Breaking the Bottleneck | Issue 108
[2/2/2026] Building Foundation Models at Tesla, Waymo's World Model, Fulcrum Control and more!
Breaking the Bottleneck is a weekly-ish newsletter and interview series about manufacturing and physical AI. If you want to chat, feel free to reach out at aditya@machinafactory.org or on LinkedIn here!
Content I Enjoyed Last Week 🗞️🔬 📚
Some Interesting Reads:
A great primer on Physical AI from CSET covering supply chain challenges, competitive dynamics, and policy considerations. [CSET]
Building Foundation Models for Robotics at Tesla from Ashok Elluswamy [Scaled ML]
Enjoyed this breakdown on Corning, especially the focus on the “Corning Way”. The approach relies on extreme vertical integration, where it designs its own manufacturing machines, and crucially retains engineers across decades by reassigning rather than laying off workers during downturns, allowing expertise to accumulate across projects. [WSJ]
Deloitte Revealed its 2026 Global Semiconductor Industry Outlook [Deloitte]
Another analysis of the misalignment between reshoring policies and workforce revival narratives. The article highlights manufacturers’ inability to match 1990s-level wages without making products prohibitively expensive, alongside the taxing physical demands and employment instability surrounding construction sector jobs, despite them being the best-paid blue-collar work. [FT]
Tesla is now manufacturing rooftop solar panels for residential solar [Canary Media]
A great breakdown from McKinsey on the areas and value that can be generated by leveraging agents across procurement. [McKinsey]
Dave Evans of Fictiv on the sourcing approaches needed in 2026, including scenario-based sourcing strategies, collaborative supplier relationships, real-time data platforms, reducing organizational siloes, and procurement data integrated into the product development process. [Supply Chain Brain]
Siemens today announced the acquisition of Canopus AI, a company working on computational and AI-driven metrology solutions for semiconductor manufacturing [Siemens]
`IFR released a position paper for AI in robotics covering core areas around implementation, upskilling, and ROI. [IFR]
Products & Releases:
Waymo revealed its World Model with advanced simulation capabilities across driving action control, scene layout control, and language control.
Also, a neat interview with Ken Goldberg on the future of robotics.
Cyngn is leveraging NVIDIA Isaac Sim to execute Cyngn’s autonomy stack, mission creation tools, and telematics systems within warehouses pre-deployment. [Cyngn]
Fulcrum launches Fulcrum Control, a secure and real-time quality management product for space, aerospace, and defense manufacturers. [Fulcrum]
Allspice introduces DRCY, an AI-powered design review agent that flags design issues before they turn into expensive board spins. [AllSpice]
Dassault and NVIDIA are combining Dassault Systèmes’ Virtual Twin technologies with NVIDIA AI infrastructure, open models, and accelerated software libraries to establish category-specific World Models. [Dassault]
Tweets & Blogs
The Next Year in Manufacturing Aditya Raghupathy
The Physical AI Market Map from The Business Engineer
Finance & Transactions 💵
Bedrock Robotics raised $270M co-led by CapitalG and Valor Atreides AI Fund
Construction Robotics • Series B • USA
Machina Labs raised $124M from Woven Capital, among others
Robotics / Physical AI • Series C • USA
Polaron raised $8M from Racine 2
Material Science • Series A • United Kingdom
Uptool Launches from Stealth with $6M raise from Khosla, Eclipse, and others
Manufacturing • Seed • Germany
Planned Downtime 🧑🔧
Project Hail Mary Final Trailer
Breaking the Bottleneck is brought to you with support from our partners.
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Industry 4.0 Club - Leading cross-functional group accelerating the adoption of Industry 4.0, delivering better experiences to consumers, better profits to manufacturers, and better jobs to factory workers.
OMNI VC - Leading manufacturing tech VC, investing in Manufacturing Tech startups at the earliest possible stage.