your way up.

• A new crop of “Cursor for Hardware” startups is trying to turn prompts into early design artifacts that include block diagrams, system architectures, crude BOMs, and prototype concepts. Most outputs look like sketchpad designs rather than engineering packages, but they’re useful for early prototyping. See Schematik and Blueprint.

  • Twitter had a very strong reaction (or more gently worded, a collective correction) to one post on how easy it is to build a Kindle. More related reading: the unexpected joys of hacking an old Kindle.

• And a couple fun links to round out the week:

  • CNC milling a star.

  • A great video from MKBHD on smartphone glass and the marketing game behind “more shatter resistant” and “more scratch resistant” claims.

• Sponsored: Zoo is hosting a virtual makeathon from 4/28–5/5 — build something in Zoo Design Studio, and the best entries win a Bambu Lab 3D printer and two years of unlimited compute.

  • If you’re attending Kinetic, you can also win a Bambu Lab 3D printer in person!

Presented by Jiga: Late parts don't have to be a surprise

The worst part about a missed deadline isn’t the delay, it’s finding out too late to do anything about it. Black-box sourcing platforms give you a lead time estimate and then silence. On Jiga, you communicate directly with the manufacturer and get proactive updates on production status. When something shifts, you know early enough to adjust, not after your team is already scrambling.

Try Jiga today. 👇

Startup News

• Project Prometheus, the physical AI lab led by Jeff Bezos and Google veteran Vik Bajaj, closed a $10B funding round at roughly a $38B valuation. The company is building AI models and tools for engineering and manufacturing physical products rather than pure software workflows. JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock are participating in the round, though there is reportedly no lead investor.

• Skydio raised $110M in Series F funding at a $4.4B valuation and committed $3.5B over five years to expand U.S. drone manufacturing. The expansion includes SkyForge, a domestic supply chain program, a new U.S. factory five times larger than its current space, and more than $1B directed toward U.S. suppliers.

• SpaceX struck a partnership with Cursor to develop a next-generation “coding and knowledge work AI,” paired with an option to acquire the startup for $60B later this year. The deal gives Cursor access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer (claimed to equal one million Nvidia H100s) in exchange for product and distribution to Cursor’s software engineers. SpaceX will either pay $10B for the work or buy the company outright, and comes ahead of SpaceX’s anticipated IPO.

• C-Infinity raised $16M in funding to develop AutoAssembler, an AI platform that turns CAD and PLM data into production-ready manufacturing plans. The software automates process planning, engineering change order reviews, and assembly instruction generation inside existing engineering workflows. Canaan Partners led the round, with participation from Inventus Capital, Bee Partners, and Radius Capital.

• Figure AI is reportedly in discussions with UPS for a large humanoid robot deployment across logistics facilities, with investors claiming the potential order could reach tens of thousands of units. The company previously raised more than $1B at a $39B valuation and has said its San Jose BotQ factory could produce up to 12k humanoids per year. Worth caveating: this announcement appears to be coming through investor and social-media chatter, not a clean company announcement.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Sponsored:

• Axon is looking for a Lead Digital Design Electrical Engineer & Senior Digital Design Electrical Engineer in Sterling, VA

Early Career:

• Doordash Labs is looking for a Systems Engineer in San Francisco, CA

Mid-Level:

• General Motors is looking for a Reliability Engineer (Autonomous Vehicles) in Sunnyvale, CA

• Astrolab is looking for an Avionics Manufacturing Engineer in Hawthorne, CA

Senior to Staff:

• Infineon Technologies is looking for a Director of Concept and Design Engineering in Austin, TX

• OpenAI is looking for a Thermal-Mechanical Manufacturing Engineer in San Francisco, CA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Interesting Diagram: Claude & The CAD Process

A simple flow diagram mapping how a hand sketch becomes a CAD model. The source material gets into the older bones of computer-aided design: IGES as an early neutral file format, vector geometry for editable shapes, and the curve math behind smooth surfaces (Béziers, B-splines, NURBS).

A useful companion piece is this Onshape MCP experiment on how capable Opus 4.7 is as an AI model. The author had it build a four-part monitor arm from a sketch and short written description, producing a structured feature tree and iterating through Onshape with enough visual feedback to inspect its own work. The key was to describe the design intent clearly and with enough tools to check what it had built:

Not “autonomous CAD” (we’re not there yet), but “CAD copilot driven by design intent.” You describe what you want in plain English. Claude produces a feature tree. You sanity-check it, maybe correct a mis-read, and then it builds. The workflow replaces keyboard shortcuts and feature-tree surgery with typing and verbal iteration. If you already know what you’re building, Claude is remarkably fast at building it. As usual with early AI tools, the first step to building something is being able to describe what you want to build.

Here’s the same plugin used to compete in SolidWorks Model Mania 2025:

The shared lesson in both: CAD is not about “drawing on a computer”; it’s a stack of geometric representations built to make design intent editable, transferable, and eventually manufacturable.

The Digitally Native Manufacturing Stack

Our next Kinetic panel is about what happens when manufacturing systems are treated as engineering infrastructure, not back-office IT. We’re bringing together leaders building the operating layer behind modern hardware production: systems connecting design intent, factory execution, and delivered hardware. Expect a practical discussion on why engineers should care about the systems sitting between CAD, the shop floor, and delivered hardware.

• Cyril Sack, Head of Business Systems, Anduril

• Adam Newton, Head of Systems & Digital Engineering, Neon Aero

• Filip Aronshtein, Founder & CEO, Dirac

Join us May 12–13 in San Francisco.

P.S. Zoo is hosting a workshop at Kinetic on Zookeeper, its conversational CAD agent for turning design intent into editable geometry. If you can’t make it to SF, they’re also hosting a virtual make-a-thon with a Bambu Lab 3D printer going to the winner!

Reserve Your Spot

Interesting Video: Building a Class 100 Fab in a Backyard Shed

Another entry in the lineage of home-built production facilities, this is perhaps the most ambitious build we’ve come across: a Class 100 semiconductor clean room, built inside a backyard shed, now being used to fabricate RAM.

His facility doubles as a visual walkthrough of the semiconductor manufacturing process at each stage and the core steps — plasma etching, high-temperature processing in a vacuum furnace, i-line lithography built from a modified microscope, automated sample cleaning, fume hood work, and thin film deposition.

The ongoing RAM shortage has put memory supply chains back under scrutiny, and while this isn’t a production-scale facility, it is a working, end-to-end process line for the same device class built entirely from personal capacity.

