Tech startup Bright Machines which was founded by a group of manufacturing and software executives came releasing its product on Wednesday, dubbed as “microfactories” that is developed to automate the electronics parts assemblies.
Unlike auto industry and other product manufacturing factories that have gone automatic since a while, electronics assemblers still succeeded avoiding process automation at the manufacturing plants as programming of those automation machines requires months whereas designs of electronics changes at comparatively faster pace, said Amar Hanspal, startup’s Chief Executive.
Consist of pods having size similar to that of a large refrigerator, microfactories encloses robotics, software and sensors which are used to learn the tasks currently handles by humans such as insertion of sophisticated processor or memory chip onto a circuit board.
Bright Machines, founded by the technology veterans from Flex Ltd and Autodesk Inc, is currently working with about 400 employees and has last year raised $179 million in funding.
The San Francisco-based company is assisting about 20 different brands in more than two dozen locations in different countries including India, Hungary, Mexico, Romania, China and the United States, said Hanspal, who worked at Autodesk as co-CEO.
Hanspal did not mentioned the names of customers the firm is currently working with but those are getting benefits of its machines in the process of making diversified devices from simple products like coffee makers to complicated networking gears for data centers. The startup also inked deals worth $100 million to sell machine over the next one and a half year.
The companies are in quest of doubling the capacity of building their products with the same number of employee, but facing the challenges in part of the factories that are least automated, said Hanspal.
Bright Machines instead of programming robotic arms in a factory uses software to take up the challenge of electronics, and for the purpose it has software office in Seattle that was opened last year.
