The Bright Spot

I recently sat down with Lior Susan to talk startups, automation and his passion for building companies. In 2015, Lior founded Eclipse Ventures to meet the needs of entrepreneurs building full-stack startups: companies integrating multiple types of technology including hardware with software and data.

The pace of technology innovation in the auto industry over the last decade has been remarkable. Cars are becoming increasingly intelligent with new electrification, autonomy, connectivity and infotainment capabilities.

Over the past 20 years, the electronic design automation (EDA) industry has seen a rapid acceleration of innovation, with improvements made in both methodology and tools to greatly improve design productivity through automation.

From 2003 to 2006, I worked at a contract manufacturing company as a robotics engineer. I was the first software engineer hired by the company, an opportunistic hire by a visionary CEO who saw the importance of automation in manufacturing.

Back in 1962, the notion of a personalized vacuum cleaning robot was a science fiction fantasy, and a staple of the popular animated TV show, “The Jetsons”. Flash forward to 2018, and Roombas are vacuuming our floors, Siri is playing our music and maintaining our schedules, and robo-taxis are shuttling students to and from college campuses.

Each year more than a 100,000 people attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to get a firsthand look at today’s hottest technology trends and I was thrilled to be among the crowd this year, along with several of my Bright Machines colleagues.

If you’re like me, you probably get fatigued by tech company jargon.There are times, however, when acronyms are useful in communicating a company’s intent to reinvent a process or concept, not just as it relates to the company but for the benefit of the industry at-large.

Meet our New Software Leader; Seattle office coming soon.At Bright Machines, our vision is to reimagine the manufacturing industry through intelligent Software-Defined Manufacturing. From Autodesk to Google and VMware, our founding team brought with them an incredible wealth of software expertise, but we knew we couldn’t stop there.

Imagine this: a factory where products are made without any humans inside. Design improvements are deployed to the factory a dozen times a day - not annually - without downtime for retooling. When production machines inevitably break, other machines take over within seconds. 

Around 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made a bold prediction based on a historical trend he observed - one that would help guide technology’s evolution over the next 50 years: The number of transistors on an integrated circuit - or, overall processing power for computers - will double every two years.