(Class 100 refers to fewer than 100 particles ≥0.5µm per cubic foot of air; this is one of several cleanliness standards used in commercial fabs.)

Presented by Protolabs: Machined Parts Delivered in Days

Need machined prototypes or production parts fast? Protolabs CNC machining delivers precision parts in as little as one day, with online quotes and automated manufacturing analysis. Choose from a wide range of production-grade metals and plastics, plus post-processing options like anodizing and plating without sacrificing speed. Even parts with advanced features like tight tolerances and diverse finishes to strengthen and cosmetically improve parts are delivered in as fast as three days with comprehensive quality documentation.

Start your next project today.

More From Around the Web

• For weekend listening, a classic episode on the rise and fall of Boosted Boards. Good lessons on how hardware startups can get trapped between scale, capital, and operations.

• ISS bathroom tank telemetry, taken to its logical extreme.

• Emosh from WORC shared a public breakdown of mathematical snap-fit design. Bayer Material Science’s Snap-Fit Joints for Plastics is the golden reference.

• A contrarian take from George Hotz: AI has no moat.

• A short history of the Torx screw.

Manufacturing & Startup News

More leftovers from our weekly research:

• Twelve, a startup producing synthetic aviation fuel from captured CO₂, started commissioning its Moses Lake SAF plant and is reportedly planning a Series D after first shipments.

• Schematik raised $4.6M in pre-seed funding to build a “Cursor for hardware” that turns project descriptions into code, wiring diagrams, component lists, and assembly instructions.

• Crewline raised $7.1M in seed funding to deploy an autonomous retrofit kit for construction rollers, using soil compaction as its entry point into earthwork automation.

• Bubble Robotics raised $5M in pre-seed funding to build long-duration autonomous robots for subsea inspection and monitoring.

• A&K Robotics raised $8M CAD in Series A funding to develop a self-driving indoor mobility robot for moving passengers through airport terminals.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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P.S. Kinetic (May 12-13, SF) our inaugural conference is three weeks out!

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Interesting Links

• The most interesting climate startups aren’t leading with decarbonization and net zero framing anymore — they’re pitching energy. Residential electrical infrastructure runs at roughly 40% of peak capacity on average, and that gap has become the basis of a new residential compute pitch: if households have behind-the-meter capacity, why not turn it into compute? Span’s new XFRA whitepaper details a distributed compute cloud: high-end GPUs and a 15 kWh battery installed alongside new-construction homes, coordinated via Span’s smart panel. NVIDIA is the launch partner, PulteGroup is the initial homebuilder, and the target is 1 GW of annual deployment capacity by 2027. The core bet is speed-to-power arbitrage, assuming a 100 MW centralized data center needs substation upgrades and interconnection queues stretching 3-5 years; theoretically, a box next to a Pulte home would require just an electrician. Homeowners receive a smart panel and battery at no upfront cost, plus a monthly payment that offsets their utility and broadband bills.

  • It will be interesting to see if other companies with similar capabilities (Base Power or Tesla Powerwall) launch competing offerings. Both have the installed base and customer access to copy this move if the niche proves to be economically viable. Like our coverage of Boom Supersonic repurposing its engine tech. into gas turbines (#161), both are bets that the compute-vs-power gap is wide enough to build a business inside.

• The Case Against Humanoids maps every deployed robot category onto a Pareto frontier of environment complexity against manipulation complexity. Humanoids land alone in the upper-right corner, a “double penalty” position where technical risk is multiplicative. The warehouse math: a Locus-style AMR at roughly $13K/year handles 100–150 picks/hour; a $150K humanoid manages 30–50 at ten times the power draw. The rare tasks humanoids exist to handle (spills, damaged packages, peak-season reorganization) happen weekly rather than hourly, and rarely earn back the capex. Modifying a facility to suit a wheeled robot (adding a ramp, drilling through a wall) almost always beats buying a bipedal generalist to navigate the existing one. The core argument is that humanoids only pencil out where task variety is extreme, per-task volume is low, and the environment is a fixed constraint. Worth reading for the contrarian framing; hold the conclusions loosely!

• Two new analysis tools on our radar that feel closer to a digital lab notebook than most general-purpose tools: 1) WORC is what happens if Jupyter Notebook and MATLAB had a chimera offspring and raised it from birth to be an engineer. It includes math blocks, FEA, python executables, vendor spreadsheets, and reasoning all in one linked document. 2) Blockpad is chasing the same result from a different angle, pitching itself as a blend of Excel and Mathcad for engineering calculations.

  • Both capture the same ethos that when variables, solvers, and commentary share one document, writing up the work naturally falls out of doing the work.

• A useful companion piece to the XFRA whitepaper above, Bloomberg’s Bottlenecks series takes a closer look at the global gas turbine shortage where three companies (Siemens Energy, GE Vernova, and Mitsubishi Heavy) control more than 70% of the large turbine production capacity. A single large combined-cycle turbine generates 500-600 MW, so while the volume seems comparatively low (GE Vernova produced 55 last year, expanding to 70-80 in 2026), each unit has an outsized impact on grid capacity. Exhaust from the gas turbine feeds a heat recovery steam generator, which drives a second turbine downstream. Combined-cycle efficiency: ~60%, versus ~35% simple-cycle.

  • To set the scale, 500-600 MW is enough to power roughly 400,000 homes.

• What engineers find compelling and what customers will pay for are different filters, and hardware makes that gap more obviously expensive. A recent example: Aescape, the robotic massage startup that announced an $83M strategic round last March, was pushed into involuntary bankruptcy nine months later and is now liquidating via Article 9 sale. Creator is another — the food robotics startup built what was essentially a Rube Goldberg machine for burgers before shutting down after a stalled investment deal with SoftBank’s Vision Fund. At this point, a catalogue of high-profile startups that raised significant capital and didn’t make it would be just as interesting as tracking the ones that did.

• And one fun link to round out the week: Big Office Chair doesn’t want you to know that swapping in these $20 caster wheels makes any office chair significantly better.

• Sponsored: Zoo is hosting a virtual makeathon from 4/28–5/5 - build something in Zoo Design Studio, and the best entries win a Bambu Lab 3D printer and two years of unlimited compute!

Quilter: AI-Powered PCB Layout Keeps Getting Better

Quilter’s physics-driven AI places and routes your entire board autonomously — no manual trace-drawing, no weeks of waiting.

