SAN FRANCISCO — Bright Machines, an innovator in intelligent, software-defined manufacturing and robotics, has raised $126 million in Series C funding, with $106 million in equity led by investment from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and participation from NVIDIA, Microsoft, Eclipse, Jabil and Shinhan Securities, and with $20 million in venture debt from J.P. Morgan. This brings the company’s total amount raised to more than $400 million. The capital will be used to launch product innovations, expand its software stack for increased assembly flexibility, and grow strategic relationships with ecosystem partners.
Currently, electronics manufacturing is outdated and manual with isolated, inefficient processes that drive up costs. With the proliferation of AI driving up demand for compute power and subsequently, AI hardware, the industry faces a bottleneck across dozens of fragmented vendors that causes a supply chain traffic jam. Bright Machines was founded in 2018 by industry veterans who saw a unique opportunity to solve this problem and bring an unprecedented, data-focused approach to electronics manufacturing.
Bright Machines’ full stack solution provides centralized data visibility, traceability, performance benchmarking, and flexible automation. In Bright Machines’ digital ecosystem, valuable data is constantly generated and communicated to a central hub, thus creating a powerful engine for continual optimization. Leveraging this robust data network, Bright Machines’ Design for Automated Assembly (DFAA) tool provides virtual design recommendations to shorten products’ time to market. The company’s robotics utilize machine learning algorithms to help ensure quality control and traceability during assembly inspection. And once products reach their end of life, Bright Machines’ flexible disassembly capabilities help harvest and recycle components – achieving full circular manufacturing. By uniting this data network with agile robotics, modeling and simulation, Bright Machines provides a robust, modern factory that far exceeds what traditional factories can achieve.
“Adopting ecosystem-wide, software-defined manufacturing processes will ease the mounting burden from the industry’s biggest challenges, including a lack of skilled workforce; aging, rigid systems; disparate and fragmented supply chains; and an overall lack of standards across the value chain,” said Lior Susan, CEO and Executive Chairman at Bright Machines. “By collaborating with technology leaders such as NVIDIA and Microsoft, Bright Machines can deliver flexible, integrated, and intelligent manufacturing solutions to our customers, starting with Design for Automated Assembly (DFAA) and continuing – with unprecedented visibility – through every step of the process, right through to the circularity of recycling. As optimized manufacturing systems are faster, more resilient, and more efficient than their manual counterparts, our customers are more competitive in terms of cost, their products’ time-to-market, and customer delight. And in a world where we can now use AI and software to teach robotics systems how to build electronics, the opportunity to redefine how we will design and build electronics is unlimited.”
“Physical AI is powering the next wave of digitalization applications. Bright Machines, powered by NVIDIA Omniverse core technologies, will help accelerate a new era of AI-enabled industrial digital twins — from design to operation and optimization,” said Rev Lebaredian, VP of Omniverse and Simulation Technology, NVIDIA
