Adam Gluck

The code that runs the physical world had no backup. He noticed.

Somewhere right now, a programmable logic controller is deciding when to open a valve, when to weld a seam, when to cap a bottle of medicine. That little gray box runs code. Often the only copy of that code lives on a laptop, or a USB stick, or in the head of one engineer who is about to retire. There is no version history. No undo. No "who changed this and why." If it breaks at 2 a.m., someone is paged, and the clock starts bleeding money.

Adam Gluck is the CEO and co-founder of Copia Automation, a New York company built on a single stubborn idea: the engineers who program factories deserve the same tools software developers have taken for granted for two decades. Source control. Collaboration. Code review. A clean way to recover when things go wrong. Copia calls it Industrial DevOps, and its flagship product brings Git - the version-control system behind essentially all modern software - to PLC programming.

It is not a glamorous pitch. Gluck knows that. It is also, arguably, one of the more important unsolved problems in the technology that quietly runs the economy.

A sociology major walks into Uber's microservice architecture.

Here is the detail that refuses to fit the founder template: Gluck did not study computer science. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, with Honors, from the University of Chicago. The discipline of studying how systems of people behave turns out to be useful preparation for studying how systems of machines - and the people who maintain them - actually work.

Before Copia he was a staff software engineer at Uber, and not a quiet one. He was a founding engineer on Uber's Engineering Strategy team and helped design and build DOMA, the microservice architecture that organized how Uber's sprawling backend fit together. He worked through multiple rewrites of the Uber driver app and the machinery for shipping it to millions of drivers every month. Earlier still, he founded Openshelf and led iOS development at the University of Chicago.

So Gluck spent years inside one of the most demanding software environments on the planet, where every engineer expected version control, automated testing, and a rollback button as a birthright. Then he looked at the industrial world and saw none of it. That gap became the company.

What Copia actually builds.

Gluck co-founded Copia with Matthew Lee. Together they assembled a toolkit aimed squarely at controls and automation engineers - the people whose code keeps assembly lines moving. The promise is simple to say and hard to deliver: fewer hours of downtime, faster delivery of new automation, and a real safety net when something goes sideways.

There is a security dimension too, and it is not theoretical. Industrial systems have become ransomware targets, and "ransomware readiness" is now part of the conversation Gluck has with manufacturers. When your only copy of the code is gone, a backup with full history stops being a developer convenience and becomes disaster recovery.

How he got here.

Boring, on purpose. Important, by accident of history.

Software people love new things. Industrial people, sensibly, love things that have not failed for thirty years. A controls engineer running a line that produces a million units a week is not looking for novelty - novelty is risk, and risk is downtime. That conservatism is exactly why the factory floor missed the DevOps revolution the rest of software lived through.

Gluck's bet is that the safe-and-proven tools of modern software - version control, code review, automated backup - are now mature enough that bringing them to industry reduces risk rather than adding it. He spends a lot of his time saying this, on podcasts, on stages, in interviews, patiently translating between two worlds that have historically not spoken the same language. The fluency is the product as much as the code is.

It helps that he is not a stranger to the smell of the shop floor. Gluck has ties to manufacturing going back to growing up around the automotive process - close enough to the work to know that the engineers he is selling to do not want a lecture from a software person. They want their 2 a.m. to be less bad.