This spring the platform shipped calculated impedance profiles powered by the industry-standard Simbeor solver, explicit ground-net control for multi-domain boards, region ground pours, and a completely restructured setup flow that exposes every constraint before you hit submit. Coming next: automated BGA fanouts and full clearance-constraint ingestion straight from your ECAD tool.

On April 23, Quilter is running a live walkthrough of every Q1 release, plus an early look at what’s shipping next.

Register for the live session: April 23 at 9 AM PT👇

Startup News

• Ulysses raised $38M in Series A funding, bringing total funding to $46M to develop a family of unmanned surface and subsurface vessels for defense, ocean science, and commercial survey missions. Their flagship product, Mako, is a mini-torpedo-shaped UUV with a 5k-foot depth rating, 72-hour endurance, and up to 200 lb payload capacity; starting price is $50K, an order of magnitude cheaper than comparable systems from HII and L3 Harris. The company has already generated $5M in revenue across government, commercial, and scientific partners (including the U.S. Navy and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation) before expanding into defense applications. The round was led by a16z’s American Dynamism fund, with participation from Booz Allen Ventures and Harpoon Ventures.

• Slate Auto raised $650M in a Series C round, bringing total funding to ~$1.4B to bring its stripped-down, affordable electric pickup truck to market. The company has booked 160,000 refundable reservations with first deliveries targeted for late 2026. The Slate Truck targets the extreme low end of the market, starting at around mid-$20k in the single bare-bones configuration, with post-delivery customization options including an SUV conversion kit for around $5,000. The round was led by TWG Global; prior backers include Jeff Bezos’ family office and General Catalyst.

• Glydways is in talks to raise an additional $250M at a $1B+ valuation for its closed-loop autonomous transit system using podlike vehicles running on dedicated expressways. The company has 20+ projects under negotiation globally, with active agreements in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and a system near Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport targeting pilot operations by year-end. Suzuki will manufacture the vehicles.

• Booster Robotics, a China based humanoid startup, raised ~$140M (roughly 1B RMB) to expand its global delivery network and prepare for a consumer-grade product launch. The company’s flagship small humanoid robot has shipped over 1,000 units across 20 countries and 400 clients, with new orders in January and February up by 800%.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• SpaceX is looking for a Reliability Engineer in Hawthorne, CA

Mid-Level:

• Ulysses is looking for a Mechanical Engineer & Electronics Engineer in San Francisco, CA

• Crusoe is looking for an Electrical Engineer in Arvada, CO

Senior to Staff:

• Sophia Space is looking for an Embedded Firmware Engineer in Pasadena, CA

• Charge Robotics is looking for a Head of Engineering in San Leandro, CA

Internships:

• Varda is looking for a Mechanisms / Payload Intern (Fall 2026) in El Segundo, CA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Interesting Lecture Notes: The Art & Science of PCB Design

One of our favorite finds in recent memory: The Art & Science of PCB Design should be mandatory reading for electrical engineers — or really all engineers who interface with hardware at any level. The course comes out of MIT’s open-curriculum period where students step outside normal coursework for four weeks, and the resulting material tends to be more direct and applied than anything in a standard syllabus.

Electrical engineering is a broad field, with electronics engineering being the branch that maps to most of what we cover. The course runs the full discovery arc of what an engineer should learn when designing a board: basic components, electrical topologies, schematic capture, layout at increasing complexity (intro, high power, high speed), through to fabrication, assembly, and debug. Standout lectures include their notes on basic components which is really about understanding how ideal circuit elements from Circuits I/II translate into real parts, reading datasheets, and specifying components for a board.

Not to editorialize on academic grievances, but the University of Waterloo is worth naming here as an example of an engineering curriculum that strikes a direct balance between industry and academic framing. Students work through around 6 co-op terms that add up to two years of industry experience woven into the degree (most graduate in five years minimum); it does beg the question of why more programs can’t close the gap.

Follow the Money: Deep Tech Investing in 2026

Our next Kinetic panel goes inside the minds of the engineer-turned-investor. These are GPs who built their careers shipping hardware and software before they started writing checks. Expect honest takes on how technical founders should pitch, what separates a compelling vision from a fundable one, and what engineer-investors look for.

• Chrissy Meyer, General Partner, Root Ventures

• Leo Polovets, General Partner, Humba Ventures

• Chad Conway, General Partner, 981 Ventures

Join us May 12–13 in San Francisco.

Reserve Your Spot

Interesting Chart: U.S. Radio Frequency Allocations

At a high level, a zoning map for the electromagnetic spectrum with every frequency band from 3 kHz to 300 GHz categorized among the 30 different radio services, each subdivided further into hundreds of sub-bands where the legal boundaries live.

Per Aspera has a great post on why the mid-band spectrum is the most fought-over real estate in wireless (5G, military radar, and aviation all operate in this band; AT&T and Verizon spent $94B securing licenses in 2021), and how whoever sets the global frequency standard ends up setting the hardware supply chain.

Low frequencies propagate far and penetrate obstacles but require large antennas (AM towers at 50–150 m), mid-band is the practical sweet spot (FM, WiFi, Bluetooth), and high frequencies deliver bandwidth at the cost of range (mmWave).

Presented by Zoo: Design Studio Makeathon

Zoo is hosting a virtual makeathon from April 28–May 5. The format is straightforward: build something in Zoo Design Studio, submit it, and the best entries win a Bambu Lab 3D printer along with two years of unlimited compute in their software.

If you’ve been looking for a reason to sit down with AI-native CAD tooling, this is a good one — we’re also featuring the first-place submission in the newsletter!

More details at zoo.dev/makeathon. 👇

More From Around the Web

Things worth reading that didn’t fit anywhere else this week:

• Allbirds, the once popular shoe brand, is now making a hard pivot to AI compute in an attempt to save the company’s stock.

• A ‘one-piece drawer release catch’ mechanism using a molded flexure.

• Shane Witten is back with part two of robot golf vs. progressively harder holes. The engineering is genuinely insane, and the builds keep getting more elaborate.

• Brother can ship CNC machining centers in custom paint, including colors like pink.

Manufacturing & Startup News

More leftovers from our weekly research:

• Monarch Tractor’s assets were acquired by Caterpillar after dealer lawsuits, layoffs, and the loss of Foxconn as its manufacturing partner.

• Partcl raised $5M in new funding to build GPU-accelerated EDA tools aimed at reducing tapeout timelines.

