A factory can be full of computers and still be strangely silent. The planning system knows what should happen. The accounting system knows what was purchased. The machines, some older than the people operating them, know what is happening right now. The trouble is getting them to speak in one usable language. Brad Bullington has built a career around versions of that translation problem.
At Amper Technologies, the Chicago company he led into a December 2025 acquisition by ECI Software Solutions, the translation is literal. Sensors and software capture signals from machines regardless of age or brand. FactoryOS turns them into a live account of uptime, downtime, jobs, labor and production. A manager can see a bottleneck before the weekly meeting. An operator can work from the same operational picture as the front office. The promise begins with a modest achievement that many factories still lack: knowing what is going on.
Bullington arrived at that problem through an unusually coherent tour of supposedly unrelated industries. He worked in strategy at disk-drive companies Maxtor and Seagate, ran LED developer Bridgelux, moved into venture investing, led enterprise-networking companies Pica8 and Borderless, then returned to operating at Amper. In each case, an entrenched piece of hardware was becoming more programmable, more observable or more dependent on software economics. His résumé reads like a study of the moment when atoms learn to report to bits.
storage strategy
LED economics
open networking
factory intelligence
The price-performance crossing
The most revealing chapter begins with light bulbs. Bullington joined Bridgelux in 2010 from Seagate, initially overseeing strategy, corporate development and technology solutions. By 2013 he was CEO. The industry was trying to replace incandescent lighting with LEDs, but technological possibility was not the same as commercial inevitability. LEDs had to become efficient enough, inexpensive enough and simple enough for customers to switch.
Bullington described the task as crossing price-performance levels that allowed new applications to “flip” to the new technology. It is a compact way to talk about adoption. Customers rarely buy a paradigm shift. They buy a shorter payback period, lower maintenance, better output or fewer irritating surprises.
Bridgelux treated lighting partly as a semiconductor problem. It developed gallium-nitride technology on silicon, worked with Toshiba on commercialization and concentrated on packaging, thermal management and usable systems around the chip. In a later interview, Bullington said the company had once been viewed as heretical for drawing strong analogies between LEDs and mainstream semiconductors. The heresy was really an economic claim: borrow the manufacturing curve of a larger industry and lighting could get cheaper faster.
Partnership was central. Bridgelux worked with Toshiba on fabrication and with Chevron on municipal street-light programs. Bullington’s television shorthand was “Don’t fight the river.” Rather than own every expensive stage of production, a company could partner with scaled manufacturers and invest in the technology and applications where it had an edge.
By the 2015 sale agreement with an investment group led by China Electronics Corporation, Bridgelux had become an example of the strategy it preached: differentiated technology joined to global manufacturing scale. Public materials around Bullington’s later appointment at Pica8 credited his Bridgelux tenure with growing revenue tenfold to $100 million over four years and leading more than $100 million in capital formation. The precise technology changed at his next companies, but the playbook survived.
From boardroom context to the CEO seat
After Bridgelux, Bullington spent time as a venture partner and entrepreneur in residence at DCM Ventures. He co-founded Q6 Capital in 2017, investing in early-stage companies that digitized established industries. Amper became both an investment and, eventually, a long apprenticeship.
Amper itself had learned through a pivot. Founded in 2016 by Akshat Thirani and Philip House, it began with an idea for a smart residential circuit breaker. The team invalidated that idea, then redirected its knowledge of electrical data toward factories. Instead of asking manufacturers to replace their equipment or endure a large systems-integration project, Amper developed a lower-friction way to monitor existing machines.
Bullington backed the company and joined its board. When Amper raised an $11 million Series A in 2022, Thirani thanked him among the mentors who had provided steady support and described the group as empathetic, scientific and long-term focused. Bullington later became executive chairman. He had the investor’s view of the market, the director’s view of governance and a close view of the operating company before he had the chief executive’s responsibility for all three.
Investor → board member → executive chairman → CEO. The title changed, but the accumulated context stayed in the room.
In March 2025, after discussions with Thirani and the board, he took the CEO role. His announcement was not framed as a rescue or a reinvention. It was framed as a change in vantage point at a company he already knew. He wrote that manufacturing’s transformation was only in the “3rd or 4th inning,” borrowing baseball to make an industrial shift feel unfinished but legible.
He also named the missing layer. Factory operations generate digital signals, but there is often no single source of truth that captures, processes and acts on them. Information technology lives in enterprise systems. Operational technology lives among machines, controls and specialized workers. The useful software company has to bridge the two without pretending either side can be wished away.
The useful constraint of old machines
Industrial technology attracts futuristic language, but Amper’s practical advantage is its respect for the installed base. Factory owners have already spent heavily on machines that may run for decades. A system that works only with new equipment imposes a capital decision before it delivers an operational benefit. A system that connects to what is already there can begin with observation.
This is where Bullington’s earlier work echoes. Open networking software separated capability from proprietary hardware. Semiconductor partnerships separated product innovation from owning every fabrication step. Factory monitoring separates visibility from a wholesale machinery replacement. In each case, the constraint is not an embarrassment. It defines where leverage can be built.
Amper’s product expanded from machine monitoring into FactoryOS, bringing together people, machines, jobs and systems. By the time Bullington became CEO, he said the company had more than 250 customers, from family-owned machine shops to Fortune 50 companies. The ambition he stated was broader still: put Amper into the hands of every manufacturer.
That aspiration arrived just as industrial AI was becoming an easy phrase to print and a difficult thing to implement. Forecasts and copilots need a dependable account of machine state, job progress, scrap, labor and delays. Without it, artificial intelligence is reasoning over administrative shadows. The less glamorous data-collection layer determines whether the glamorous layer can help.
An exit into a larger system
Nine months after Bullington became CEO, ECI Software Solutions acquired Amper for an undisclosed price. ECI sells business-management and ERP software across manufacturing and other industries. Amper supplied the live shop-floor layer: machine insights, smart scheduling, labor analytics and an AI copilot grounded in production data.
The fit is almost diagrammatic. ERP describes the plan and records the business. FactoryOS describes execution. Joined together, they can narrow the distance between what a company intended to produce and what its machines and teams are producing now. Bullington said ECI would give Amper the scale and acceleration to deliver more operational efficiency to customers.
For him, the transaction also completed another lap through a familiar pattern. A focused technology company develops a way to make old infrastructure more useful. It proves that value with customers. Then a larger platform supplies distribution, complementary products and endurance. The company does not defeat the river. It enters a bigger current.
There is a temptation to describe industrial change as a march toward autonomous factories. Bullington’s career points to a more grounded account. Progress comes through thresholds: a payback short enough to approve, a sensor simple enough to deploy, a partnership large enough to manufacture, an interface clear enough to trust. The future arrives when a stubborn system becomes economical to understand.
That may be the most useful observation hiding inside the string of titles. Consultant. Strategist. CEO. Investor. Board member. CEO again. Bullington has repeatedly chosen markets in which software must negotiate with physical reality. The work begins by listening to the machines already in the room.