Machina Labs CEO Edward Mehr on AI-powered sheet metal forming, defense contracts, and the Golden Dome opportunity

interesting topics and he uh is going to talk to us about a bunch of stuff. Uh let's bring Ed in and then we will have him introduce the company so I don't mess anything up and uh we'll go from there. Ed, how you doing? Hey guys, good to see you. What's going on?

Uh would you mind just uh kicking it off with a little background on the company? Uh maybe how you pronounce it. It's Machina Labs, right? Yeah, you're right. Machina Labs. Fantastic. Uh, and yeah, just give us a brief overview for the listeners. Yeah, for sure.

Um, you know, I think Mocking Labs is a response to something that maybe actually Peter Teal said once, right? Um, I I I don't want to butcher it, but was along the lines of like, you know, we wanted flying cars, we ended up getting, you know, 140 characters, right?

um which kind of comes down to the cornerstone of like okay software develops really fast hardware doesn't I think you know some people interpret that as a um you know as something that says oh like we don't have as much glass still in the hardware side but reality is there's a lot of technological challenges in terms of um building building hardware right so what we're trying to do at mock labs is just making that much easier right you know if you're a software developer you know two people can develop a program you know rent server from AWS Amazon deploy it.

If you want to build a hardware, you pretty much have to go build a factory, right? Um, and that's why development timelines are like seven years, 9 years. Um, so what we're doing at Machina is we're using robotics and artificial intelligence to build a basically what we call a robotic craftsman.

And it's a robotic system that can do different types of manufacturing operations. Um, and it's powered by AI.

basically can figure out how to pick up different tools, do different types of operation to make different types of parts, physical parts, um, without anybody having to program it or having to handhold it, um, or build tools for it.

Uh, and can you talk about, uh, the specific kind of like first instantiation of the thesis? I saw Justin Lopez over at uh, Bass Powering and it looked like he used a picture of your warehouse. Is that you guys? Is that right? That is us. Oh, yeah.

And so he breaks he breaks the new uh the new manufacturing space down into three categories. Manufacturing SAS companies, make parts for other people companies, and change the way the part is made companies. And uh which which one do you guys fit in? I think you're in the third, right? Change the way the part is made.

Uh developed a way to make stampings complex geometry form sheet metal parts without dyes. And so, uh, can you break us down like what is actually going on when this massive robotic arm is, uh, like pushing into this metal? Explain why this is important, how it works. Yeah. So, we wanted to build a system.

We call it robo craftsman, right? The idea is like where do we get started? Um Um, and we started as sheet forming. Sheet forming is largest metal processing sector today. I think it's like $280 billion industry. You know, most of the metal parts you see dayto-day are sheet metal parts.

like you know you're sitting in your car you like you know you're in a sea of sheet metal every other car body is sheet metal form sheet metal parts or aircrafts are basically sheet metal cans um but today it takes a very long time to get your first batch of parts in sheet metal world right you have to go make dyes put them in giant stamping presses like fourstory tall buildings um and then stamp your your you know your parts out um so our first kind of application of being sheet forming um we have two robots that form um you know start from flat sheet amount metal between two robots.

They have these giant fingers that are super strong, but they can basically push and pull on the metal that form it into a very complex shape without the need for any any dyes or tooling. Um, basically, you know, you get your from idea to to the first part in a matter of hours, right?

Um, it's similar to how a potter forms a clay bowl with their fingers. They're coming into the sheet, they form it um and and and shape it into different shapes. So, yes, it's a new um paradigm, a new way of doing manufacturing. Um, but it doesn't stop there. We're already doing like trimming.

We're already doing uh slotting, hole making. So, the robot can literally pick up another tool, figure out what it need to do with it to do the next operation and does that. So, today does forming, it does a lot of subtractive work like trimming, hole making. It also does a lot of QC. Are you do you get worried?

There's been a ton of there's been an explosion of new manufacturing startups over the last couple years.

um you know uh long since you guys started the company many of which promising to automate with robots the creation of various products um we covered earlier today on the show just how hard it is to like manu for Nike to manufacture a shoe right which sounds somewhat trivial like you know humans have been make doing them for years you should be able to uh maybe we should be able to do it with machines but then in practice it's like there's so many different factors down to temperature um out of all you When you look at manufacturing broadly, are I'm I'm assuming you have some type of framework for evaluating whether something like can be automated to the degree that people would like to see out of manufacturing or or areas that you know basically shouldn't be touched, right?