• Hertha Metals is raising a $100M Series A to scale low-carbon steel and high-purity iron production, tied to the broader push to build domestic rare-earth magnet supply chains.

• Skild AI acquired Zebra Technologies’ robotics division (Fetch Robotics) to layer its foundational model on top of Zebra’s warehouse orchestration software.

• Rivian and Redwood Materials are deploying a 10 MWh battery storage system at Rivian’s Illinois plant using second-life EV packs to cut peak energy costs and reduce grid load.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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P.S. Kinetic (May 12-13, SF) our inaugural conference is four weeks out! The full agenda was published over the weekend.

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Interesting Links

• Every watt generated, stored, or consumed today has to move through infrastructure designed before modern power electronics existed. That same mismatch is what's driving the current obsession with the grid, and the subject of Drew Baglino’s essay on the history of power electronics and why medium voltage is the next frontier. The US grid is, at its core, still organized around 19th-century electrical principles: iron-core transformers, fixed-ratio voltage conversion, and infrastructure designed for one-way power flow. More than two-thirds of transmission lines and large power transformers have been in service for over 25 years, while transformer demand has doubled since 2019, costs are up ~80%, and the US faces a ~30% supply deficit constrained by a single domestic supplier of specialty electrical steel. “Five decades in, nearly all power semiconductor progress has accrued to low-voltage applications: telecoms, datacenters, vehicles, chargers, solar, batteries. The distribution grid, operating at medium voltage between 7.2kV and 34.5kV, remains dominated by passive, mechanical hardware.” Data centers are driving more load growth, solar and batteries are making flows bidirectional, and electrification is pushing more power through infrastructure that was never designed to actively manage it.

• Making motors sing is one of engineering’s oldest party tricks, and a rite of passage that’s older than most people realize. The general mechanism works as follows - drive any electromechanical system to oscillate in the audible range, and it will produce sound. Control the frequency and you can control pitch, then sequence it over time to get music. Arguably the most famous example is the Curiosity rover, which in 2013 used its sample handling system to vibrate at controlled frequencies and “play” Happy Birthday; no speakers, just instrumentation driven in the audible range. A more accessible version exists with Bambu Lab 3D Printers with public documentation and a dedicated web tool that converts MIDI (think digital sheet music) into G-Code, assigns tracks to the machine's three motors, and plays the result directly from an SD card. For example, a printer playing the Mario theme.

A quick intermission: our next Kinetic speaker reveal is Jim Belosic, CEO & Founder at SendCutSend. He'll speak on the panel 'On-Demand Manufacturing Everything', about how fully digital, vertically integrated manufacturing is reshaping modern production.

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• Tips for Using AI to Write Embedded Firmware offers a great set of heuristics, the best of which is: treat the model like an eager junior engineer who doesn’t read enough documentation. Do lean on it for scaffolding, boilerplate, and getting from blank screen to something running. Don’t trust it on pin configuration, interrupt models, bus contention, clock stretching, or anything touching real-time and concurrency unless you like debugging above all else. Resource constraints are another blind spot, since these models ingest vastly more code deployed on much more powerful computers, so suggestions almost always run heavy on RAM/flash for constrained targets.

• On a related note, Awesome MCP for Hardware is a curated directory of MCP servers and clients for connecting AI models to embedded devices, serial interfaces, oscilloscopes, and other related lab hardware. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that gives AI models a common interface to external tools; think of the same way a peripheral needs a driver, a model needs MCP to talk to anything outside itself, except the protocol is universal: any model can talk to compliant tools without custom integration. Some very cool use cases include using an MCP server to let a model control a Keysight/Agilent oscilloscope over Ethernet. Describe the task (i.e. “verify the I²C and PWM functionality of this port”), and the model can configure channels, set triggering, measure frequency and duty cycle, and return a pass/fail summary. Video demo here.

• Most companies don’t buy rare earths directly; they buy the motors, magnets, sensors, and semiconductor modules that contain them, only to find out how exposed they are when a supplier can’t deliver. Deloitte’s guide walks through mapping that exposure and sequencing mitigations from safety stocks to component redesign and supply diversification. If you buy any of the above, it might be worth a few phone calls to get a better sense of how exposed your supply chain is to geopolitical chicanery.

  • The high-level takeaway: the Western world mines the ore, and by the time it becomes a magnet or alloy, roughly 90% of that processing runs through a single country.

• Also related to global supply chains, the world’s maritime choke-point mapped two ways:

  • ShipMap is an animated map of global shipping traffic over a full year.

  • Global Maritime Traffic captures the same data live.

• And one fun link to round out the week: there’s a $9 game on Steam that’s part simulation, part hands-on tutorial to learn how data centers work.

Presented by Protolabs: Harley-Davidson Factory Racing 3D-Printed Exhaust

Harley-Davidson Factory Racing competes in the King of the Baggers, a road-bike racing series where reducing weight and improving lean angle can deliver measurable lap-time gains. To support rapid design iteration, the team partnered with Protolabs to manufacture a redesigned exhaust using metal 3D printing. The result was an organically designed titanium exhaust that tucks closer to the bike, helping riders carry more lean angle through tight right-hand turns. Check out the full Harley-Davidson’s design story.

Startup News

• Hermeus raised $350M in Series C funding ($200M in equity, $150M in debt) at a $1B valuation to continue development of unmanned hypersonic aircraft. The startup recently flew a demonstrator the size of an F-16, with the next iteration targeting supersonic flight and a third aircraft already in the works. Rather than building its own engine, Hermeus pivoted to modifying Pratt & Whitney’s F100 engine, putting the company on a faster development track while opening up near-term DoD contracts. The round was led by Khosla Ventures with existing investors like Canaan Partners, Founders Fund, and RTX Ventures also participating.

• Foundry Robotics raised $19M in seed funding to build what it calls an “AI-first, robotics-native” end-to-end manufacturer focused on assembly. The company is positioning itself as a dual-use manufacturer integrating software, robotics, and production in-house, though specific product and facility details are light. Backers include Khosla Ventures, Red Glass Ventures, Zero Shot Fund, Hanabi Capital, and Ora Global.

