Jamie Serota

The unglamorous box that runs the world

Somewhere inside every automated factory, water plant, and warehouse there is a steel enclosure packed with wires, breakers, and relays. It decides when the conveyor moves, when the pump runs, when everything stops. Nobody photographs it. Jamie Serota decided that anonymity was the whole point - and the opportunity.

As co-founder and CEO of Podium Automation, Serota runs a Brooklyn company that designs and manufactures UL 508A industrial control panels. The pitch is deceptively plain: order a panel, get it in under four weeks. The industry norm is twelve or more. In a world that romanticizes software, she picked the most physical corner of manufacturing and made speed the headline.

She came to it the hard way, as a buyer. Before Podium, Serota led commercial strategy and business operations teams at three of the most demanding hardware companies in America: Tesla, Blue Origin, and Bowery Farming. Cars, rockets, and vertical farms have almost nothing in common except this - they all break when a control panel is late, wrong, or opaque. Serota lived that frustration from the customer side, repeatedly, and eventually stopped waiting for a better vendor to exist.

"We founded Podium to build the vendor we always wished we had," she says. It is the founding myth in a single sentence: not a market she spotted from the outside, but a hole she kept falling into from the inside.

In 2024 she teamed up with Jacob Buser, a decade-deep automation engineer who had built systems across pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and food and beverage as both a maker and a user of the equipment. He became CTO. She became the person who had to explain, over and over, why a startup would choose to open a fabrication shop in Brooklyn rather than write another app.

The answer is that Podium is not really a panel shop pretending to be a tech company. It is a software company that happens to bend metal. Where a legacy fabricator hands the job to a veteran technician armed with hand-drawn schematics, Podium replaced the drawings with software. The system links customer requirements, electrical CAD tools, and shop-floor work instructions into one chain. Proprietary logic selects and connects components to meet UL requirements automatically, and designs each panel for manufacturability, speed, and whatever parts the supply chain can actually deliver that week.

The result is not just faster - it is legible. A customer can watch a panel move from first quote to final delivery without the usual black box of phone calls and delays. That transparency is not a marketing garnish for Serota. It is one of the four values stapled to the company's wall, next to "speed is a feature" and "win for the customer."

By mid-2026 the approach had a scoreboard. Podium had shipped more than 200 panels out of its Brooklyn facility in under two years, serving customers that range from scrappy startups to Fortune 500 manufacturers. Then, in June 2026, the company announced an $18 million Series A led by Construct Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz, Transition Ventures, Sunflower Capital, and Banter Capital joining. Total funding crossed $23 million, and Construct's Dayna Grayson took a board seat.

Investors, notably, did not talk about panels. They talked about Serota. a16z's Oliver Hsu called the founders people "who understand both the legacy world and how to rebuild it from first principles" - which is venture-speak for: they have done the boring work, and they still want to blow it up. Grayson framed control panels as "foundational infrastructure" and Podium as "the modern vendor this category has been waiting for."

What makes Serota unusual is not the ambition. It is the target. Plenty of founders want to reinvent something shiny. She chose to reinvent the quiet, load-bearing thing at the bottom of the stack, the part everyone depends on and nobody thanks. In her telling, faster and better are not a tradeoff to be managed. They are the same thing, and the old industry simply forgot.

Consider what a control panel actually governs. It is the central nervous system of automated production - the logic that tells equipment how to start, stop, communicate, and operate safely. When one is late, an entire production line sits idle. When one is wrong, the failure can be dangerous. For decades that critical component has been produced by a fragmented network of shops that quote slowly, build by hand, and leave the customer guessing. Serota's insight was that the pain was not the panel. It was the process around it.

That is why Podium's four company values read less like a poster and more like a diagnosis of everything she found broken. "Win for the customer" is a rejection of the adversarial vendor relationship. "Default to transparency" answers the black-box quoting she hated as a buyer. "Speed is a feature" reframes turnaround time as a product, not a concession. "Win and lose as a team" is the operator's instinct for collective accountability, imported from the high-pressure floors of Tesla and Blue Origin. Each value maps to a specific frustration she carried in from the other side of the invoice.

The Brooklyn decision is telling too. Building a fabrication facility in one of the most expensive cities in the country is not the obvious cost-optimized move. But it keeps design and manufacturing in the same building, on American soil, where the software team and the shop floor can iterate on the same panel in real time. For a company whose entire advantage is the tightness of the loop between digital design and physical build, geography is strategy. Brooklyn-designed and American-made is not nostalgia. It is the operating model.

The Series A gives Serota room to widen the aperture. Control panels are the wedge - the first, most universal piece of industrial infrastructure - but the founders have been explicit that the ambition is larger: to build the next generation of industrial infrastructure, applying the same software-first, transparency-first playbook to more of the supply chain that keeps factories running. Dayna Grayson, who has spent a career backing hard-tech and industrial companies, joined the board to help steer that expansion.

For now, the proof is boring and undeniable: panels that used to take a quarter of a year now leave the building in a month, and customers can see the whole journey. In an economy loud with promises about artificial intelligence and abstraction, Serota is winning by making something profoundly concrete arrive on time. It is, in its way, the most contrarian bet in the building - and the scoreboard keeps agreeing with her.