From Sifted.eu, February 8:
The startup is attempting to remove supply chain bottlenecks that manufacturers typically face
Karlsruhe-based Daedalus has raised $21m in Series A funding to build autonomous factories that manufacture precision parts, for anything from medical devices and rollercoaster wheels to rocket engines.
The startup — that takes its name from a skilled architect and craftsman in Greek mythology — was founded by former tech lead and one of the first engineers at OpenAI, Jonas Schneider, who worked at the company between 2016 and 2019 and founded Daedalus a few months after he left.
His startup is currently ramping up production at its first 50k square foot factory in Karlsruhe, a city in the industrial region of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It’s already producing components for companies in the semiconductor, defence, energy, emobility and medical sectors.
The idea is for the company to automate the manufacturing process from quoting (which assesses the raw materials, labour and margins needed to produce a specific item) to delivery and smoothing out supply chain bottlenecks that manufacturers typically face.
The Series A round was led by US firm NGP Capital, with further participation from its existing investors, including Addition and Khosla Ventures.
The manufacturing ‘bottleneck‘
High-end manufacturing companies like Siemens, which produces electronics, or ASML, which produces semiconductors, typically run into problems when trying to produce bespoke parts.“They are very much focused on design and application engineering, figuring out ‘how can we design a pump in a way that is hyper-efficient’, but they get stuck at the point of where to actually get these parts produced,” explains Schneider, who cofounded and led software engineering for OpenAI's Robotics team....
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Also at Sifted, February 8:
There’s a lack of growth capital in Europe — Germany’s $1bn deeptech and climate tech fund wants to change that
The fund backed six early stage companies last year and wants to focus on writing bigger cheques in 2024