• Starfish Space raised more than $100M in a Series B to scale production of its Otter spacecraft, designed to service, refuel, and deorbit satellites in GEO and LEO. The ~90-person Seattle-based company has multiple spacecraft in production with first launches slated for later this year, backed by contracts for a geostationary life-extension mission and a separate mission with the U.S. Space Force. Starfish is also operating Otter Pup 2, a test vehicle validating its rendezvous and docking autonomy stack. The round was led by Point72 Ventures, with Activate Capital and Shield Capital co-leading

• Portal Space Systems raised $50M in Series A funding to build two maneuverable spacecraft: Starburst, a high-agility bus, and Supernova, a solar-thermal propulsion vehicle designed to move quickly between orbits. The capital will fund a 52,000 sq ft factory in Bothell, Washington with planned capacity for 12 Supernovas and 16 Starbursts per year. The round was led by Geodesic Capital and Mach33.

• Hybron raised $25M in seed funding to scale production of carbon fiber composite components intended to replace metal parts in defense and aerospace systems. The El Segundo-based company uses high-pressure molding to achieve 10–15 minute cycle times per part, claiming 5× lower cost and 100× faster throughput than traditional composite processes. The raise follows a nine-figure contract with a major European munitions manufacturer and was led by Marque Ventures.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Waabi is looking for a Mechanical Engineer in Pittsburgh, PA

Mid-Level:

• Avalanche Energy is looking for an Electrical & Instrumentation Engineer in Tukwila, WA

• JetBlue is looking for a Reliability Engineer in New York, NY

Senior to Staff:

• DoorDash is looking for a Manufacturing Quality Engineer in Fremont, CA

• Waymo is looking for a Digital Engineering Program Lead in Mountain View, CA

Internships:

• Fluke is looking for a Research Engineering Intern in Everett, WA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Interesting Lecture Notes: On Hardware Development Frameworks

Hardware development frameworks tend to look different on the surface - consumer electronics runs sequential waterfall scheduling, automotive and highly-regulated industries operate on V-Model framing with requirements traceability baked in, while new-age space startups have shifted toward ‘agile’ iterative development. At the core though, all frameworks aim to solve the same underlying problem: how do you manage integration risk in a physical system where changing something late is expensive?

From the DSpace at MIT, a classic set of lecture notes on product development processes (lecture #11, circa 2003), but more relevant now than ever as teams building complex hardware has expanded well beyond traditional primes and OEMs.

Most engineering teams don’t pick a process so much as inherit one, and what’s interesting is how much the frameworks rhyme across industries despite looking different on the surface. The same variables (build volume, system complexity, degree of vertical integration, regulatory environment) just get weighted differently depending on what’s built.

For example, SpaceX and Anduril treat hardware as learning material; rapid build-test-redesign loops where a failed unit is just the cost of data. Traditional defense primes run highly controlled V-Model flows with frozen requirements and certification-driven verification. Apple and Oura run EVT–DVT–PVT, where architecture is locked early and late changes are prohibitively expensive once tooling begins.

Worth reading as a useful reference regardless of which framework is in play. More recommended reading: the NASA Systems Engineering Handbook.

Consumer Hardware at Scale: 0 → 1 → n

Our next Kinetic panel brings together operators who’ve built consumer hardware more times than they can count, from the biggest companies in the world down to early-stage startups. Expect hard-won lessons, honest mistakes, and no shortage of opinions with:

• Michael Kubba, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Fellow

• Niko Reid, VP Hardware Engineering, Fortune Brand Innovations

• Santhi Analytis, Venture Advisor, Designer Fund.

Join us May 12–13 in San Francisco.

Reserve Your Spot

Interesting Chart: Robotics & Autonomous Systems, 2026

We’ve written a fair amount about robotics over the past few issues (hard not to, given how much is moving in terms of engineering development!). This is our annual map update, now rebranded as “Physical AI, Robotics, & Autonomous Systems” to reflect where the field sits in 2026.

The main addition is the intelligence layer, which didn’t really exist as a discrete category a couple years ago.

Presented by Protolabs: Design for Moldability Toolkit

​​Designing plastic parts for injection molding means balancing cost, quality, and manufacturability, and small geometry decisions can drive big changes in lead time and tooling complexity. Protolabs’ Design for Moldability Toolkit is a practical resource for engineers working through common molding challenges like draft, wall thickness, undercuts, gating, and shut-offs. Protolabs also provides automated design analysis on CAD models to highlight features that can be adjusted before cutting a tool. Use it to reduce quoting advisories and accelerate production readiness. Accelerate your design today.

More From Around the Web

Things worth reading that didn’t fit anywhere else this week:

• Using Claude Code as a test fixture/jig-making tool. Feed it sketches, and get a file ready to 3D print via FreeCAD.

• A neat real-world demo of PID control on a differential drive robot. Also: turns out Instagram Reels might be one of the better formats for visualizing fundamental control theory.

• A full die casting cycle, from start to finish.

• The cyberdeck aesthetic: a whole subcommunity building gorgeous, chunky shells around old laptops or a Raspberry Pi.

Manufacturing & Startup News

More leftovers from our weekly research:

• Kia plans to deploy Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robots in its US factories by 2029 and release its first ‘software-defined’ vehicle (i.e. features can be remotely updated like a smartphone) by 2027, as part of a broader technology and electrification push.

• Askari Defense raised a $1.7M pre-seed round to build low-cost drone-intercepting systems from investors including Knoll Ventures, Overline, and Georgia Tech Foundation.

• Sonibel raised $1.6M in pre-seed funding to develop an acoustic sensor that mounts to a welding torch and uses ML to catch defects (including those inaudible to the human ear) for better weld quality control.

• Terawatt Infrastructure is raising up to $1.5B in equity and debt to build a national network of charging depots for autonomous EV fleets like Waymo, pivoting from its earlier focus on electric truck charging.

• Merino Energy launched an all-in-one heat pump that installs in one hour for $3,800 total, with a SEER2 rating of 15.2; above the federal minimum of 14.3 but below standard mini-splits (18-25; higher = lower electricity bill). The core bet is that simpler design enables flat-rate pricing and removes the costly quote process that was itself a bottleneck to heat pump adoption.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• DraftAid – AI that automatically generates manufacturing-ready 2D drawings from 3D CAD.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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P.S. Kinetic (May 12-13, SF) our inaugural conference is five weeks out!