Like something like like shoes which have infinite sizes and a bunch of different factors. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's like a combination of like three things like the market size, opportunity and how how technology ready it is to to to be to be kind of disrupted, right?

So, um uh but also I think there's a lot of conversation around automation that that is in the previous paradigm. I think for now for the first time we have this concept of LLM this concept of we can actually reason very complex sequence of operations as long as we can train the robots on that sequence of operations.

So it comes down to what data do we have available to train the robots. We already figured out okay you know neural networks LLMs uh these uh transformers if you give it enough data it can actually learn a very complicated complicated task.

The real key was okay what where do we generate enough data where do we have enough data to train it.

Um so it needs and and unfortunately for a lot of manufacturing tasks the data is not out there right you cannot train a very complicated model on it for you know for chat GPT the internet had trove of free data that you could use to create a very complex um kind of chatbot for us coming up with right sequence to make car doors um or shoes doesn't exist yeah so the key is can you actually provide a solution that can scale with limited amount of data with human intervention limited amount data so you can deploy it in the field and get enough dra enough enough traction so you can have now enough data that comes from your machines to train your model.

Can you talk and that's why they went after she form. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the N uh the Nvidia announcement today? That's very exciting. Uh seems like it might be a little bit of like a side quest or is this like in the critical path to you know mass uh mass production? Yeah.

No, Nvidia's today announcement was was a kind of little fun thing we did. Nvidia is an investor in us. So cool. Fundamentally they are very interested in what we are trying to do. You know being able to capture data from physical phenomenon and build models that can manipulate the physical world. Cool.

Um but I think we work with their artist and resident. This actually open AI is artist and resident that we work with Nvidia collaboratively. Fun to really turn a just the artist speaking to a system into a piece of art. Right.

So, Alex, the artist that would work with us, basically spoke what he wanted to build, what sculpture he wanted to build, and the full stack of generating the code, running the robots, all were done autonomously. So, from speech, from intent all the way to the physical part without anybody ever touching anything.

I love that. I I was I was when the when the Studio Giblly moment happened, I was taking some photos of like my kids playsets, studio giblifying them, and then immediately I wanted to print them out because I wanted to have some sort of like physical instantiation, just showing the phone was like not satisfactory.

So the idea of like speaking words and then getting like a sculpture out like that's that sound really awesome and futuristic. Yeah. Yeah. Go. How uh a lot of an investment in humanoid robots lately. many of those promising to revolutionize manufacturing, replace human labor, automate the production of lots of things.

As somebody who's been doing it with robots since 2019, uh how how do you think of that form factor in the context of um manufacturing? Yeah, I'm actually super bull super bullish on on on human rights, right?

I think the question is to to your point, is it going to be is the first application going to be in uh in manufacturing? I don't think so. Right.

Um I think the biggest problem if you want to like think of a startup as like what do you need to derisk first the first thing you gave an example of like Nike figuring out how to do the shoe manufacturing. The first thing is actually intelligence. We have kinematic frameworks for a long time.

You know we could do what humans does in terms of kinematic freedom with industrial robots. We can actually do it more precisely with higher force with industrial robots which was what we need in manufacturing setting. So the missing piece really was intelligence. So we're kind of a little bit intelligence first, right?

We don't need to solve the joints. We don't need to solve people walking around like robots walking around and you know having the human form factor. If you solve the intelligence um you have enough kinematic frameworks which is industrial robots to do what you need to do.

But that being said, I think you know humanoids is huge opportunity maybe not in manufacturing but but downstream in homes and all other places that that that that we can consume it.

What is uh what is the you know I imagine you guys are a beneficiary from some of the tariff stuff in some way but on the actual machine side are you are you know you and the industry seeing challenges of like you know h how much of like the actual robots that you guys are leveraging are are sourced uh outside of the country and yeah Chris at Hrian was saying like yeah my capex goes up by 10% but the demand demand has way way higher.

So what's been your experience? I mean that's true. I mean like what we can what we do here. So so the the challenge is for a lot of work that we do and especially in the defense aerospace defense there is no industrial base. So we have to do it. So demand is always there.

Now 70% of our bomb is off the shelf and we intentionally try to do that so that we can actually finance it easily right use you know multi pusher offtheshelf equipment so that we can easily finance um the full harbor stack.

That being said, you know, a lot of the hardware that we use is either produced in America or it's in very like allied countries. For example, robots were produced in in in um Japan. Um so the tariffs are a little bit more digestible there.

