factory-automation
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John Stewart Finds the Future of the Factory in What It Cannot Afford to Miss
The Navy veteran and veteran inspector has spent his career looking for flaws that ordinary eyes miss. His larger project is harder: turning shop-floor knowledge into systems, and overlooked people into the next generation of aerospace talent.
Allen Pan Is Teaching Factories to Change Their Minds
After engineering autonomous systems at General Motors and advanced factory automation at Tesla, Allen Pan is betting that the useful factory of the future will not merely run. It will learn, adjust and run again.
The Factory Floor Has a Memory. Senthil Ranganathan Wants It to Think.
After 25-plus years inside manufacturing systems, the Athena founder is betting that factories need fewer passive dashboards and more useful decisions.
Bernhard Kratzwald Wants Factories to Answer the Hard Question: Why?
The Austrian computer scientist spent years teaching AI to cope when the world changes. Now he is applying that instinct to factory floors - where one unexplained defect can become an expensive habit.
Lauren Dunford Is Teaching Old Machines to Tell the Truth
Her company began with an energy thesis in Kenya. The breakthrough came when factory teams showed her that the same electrical heartbeat could reveal something more urgent: where production was getting lost.
Brad Bullington’s Long Bet on the Physical World
Before factory software, Brad Bullington worked through disk drives, LEDs and open networks. At Amper, that career became a playbook for turning stubborn physical systems into useful data.
Kemal Levi
Kemal Levi is the founder and CEO of Relimetrics, an industrial AI company splitting its headquarters between Sunnyvale and Berlin. A Stanford-trained materials scientist who once measured how skin behaves under stress for the cosmetics industry, he now builds ReliVision, a no-code, GenAI-powered platform that lets factories teach machines to spot their own defects. He has spent more than fifteen years turning non-destructive testing and computer vision into shop-floor software, and counts NVIDIA's Inception program among Relimetrics' backers.
John Kibarian
John Kibarian is the co-founder, President, and CEO of PDF Solutions (NASDAQ: PDFS), a Santa Clara-based semiconductor analytics company he has helmed for over 35 years. Armed with a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, Kibarian started building yield-improvement algorithms while still a researcher at SEMATECH - then turned those algorithms into a company. Today PDF Solutions generates $219 million in annual revenue helping chipmakers, test facilities, and battery manufacturers squeeze more quality out of every wafer, with flagship products like the Exensio Analytics Platform and the Sapience Manufacturing Hub driving AI-powered collaboration across global semiconductor supply chains.
Clinton Smith
Clinton Smith is Co-Founder and CEO of RIOS Intelligent Machines, a Menlo Park-based robotics and AI company deploying dexterous robots in factories across industries like wood products, food, and beverage distribution. A Princeton-trained electrical engineer with a Ph.D. on laser spectrometers for wireless trace-gas sensing, he spent years at Xerox PARC and Physical Sciences Inc. before co-founding RIOS in 2018 with fellow PARC engineers. Under his leadership, RIOS has raised $37.5M total including a $13M Series B in March 2024 co-led by Yamaha Motor Corp. and IAG Capital Partners, pioneering a Robots-as-a-Service model that shifts CapEx burden away from manufacturers and promises outcomes from day one.
Felix Fink
Felix Fink is the co-founder and CEO of RIIICO, a German deeptech startup building AI-powered 3D factory digital twins using LiDAR point cloud data. Founded in 2021 out of RWTH Aachen University, RIIICO transforms physical factory floors into collaborative, predictive digital environments in a fraction of the time traditional modeling takes. The company raised a $5M seed round in 2025 led by Pi Labs, won the Siemens Inventors of the Year 2024 award in the Open Innovation category, and counts Volvo, Porsche, Volkswagen, and Schaeffler among its customers. Fink drives product strategy with a philosophy of combining startup agility with deep industrial knowledge.