Interesting Links

The ASML Way is a book worth reading for its account of how a small Dutch company ended up developing the most complex machine ever built, and now stands as the unambiguous bottleneck of the entire global semiconductor industry. Some context: ASML doesn’t make chips, it makes the machines that make the chips, and it is the only company on earth that can. Each machine has ~100,000 parts, costs anywhere from $150-$380M for the latest High-NA generation, requires multiple cargo planes and dozens of trucks to ship, and took over two decades to develop. No country, no competitor, no amount of state subsidy has been able to replicate them (yet), with ASML shipping a total of 44 EUV machines worldwide in all of 2024. Chip manufacturing is fundamentally about using light to project circuit patterns onto silicon, and physics sets a hard ceiling: you can’t resolve features smaller than the wavelength of light used. For decades the industry cheated this limit (shorter wavelengths, multi-pass patterning, etc.) until extreme ultraviolet lithography emerged as the viable path forward (13.5nm wavelength and 14x shorter than what came before). The rest is best read firsthand; here are the details we found most striking:

• The EUV light source fires 30-micron molten tin droplets at 50,000 per second, and converts 1.2 megawatts from the grid into a few watts on the wafer. The entire machine exists to protect and aim that tiny fraction of light across 11 mirrors in near-vacuum.

• China’s response to being locked out of EUV by export controls has been described as a semiconductor Manhattan Project (state-coordinated, massively funded, and largely secret). Separately, a California startup Substrate is betting on X-ray lithography at sub-1nm wavelengths as a way to bypass EUV entirely. Vik’s Newsletter has a great technical breakdown.

• On machine sensitivity - Intel once traced a nightly yield drop to methane from a neighboring cattle farm and paid to relocate three farms.

• Chris Coleman’s guide to watchdog timers is a practical walkthrough of one of firmware’s most important (and most neglected) subsystems. A watchdog is, in essence, a controlled self-destruct sequence: a hardware counter that reboots the device if software fails to check in periodically. For a consumer device, not having a watchdog can mean a reboot; for a satellite or remote system, it can mean permanent loss of control and an unrecoverable on-orbit failure. The whole walkthrough is built around a NRF52840 dev kit so readers can follow along; it covers hardware and software watchdog layers, task-level monitoring for catching deadlocks, and debug strategies for root-causing the hang after recovery. Coleman also advises caution when removing watchdogs during debug builds to avoid nuisance resets; this is a great way to accidentally cut a release that bricks the fleet.

A quick intermission: our next Kinetic speaker is Michael Hammersley, Principle Failure Analysis at NVIDIA. He'll share best practices on failure analysis to identify, contain, and correct failures at scale — and how to chase those last few nines of reliability.

Get Tickets

• In Canada, many graduating engineers elect to receive an iron ring on their pinky finger during a private ceremony in a ritual known as The Calling of an Engineer. The tradition started after the 1907 Quebec Bridge collapse, where engineering errors killed 75 workers in fifteen seconds, established to reinforce the ethical responsibility of engineers. The ring sits on the working hand so it drags across every document signed, a physical reminder that the work of engineers lands on the people who depend on it. As software increasingly touches how people interact and interface with each other (and now reason with AI) the same obligation applies: an algorithm that optimizes for engagement over truth, in many ways, creates its own kind of structural failure.

• Fictiv’s composite layup guide is a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps reference covering the major layup methods (hand layup, prepreg, resin infusion, AFP), fiber orientation fundamentals, laminate architecture, common defects, and DFM guidelines. What makes composites different from most other manufacturing processes is that the material doesn’t exist until the part does. There’s no billet to machine or pellet to mold; each ply angle is a decision branch, and the stacking sequence determines how (or if) the part carries load, and how much it weighs. Aerospace helped push advanced composites into the mainstream (the 787 is 50% composites by weight), and the methods have since spread to wind turbine blades, EV structural panels, pressure vessels. In any application where mass, high stiffness, and fatigue life are the binding constraints, composites are usually in the conversation.

• From a reader of the newsletter: a story on how an engineering detour became the product. Jeremy Cook built a robotic tong drum using solenoids driven by Arduino’s Opta PLC (a compact industrial controller with a solid-state relay expansion that can fire solenoids silently). The build needed a MIDI controller interface; nothing existed for the Opta’s serial and I2C lines, so he designed one. That adapter — a small fraction of the overall project — turned out to be what people actually wanted. He’s now sold roughly 200 units on Tindie at modest per-unit margins. His companion piece on selling small-batch hardware in multiples covers the economics of sub-$10-profit add-ons. If you’ve ever had to make a custom board or fixture because nothing existed, it might be worth doubling back to see if that’s still the case.

• To round out the week, a couple of fun links:

  • VotingWorks is a 501(c)(3) non-profit building open-source voting systems across the U.S. - their team is hiring a Head of Hardware (fully remote)!

  • Engineering projects are meant to be fun. A great example, the world’s loudest mechanical keyboard.

CoLab: AI that applies your design history to every future decision

When past decisions aren’t documented, your team ends up making the same mistakes and duplicating work. With CoLab AI, you upload a model or drawing and AI surfaces lessons learned from past reviews. Those lessons include a link to exactly where and when on the CAD or drawing that feedback was left. So, your team sees why the design is the way it is. See CoLab AI in action →

Startup News

• Whoop raised $575M in funding at a $10.1B valuation to scale its subscription-based wearable platform for health and performance monitoring. The company builds a screenless, wrist-worn device that collects sensor data (heart rate, HRV, sleep stages, strain) and translates it into recovery and readiness metrics, all delivered through a subscription rather than a one-time hardware sale. The company positions itself as a data platform for performance training rather than a general-purpose wearable category defined by earlier devices like Fitbit and similar fitness trackers. The round was led by existing investors including IVP and others.

• Saronic raised $1.75B in Series D funding to scale production of its autonomous surface vessels for U.S. military applications. The company currently builds multiple unmanned ship classes ranging from small reconnaissance craft to larger 40-metric-ton vessels, and is targeting production of 20+ ships annually by 2027 while expanding its Louisiana shipyard and developing a new “Port Alpha” facility. The push comes as the U.S. looks to offset a ~200x shipbuilding capacity gap and shift toward lower-cost, autonomous naval systems that can be deployed at scale. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins, following a $392M Navy contract and rapid growth in defense demand.

• Valar Atomics raised $450M at a $2B valuation (including $340M equity and $110M debt) to develop clusters of small, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs) for AI data center power. The company’s design focuses on modular reactor clusters sized for data center-scale loads, delivering baseload power without the complexity of traditional multi-gigawatt nuclear plants. The round builds on a prior $130M raise backed by investors including Palmer Luckey and Shyam Sankar.

