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“At the moment, electronics manufacturing is outdated.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