Bright Machines, an innovator in intelligent, software-defined manufacturing, has successfully secured a raise worth $126 million, with $106M in equity led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, as well as from NVIDIA, Microsoft, Eclipse, and Jabil and Shinhan Securities. Talk about the remaining $20 million, it came in venture debut from J.P. Morgan. According to certain reports, Bright Machines plans on using these funds to launch product innovations, expand its software stack for increased assembly flexibility, and grow strategic relationships with ecosystem partners. To understand the significance of such a development, though, we must acknowledge how the electronic manufacturing space currently stands at an outdated juncture, suffering from isolated and inefficient processes that produce, on their part, a lot on unnecessary costs. This is where Bright Machines comes in with its full-stack technology, which provides centralized data visibility, traceability, performance benchmarking, and flexible automation. Generating valuable data constantly generated and then communicating the same to a central hub, Bright Machines’ technology creates what is a powerful engine for continual optimization. Furthermore, thanks to such a robust data network, Bright Machines’ Design for Automated Assembly (DFAA) tool is able to provide virtual design recommendations, all for the purpose of cutting back on time taken by products to reach the market.
“Adopting ecosystem-wide, software-defined manufacturing processes will ease the mounting burden from the industry’s biggest challenges, including a lack of skilled workforce; aging, rigid systems; disparate and fragmented supply chains; and an overall lack of standards across the value chain,” said Lior Susan, CEO and Executive Chairman at Bright Machines. “By collaborating with technology leaders such as NVIDIA and Microsoft, Bright Machines can deliver flexible, integrated, and intelligent manufacturing solutions to our customers, starting with Design for Automated Assembly (DFAA) and continuing – with unprecedented visibility – through every step of the process, right through to the circularity of recycling.”
More on the company’s technological prowess would reveal the manner in which Bright Machines’ robotics infrastructure also banks upon machine learning algorithms to help ensure quality control and traceability during assembly inspection. Once a product reaches the end of its life, there steps in Bright Machines’ flexible disassembly capabilities that help you harvest and recycle components so to achieve full circular manufacturing. From an overall standpoint, by uniting the data network with agile robotics, modeling, and simulation, Bright Machines provides a robust and modern factory that promises to deliver much more than what traditional factories can achieve.
“There is a fundamental shift in the way electronics manufacturing must adapt to enable the rapid progress and adoption of AI. Bright Machines’ full-stack solution changes the status quo by providing flexible automation across all stages of the manufacturing life cycle from product design to assembly to disassembly. The team at Bright Machines sees the power of combining robotics and AI in the physical world and is uniquely positioned to transform the manufacturing lifecycle through automation,” said Marc Stoll, Partner at Eclipse.
Operating out of San Francisco, Bright Machines’ rise stems from its industry-leading technology which specializes in using computer vision, machine learning, and software applications to transform the way products can be designed and manufactured. The company’s excellence in what it does can be understood you consider it has, thus far, achieved 28 times faster NPI, along with 100% process genealogy. Complimenting the same is how Bright Machines has also scaled up its customers throughout by 2.5%. In case that wasn’t enough, then we must mention the way the company has already been named “Best AI-based Solution for Manufacturing” by AI Breakthrough, “Technology Pioneer” by the World Economic Forum, and one of “America’s Most Promising Artificial Intelligence Companies” by Forbes.