• Aetherflux is reportedly raising a $250–350M Series B at a $2B valuation to develop orbital data centers powered by solar energy for AI workloads. The company has shifted from its original focus on space-based power beaming to placing compute on satellites, using ‘continuous solar exposure’ to run AI chips without relying on terrestrial grid infrastructure. Its first data center satellite is targeted for 2027, with ongoing work on laser power transmission and a satellite bus built by Apex Space. The round is expected to be led by Index Ventures.

• Xoople, a Spanish startup, raised $130M in Series B funding to build a satellite constellation designed to generate Earth observation data for AI models. The company is developing optical sensing payloads with L3Harris Technologies, targeting data quality improvements on the order of 100× over existing monitoring systems. The round was led by Nazca Capital.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Sponsored:

• PNY Technologies is looking for a Product Manager (Storage Solutions for AI Products) in Zhubei City, Taiwan.

Early Career:

• Google is looking for a Technical Program Manager (Hardware Development, Pixel) in Mountain View, CA

Mid-Level:

• BRINC is looking for an Electrical Engineer in Seattle, WA

• Apple is looking for a Mac Reliability Engineer in Austin, TX

Senior to Staff:

• Watney Robotics is looking for a Senior Mechanical Engineer, Robotics in San Francisco, CA

• Serve Robotics is looking for a Senior Director of Hardware Engineering in Redwood City, CA

Internships:

• Boston Dynamics is looking for a Mechanical Engineering Co-op in Waltham, MA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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P.P.S. 20,000+ engineers, founders, and operators read this newsletter. If you want to reach them, get in touch.

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Interesting Presentation: Building Beyond Algorithms

There’s a version of any technical discipline that lives entirely in algorithms and theory, and then there’s the version that ships to customers. The former is where ideas incubate and foundational work happens; building in robotics just happens to make the deployment gap between the two unusually visible.

Cheng Chi, CTO of Sunday Robotics, gave a guest lecture at ETH Zurich that sits squarely in the second category. He and his co-founder Tony are both PhDs with academic backgrounds, and the talk is essentially a candid debrief on what that background doesn’t prepare you for when deploying hardware at scale.

The talk is structured around an underappreciated observation: what engineers call “the stack” in robotics extends well beyond traditional academic framing. In practice, it runs from policy and robot software down through hardware design (mechanical/electrical), supply chain, manufacturing ops, and data collection operations. Most technical education covers the top two layers well. The rest gets learned on the job.

Two mental models worth noting:

• Supply chain as a dependency tree. Most engineers think one layer deep (what parts do I need to order), but supply chain management means traversing the full tree. Your supplier’s suppliers, their suppliers, back to raw materials. Retail is a ‘physical caching layer that creates an illusion of low latency,’ and it breaks the moment you need volume or need to change anything upstream.

• Data collection is an operations problem, not a technical one. With Sunday’s approach specifically — demonstration data collected at scale through a network of contributors — quality and distribution are real concerns, but they’re downstream of clarity with the humans doing the work.

Definitely worth watching if you’re coming from a software or research background and moving toward hardware deployment.

The Humanoid Frontier: Are We There Yet?

Humanoid robots are in full swing, and everyone’s at a different point in finding out what that means.

Our next panel at Kinetic brings together three operators living it right now — each at a different stage, with real lessons to share:

• Clayton Haight, Hardware Lead, Sunday

• Robert Luan, Member of Technical Staff, Meta Robotics Studio

• Benjamin Bolte, Engineering, OpenAI

Join us May 12–13 in San Francisco.

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Interesting Diagram: Humanoid Hand Architectures

A useful primer on humanoid robot hand architectures that are architecturally far more complex than Sunday’s approach. Morgan Stanley’s analysis of Tesla Optimus Gen-2 puts hands at ~17% of total BOM cost.

The diagram looks Nano Banana Pro-generated, but covers the basics well.

CoLab: AI that applies your design history to every future decision

When past decisions aren’t documented, your team ends up making the same mistakes and duplicating work. With CoLab AI, you upload a model or drawing and AI surfaces lessons learned from past reviews. Those lessons include a link to exactly where and when on the CAD or drawing that feedback was left. So, your team sees why the design is the way it is. See CoLab AI in action →

More From Around the Web

Things worth reading that didn’t fit anywhere else this week:

• If you get your teeth 3D scanned at the dentist, ask for the STL file.

• Ramp’s philosophy on hiring, and why unconventional backgrounds produce exceptional people.

• Sam from informal is opening pre-orders for his Donut Hole-Der.

• On the structural mechanics behind recent tech layoffs. Fast hiring dilutes talent density in competitive industries, companies slow down, and the cycle repeats.

• An open-source bionic lobster robot, with firmware and mechanical architecture all public.

Manufacturing & Startup News

More leftovers from our weekly research:

• Anvil Robotics raised $5.5M in seed funding to build modular, open-source hardware, branding their platform as “Lego for robots” for Physical AI teams.

• Somos Internet, a Colombian telecom startup, raised $40M in Series B funding to expand its fiber network in Colombia and enter Mexico.

• Agile Robots SE, a Munich-based robotics company, closed its acquisition of thyssenkrupp, a 75-year-old industrial automation firm.

• Also announced a partnership with DoorDash to build autonomous delivery vehicles, signaling a move toward last-mile delivery as part of their platform offerings.

• Fauna Robotics was acquired by Amazon to expand their robotics portfolio beyond warehouses; Fauna’s flagship robot is a 3.5 ft, $50k humanoid designed to be developer-friendly, with early customers including Disney and Boston Dynamics.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• DraftAid – AI that automatically generates manufacturing-ready 2D drawings from 3D CAD.

• Solderable – Custom PCB design for serious hardware teams.

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We’ve been very intentional about who’s in the room across speakers and programming; if you’re reading this, you’re exactly who we want there. Early Bird pricing ends tonight!

Interesting Links

• We’ve long been enamored with Huaqiangbei — the world’s largest electronics market, where you can source any component imaginable — and Andy Kong’s Huaqiangbei Guide is the best resource we’ve seen for anyone finally making the trip. Starting in 1988 as the SEG Electronics Market, HQB now spans 70M+ sq. meters across Shenzhen and is the physical manifestation of China’s electronics supply chain advantage: the density that lets a hardware team go from BOM to prototype in a day, and that famously made a from-scratch iPhone 6s possible by sourcing every component locally. One practical detail to note: most stalls showcase what factories can make, not what they stock; the real value is finding vendors who can make your specific part in a custom configuration.

