Issue 123 - Building a Robot Stack, How to Evaluate EDA Tools, & Gemini Robotics 2
Breaking the Bottleneck | 8/3/2026
🏭 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.
This newsletter is brought to you with support from our featured partners: AMT, IMTS, Ironloop, Upkeep, and Industry 4.0 Club.
Some Interesting Reads:
A nice breakdown on how to evaluate EDA tools enabling multiple types of PCBs beyond simple rigid boards. [Engineering.com]
The Minnesota water systems cyberattack highlights the growing need for OT cybersecurity solutions. [NY Times]
An interview with Adi Prasad, CEO of Matter, on what he learned from working for Elon and Travis Kalanick. [BI]
MIT’s TechAMP makes a good case that America’s technology-adoption gap is an occupational-structure problem rather than a training-volume one. [Manufacturing Dive]
An interesting article on how a streamlined path for behind-the-meter renewables and rate reform can reinvigorate the Industrial decarbonization in the US. [Mother Jones]
How X Square built its robotic stack [IEEE Spectrum]
The US banned foreign-made robots, creating a huge opportunity for companies like Standard Bots. [Morning Brew]
Olinia, Mexico’s $8,500 EV built for the dynamics that come with Mexican cities. [IEEE Spectrum]
A neat 2016 MIT presentation on why Manufacturing is so difficult was found by Hardware FYI!
China has started to produce domestically developed immersion deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines, though some reports state that this is still four generations behind ASML's most advanced machine [Reuters]
CATL has pivoted to AI, Grids, and ship production. I wonder if it’s tied to the slowdown in industrial output, which the FT revealed this week. [FT]
Blogs:
Products:
Google announced Gemini Robotics 2, which is composed of a vision-language-action model (VLA) that converts vision and language input into motor control, an embodied reasoning (ER) model enabling an understanding of the physical world, and VLA optimized to run locally on robots.
A look into NVIDIA’s World Model, Cosmos [NVIDIA]
Arche Industries integrated hundreds of real catalog STEP parts directly into its Smith model, enabling customers to go from text to a structural and CFD-simulated part designed for manufacturing.
Financing & Transactions 💵
Antora raised $550M led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse
Energy • Series C • USA
ChipAgents raised $60M from B Capital
Semiconductors • Series A2 • USA
P-1 raised $50M from NEA
Physical AI / Design • Series A • USA
Foundational Industries raised $25M led by BoxGroup and Zigg Ventures
Autonomous Factories • Seed • USA
Intropy raised $11M from Felix Capital, Quiet Capital, and General Catalyst
Spare Parts Management • Seed • UK
Planned Downtime 🧑🔧
A Great Interview with Applied Intuition
Simulating Worlds with Fei-Fei Li
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.
Ironloop - Ironloop is a modern OT/ICS software platform that delivers configuration-level intelligence, providing manufacturers with ground-truth security visibility and confidence in compliance across air-gapped networks.
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.