Revolutionizing Manufacturing with Bright Machines' $126M Series C Round June 25, 2024 | 3 min read Lior Susan, CEO, Executive Chairman, Bright Machines I remember it like it was yesterday. In 2013, my role at Flextronics involved spending a copious amount of time on the factory floor. I was stunned by how many electronic products were built manually. Here we were building some of the most advanced products in the world — from iPhones to GPUs — all by hand. As products evolved with advanced technology, employees had to adapt quickly in order to build new, complex designs. This laborious and taxing work equated to fewer people being up for the challenge, resulting in a struggle to fill these factory roles. The result? A perfect storm for an industry in desperate need for digital transformation. Then came a bold thought. What if we could automate our factories to produce physical goods, with limited human oversight? And so, in 2018 Bright Machines was born. Today, Bright Machines announced our $126M Series C with $106M in equity led by investment from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and participation from NVIDIA, Microsoft, Eclipse, Jabil and Shinhan Securities, and with $20M in venture debt from J.P. Morgan. This brings the company’s total amount raised to more than $400M. This investment, along with our network of partners, investors, and employees, will enable Bright Machines to further execute on our mission to revolutionize software-defined electronics manufacturing by bringing intelligence to the factory in order to enable manufacturers to build physical products with automation and data. Manufacturing Landscape Six years since the company’s inception, it is even more urgent to solve the issue of manufacturing automation. Electronics manufacturing is still outdated and manual, with isolated, inefficient processes that drive up costs. In fact, manufacturing waste is $8T annually, including rework, downtime, mistakes, and experiments. The industry continues to face challenges – everything from skilled labor shortages to outdated infrastructure, fragmented supply chains, and inconsistent standards across the entire value chain. The rise of geopolitical tensions and security concerns only add fuel to the fire, as the U.S. cannot outsource manufacturing as effectively as it could 50 years ago. At the same time, with manufacturing and its supply chain still centralized overseas, the building and scaling process has dramatically slowed down for U.S.-based manufacturers. These issues, in tandem with the rapid progress of AI, have led to skyrocketing demand for compute power and new technology innovation. Hyperscalers are racing to deliver more compute, data storage, and related network capabilities and the demand is still far outpacing the supply. The industry faces bottlenecks across dozens of fragmented vendors, resulting in a supply chain traffic jam. While there are many factors challenging the manufacturing industry, with the right investment and approach to ecosystem-wide, software-defined manufacturing processes, there are promising indicators that the industry can transform — and soon. Our funding news comes on the heels of a Microsoft partnership announced in May — an integration that allows Bright Machines to deliver accessible, efficient, and data-driven manufacturing processes for electronics manufacturer customers that are cloud-based, in collaboration with Microsoft. By partnering with technology leaders, like Microsoft and NVIDIA, Bright Machines will further our ability to deliver flexible, integrated, and intelligent manufacturing solutions to customers, starting with Design for Automation Assembly (DFAA), and continuing — with unprecedented visibility — through every step of the assembly and disassembly processes. With this investment, we’re empowering the industry to make the shift towards software-defined electronics manufacturing and take a digital approach from start to finish. “By partnering with technology leaders, like Microsoft and NVIDIA, Bright Machines will further our ability to deliver flexible, integrated, and intelligent manufacturing solutions to customers.” Final Thoughts Solving the software-defined electronics manufacturing problem will by no means be simple, but we’re up for the challenge. We’re committed to transforming this industry with the support of our partners to digitize a critical sector that has been ignored for too long. Our mission is clear, and we’re just getting started. More on today’s news from Reuters. To learn more about our capabilities in building the backbone of AI, visit Bright Machines. Share by Twitter LinkedIn Email See all blog