Issue 119 - Design and Simulation Market Map, A CPG Report, and Figure's Livestream
Breaking the Bottleneck | 5/18/2026
🏭 Breaking the Bottleneck is a weekly newsletter and interview series covering manufacturing technology and physical AI. Want to chat? Reach out at aditya@machinafactory.org or connect with me on LinkedIn.
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A Design and Simulation Market Map 🗞️🔬 📚
Enjoyed building this with Michael Finocchiaro at Threadmoat. This is the start of a new series featuring market maps of engineering and manufacturing startups shaping the landscape today. For more analysis of this ecosystem and more on each of these startups, check out ThreadMoat and visit Fino’s profile! As always, let us know if we’re missing anyone!
Some Interesting Reads:
Keychain surveyed 1,000 U.S.-based CPG manufacturers, with 52% planning to add new production lines and 25% planning to open new facilities. In terms of AI adoption, 12.3% have already deployed it, 18.4% are piloting it, and 22.1% are planning to implement it.
Cerebras, which went public this week, warned that the US Chip manufacturing rebuild could take up to 15 years [WSJ]
An interesting breakdown and analysis from Joris Feels on the AI CAD tools best suited for 3D Printing. [3DPrint]
Fanuc announced a partnership with Google, unsurprisingly shares surged [Bloomberg]
Atlas shared the Q1 2026 State of Clean Energy Manufacturing report. Surprised by the significant drop in battery investment given the energy bottleneck, though unsurprised by the cancellation of 48,000 announced manufacturing jobs. [Atlas Public Policy]
KPMG released its industrial manufacturing tech report. 48% plan to significantly increase cybersecurity investment, and 70% are taking a centralized approach, with IT leading AI implementation. I’m personally skeptical of this approach, AI’s value should be democratized to business owners. [KPMG]
Emerging approach? Stellantis and Ford announce partnerships with Chinese carmakers to survive in a European market squeezed by high costs and weak demand [FT]
China’s BYD leads in silicon-carbon battery development, a technology that the US invented, and companies like Sila Nanotechnologies have been working on for years. A great breakdown of another technology developed by the West, and productionized by China. [The Information]
An AWS solution breakdown for capturing multi-modal embeddings from manufacturing-specific data, such as engineering diagrams, CAD drawings, inspection photographs, thermal analysis plots, and fatigue curves. [AWS]
a16z shared that 20% of manufacturing firms are using agents [a16z]
BCG’s CEO Guide to Physical AI [BCG]
Products & Research:
Figure’s livestream drew 1.5 million views on X over its first eight hours. While exciting, I’d be curious to see how this performed relative to the first generation of warehouse automation, and it looks like the Agility CEO agrees. Also interesting that the robot didn’t optimize for the barcode being up on a lot of the parcels. [Figure]
Config launches building the data layer for robotics foundation models [TechCrunch]
Alcon case study, with HighByte serving as the foundation for predictive maintenance and defect-monitoring use cases. [HighByte]
Siemens and Xometry announced a $50 million partnership, including the integration of Supplyframe, which provides design-to-source information for electronic components, and Thomas’s sourcing data. [Engineering.com]
Mind Robotics raises another $400M for Manufacturing robots [Robot Report]
Microsoft updated MatterSim, a multi-task foundation model for in silico materials characterization [Microsoft]
Chef Robotics now automates secondary packaging and kitting automation for CPG manufacturers and customers. [Chef Robotics]
Perceptron released MK1, a purpose-built system for video understanding and embodied reasoning
Finance & Transactions 💵
Anduril raised another $5B from Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz
Aerospace & Defense • Series H • USA
Mind Robotics raised $400M from Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, and Redpoint
Robotics / Physical AI • Funding • USA
RangerAI raised $8.4M from Bonfire Ventures and 25madison
Industrial AI • Series B • Canada
Planned Downtime 🧑🔧
A24 and Bourdain, Sign Me Up
Breaking the Bottleneck is brought to you with support from our partners.
AMT & IMTS - The Association for Manufacturing Technology represents and promotes U.S.-based manufacturing technology and hosts the largest manufacturing technology trade show in North America, IMTS.
Jiga - Is a platform that connects hardware teams with vetted manufacturers for custom parts. Instead of black-box instant quotes, you see exactly who’s making your parts and can talk to them directly.
Upkeep - CMMS Software helping maintenance teams manage work orders, assets, and preventive tasks efficiently from any device.
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.
Ironloop - Ironloop is a modern OT/ICS software platform that delivers configuration-level intelligence, giving manufacturers ground-truth security visibility and compliance confidence across air-gapped networks.
T51 - T51 is an AI-native planning, scheduling, and optimization platform that integrates securely with your existing ERP, MES, and data stack.