  • If you want to see it up close, Ariel (a reader) is organizing a Canton Fair + Shenzhen trip, April 17–22. Tell her we sent you for a special discount!

• There’s a rabbit hole for every topic, including one entirely devoted to gigacasting and magnesium thixomolding called Industry Arsenal. It’s a newsletter that doubles as a living archive of OEM programs, supplier ecosystems, and the growing footprint of giga press installations. Some context on the current industry landscape: Tesla remains the furthest along with production-scale front and rear castings, while Toyota, Volvo, and several Chinese OEMs are building similar architectures into next-gen EV platforms, and others like Ford are still in the experimental phase with partial integrations. In practice, this is still largely limited to new EV platforms (not legacy fleets) where clean-sheet platforms make it easier to design around. OEMs are standardizing on EV skateboard layouts with front and rear castings, not full single-piece bodies.

  • Think of magnesium thixomolding as basically injection molding for magnesium (semi-solid, low-porosity), used for smaller precision parts vs. gigacasting’s large structural aluminum pieces. Tesla has a good walkthrough of the gigacasting process at its Berlin factory.

• If you've ever wanted to understand what happens between a raw silicon wafer and a finished chip, The Semiconductor Chip Manufacturing Process is a solid walkthrough of the full stack. Starting with the supply chain, wafers are thin discs of highly purified silicon crystal (Shin-Etsu and Sumco make most of them) that go into fabs like TSMC or Samsung, where equipment vendors like ASML (lithography) and Applied Materials (deposition and etch) supply the machines that process them. The core loop is simpler than it sounds: deposit a material, pattern it with light, etch away what you don’t want, and repeat — 300+ process steps, across a dozen or more metal layers. The whole thing happens in high-vacuum environments and ultra-clean rooms where a single dust particle can kill a $500 chip.

• How do you build a fastener that carries structural load up to the moment you need it gone? A frangible nut is a load-bearing fastener designed to fail on command that clamps like a conventional nut under high preload, then splits cleanly into two halves when a small pyrotechnic charge fractures it. (Watch it release at shuttle ignition to separate from the launch pad). This NASA fact sheet walks through a subtle failure mode: 25 stud hang-ups across 23 launches traced to the two redundant charges firing ~250 microseconds apart. A crossover assembly tightened that to ~50 microseconds and resolved it. Both charges delivered the same total energy, but in a system as tightly coupled as a launch vehicle, microsecond-level timing differences matter.

• From our recent webinar with Fictiv, 60 minutes of content distilled into a single flow diagram. (High-res version available.)

• A couple fun links to round out the week:

  • OpenGridWorks is an interactive map of the world’s electricity infrastructure.

  • A satisfying look at titanium anodizing in real time: voltage sets oxide thickness, thickness sets color.

  • The full history and mechanism breakdown behind the zipper.

  • Issue #120 has more examples of builds coming out of Shenzhen.

CoLab: AI that applies your design history to every future decision

When past decisions aren’t documented, your team ends up making the same mistakes and duplicating work. With CoLab AI, you upload a model or drawing and AI surfaces lessons learned from past reviews. Those lessons include a link to exactly where and when on the CAD or drawing that feedback was left. So, your team sees why the design is the way it is. See CoLab AI in action →

Startup News

• Starcloud raised $170M in Series A funding to build orbital data centers, bringing total funding to $200M and valuing the company at $1.1B. The startup has already launched a satellite carrying an NVIDIA H100 GPU and plans follow-on spacecraft with two business lines mapped out: selling compute to other satellites today and running distributed space-based data centers long-term. Their flagship vehicle is a 200 kW, three-ton spacecraft sized for Starship deployment, but an obvious caveat: Starship isn’t flying yet, and without high-cadence heavy-lift launches, space-based compute won’t be cost-competitive. In the meantime, they plan to launch smaller versions on Falcon 9. The round was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures.

• Physical Intelligence is in talks to raise roughly $1B in new funding at a valuation north of $11B for its work developing general-purpose AI foundation models for robots. The two-year-old startup, founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, has deployed its software on robotic arms to perform tasks like folding clothes, making coffee, and assembling boxes. The company had already previously raised more than $1B from investors, with Founders Fund and Lightspeed reportedly set to participate in the new round.

  • Benjie Holson (a roboticist at Robust AI) has a great series called the Humanoid Olympics, of which PI previously won last Fall.

• Sift raised a $42M Series B round in 2025, announced last week, to expand its telemetry data infrastructure software for hardware-heavy industries. The company builds systems to ingest and structure high-volume sensor data from complex machines, with a focus on managing and exposing clean, machine-readable datasets for analysis at scale. The round was led by StepStone with participation from GV, Riot Ventures, Fika Ventures, and CIV.

• Shield AI raised $1.5B in Series G funding to expand production of its autonomous military aircraft and further develop its onboard autonomy stack for unmanned fighter and drone platforms. The round follows its selection for the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft prototype program, where its Hivemind autonomy software is flight testing alongside Anduril’s Lattice software to control next-gen drone warfare fleets. A portion of the capital will fund its acquisition of Aechelon Technology.

• Normal Computing raised $50M in funding to scale its semiconductor design software and continue development of its own experimental processor architecture. The company builds AI-driven tools used by major chipmakers to reduce errors and iteration cycles in advanced chip design, where a single tape-out can exceed $500M (tape-out is when the design is frozen and sent to the fab to cut masks and start silicon). The round was led by Samsung Catalyst.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Skydio is looking for an Electrical Engineer in San Mateo, CA

• Pyka is looking for a Mechanical Design Engineer in Alameda, CA

Mid-Level:

• Boston Dynamics is looking for a Robotics Engineer (Stretch Perception) in Waltham, MA

• Verkada is looking for a Hardware Engineering Program Manager in San Mateo, CA

Senior to Staff:

• WindBorne Systems is looking for a Head of Manufacturing in Redwood City, CA

• OpenAI is looking for a Thermal Mechanical Engineer in San Francisco, CA

Internships:

• Charge Robotics is looking for an Engineering Intern in San Leandro, CA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

Access Every Link We’ve Ever Shared 🎞️

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Missed an issue? Hunting for that one link? Every tool, guide, and article we’ve ever shared is in here.

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P.S. If you find something interesting—an article, tool, funding round, project, really anything—send it our way.

P.P.S. 20,000+ engineers, founders, and operators read this newsletter. If you want to reach them, get in touch.

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