But that being said, you know, we are one of the very few manufacturing companies that are like doing almost software like merchants. So there is enough room for us to to be able to absorb that cost and still, you know, have a very high value, high margin. Interesting.

is the idea on that note is the idea you know we've seen we've seen some investors kind of uh you know strictly software investors kind of poke fun at at VCs that are investing in manufacturing you know expecting uh software-l like margins and and there's sort of this sense that uh well manufacturing hasn't for most things hasn't historically had software-like margins you're seeing it today um how how do you think about the margin profile for advanced manufacturing over time even you know even in things that are like non-chips right yeah yeah so um so so it's it's it's interesting arbitrage I think there's a lot of people thinking about manufacturing solutions in different ways I think you can think of it as automating what traditionally has been done and I think that's usually end up being very low margin right but if you're creating something new that you know has some kind of arbitrage on either labor or has some kind arbitrage on equipment, right?

In our case, for us, you don't have to make dyes, right? And a die, a single die for um you know, a car door can be up to a million dollars, right? So, for us, we're faster, but we get rid of that asset.

Um so, it allows us to have the you know, at the same costerity, have higher margin, but I think yeah, down the road, um the margins could erode. And that's why we're thinking about it as a platform, right? It's a robotic system that can do forming today. HMR is going to do your next operation. It's going to do bending.

It's going to do hemming. It's going to do forging. Right? So, you're constantly expanding the capabilities of the system which allows you to sustain a very uh larger volume business um as some of the margins of the older processes kind of erode. Right. Um yeah, last question.

Um uh you you mentioned that you might have a Golden Dome take. We did a little deep dive. There wasn't a lot to dig into. I'm curious. Uh, it doesn't seem like it would interface with your business too much, but maybe you just have studied the industry. Uh, so what do you think's going on with the Golden Dome?

He's making an actual dome. Dome. Yeah. Make a physical out of gold to go over the United States. I would love that. If you like the blue, get, you know, enjoy the blue above us while you can. It's going to just be all gold soon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

I mean there was like people were talking about how it's like compete with a golden dome at Nordame which is like actual thing um in terms of the name naming conflict. No. So um why do we actually fit into this paradigm?

We we work a lot with missile manufacturers right um and manufacturing components for them the body of the missile for them. Um hypersonics is one of the main enablers of how we can actually have defense against some of these uh missile attacks. So for hypersonics, you need to start processing very complex materials.

Materials that were traditionally very hard to to process. Think of high temperature alloys like nickel. Yep. Uh titanium. Um and and because of that robotic process that locally manipulates the material, we have way more control to process the material without getting to failure.

For example, we can form titanium sheets without tearing it in at room temperature, which is traditionally not possible, right? So I think there's a lot of interesting um opportunities there for us and we're exploring with our you know with our primes that we work with.

Uh but yeah I mean the whole concept of Golden Dome is going to be interesting. You know what I've heard last is it's going to be 7% of the DoD budget in the next two three years right once it becomes pro programmatic. Yeah.

So that's that's what I what I've been great obviously next year we're looking at like I think 20 billion on missile defense but over long term I think the plan is roughly 7% of defense budget.

So, um, it it's going to be a huge opportunity and obviously I think something that's probably very necessary for America, but uh, yeah, we can dive into details, but I don't know how much time we have. No, no, no.

I mean, uh, I I think we'll have to have you back on when there's more details that emerge and we actually get, uh, you know, a a deeper dive into how the uh, how the program record evolves, what the subcontractors might be looking at.

Right now, all the all the names parties are no comments, so there's not too much to dig into for good reason. Um, but it'll be super interesting to see how this uh pans out. Uh, Jordy, anything? No, this was great.

Yeah, we got to have you back on soon, but uh congratulations on all the success and uh I'd love to come see the the machines in action in person. Yeah, we're like we're half an hour away from downtown, so downtown LA. So, both of you. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Let's do it.

I want to I want to do the show with with a robot, you know. I want a robot to make us a bigger gong. Biggest gong possible. Got to make it happen. We got to make it happen. That's something you actually do very easily. I Yeah, I can imagine. It's a perfect It's a match made in heaven.

Our people will talk to your people. Our people will talk to your people. Uh this is fantastic. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much, Ed. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Uh next up, we got William Brown. The idea of like a a like a 20 foot gong is very appealing to me.

Very appealing that you could have watched be made from the raw material. Yes. Be be perfect. Be