DRA raises $10.7M and lands Siemens partnership to automate manufacturing work instructions

next interview with Phil from Draq. He is in the studio. He's in the reream waiting room. Now he's in the TBPN Ultradome. Welcome. I like that you're tenting your fingers in in anticipation of a big announcement. Uh what you got for us, Phil? What's new in your world? Gentlemen, it's a pleasure to be on.

Good to see you all. Um I'm uh calling in live uh currently forward deployed on site uh with the customer. No, we are uh, you know, small burgeoning Defense Prime in Costa Mesa, you know, having a great time over here as you can see from the the phone booth that I'm in. Great lighting. Great lighting over here.

Fantastic. Uh, we've uh we have some pretty exciting stuff that we're talking about today. Um, two big announcements. One of them is a spectacular technology partnership with our favorite great giant Semens. Uh, so that means a team center integration for the uninitiated, but it means that I got to hit the for Seammens.

Let's go. We lost for a while. We won't take the team slander. Semens overnight success. Totally. What else? We're helping. We're helping. So, uh, with the with the seams partnership, this means they're like bringing us into their customers. Um, it's been great.

They walked us in some pretty great automotive giants lately and some defensive companies. So, we're rocking and rolling. Great partnership. Love the Seams team. Secondly, uh, we are announcing our our primary financing brought to us by Founders Fund and CO2. favorite Trey and Thomas Leont fell over. How much? How much?

How much? How much? The number. The number. Oh, sorry. 10 uh 10. 7 million. 10. 7. There we go. Yes. There we go. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. You It's It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. I I thought what better place can I uh tell the world than my favorite technology podcast and news network, the TVN villas. Yes.

I appreciate it. Um we still we still have to do the the live episode from uh the Empire State Building. Yeah, we do. Uh walk us through the the most concrete example of like uh what uh what could be better about automotive manufacturing?

Like are are are there patterns from Tesla that you think could be ported back to the legacy OEMs? Are there entirely new things? Are there particularly broken processes in automotive manufacturing that you've discovered? any anecdotes you can share them anonymously but whatever's interesting.

So it's actually kind of interesting the a lot of our insights are not specific to industry. So it's actually this realization that you end up having a very bad context problem. So what we're this paradigm that we're trying to push through is what we call contextaware production planning.

This means us basically taking uh you know every piece of information in a manufacturing facility is one node in a very very large and deeply interconnected graph. And what build of the west is today is basically a point solution for a manufacturing engineer.

One person in that whole process who is helping with the beginning of the production planning process and a good chunk of the production planning process.

And what we find at an automotive facility, at an aerospace and defense facility, at an A like a tractor manufacturer facility is that they have contacts that might live on the shop floor, they have contacts that might live in the design world. And they often aren't connected.

They often leave the facility once somebody retires with all that tribal knowledge. And so a lot of what we found is there is there exists this interesting like spectrum of volume versus mix. So a aerospace and defense manufacturer does everything very manually. And so that might look like uh very very high mix.

They have a high a lot of variability in their production and very low volume. So they call that high mix, low volume. On the other side of the spectrum, you end up having like uh consumer electronics manufacturing. A little bit before that, you end up having automotive where it's pretty low mix.

So like, you know, they're having like one one line for one type of car, but it's very high volume. And because of that, you know, because of that predictability, right, you end up having the ability to have a lot of automation.

And a lot of what we want to drive as a company is taking th those two trade-offs of high mix low volume.

So you like have a lot of uh flexibility in your production, but like you can't do a lot of volume really quickly versus the other thing which is like you can turn out a lot of stuff really fast but you can't reconfigure your line a ton. We want to basically uh swap and democratize a lot of that value.

And so we want to basically allow an automotive manufacturer to have very very high reconfigurability and mass produce with a lot of flexibility. And then on the auto on the aerospace and defense side, we want to allow them to be able to massproduce that scale while maintaining that flexibility that they have.

And so that's a lot of what we've seen. That's kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like Tesla's gone like except with the Cybert truck like ve like all the all the cars are kind of like very clearly like, okay, this is the same platform, the Model 3, the Model Y, like there's a ton of shared parts and that's been what's allowed them to scale volume. Color of the seats. Yeah, exactly.

There's like two colors, three colors. Uh whereas uh a company like Mercedes that's been in business for so long, they have like everything from like a small sedan to the the the AMG1 which is probably handbuilt.

Um what uh what is uh um what is the biggest like bottleneck to getting more information out of the heads of like the old guard? like uh is it is it just bringing on a new system that they are forced to use or are there other kind of like pieces of data collection?

I'm thinking about like like you know GitHub cursor cursor for bio the electronic note lab the lab notebook just this idea of like if you can have someone use voice notes in medical context all of a sudden you're starting to get that data into something that can be parsed with uh AI or just software uh and it feels like that particularly if someone says oh today I realize that this tool needs to be lubricated a little bit more in order to get good yield that's staying in their head they're not saying it out loud they're not writing getting it down anywhere.

Is there is there like is there a solution to that? Is that a real problem or is that just something that people say when they're marketing? A a very very real problem. Um it's a very real problem. I I'm not a huge fan of approaches that like take that don't structure that information in a very useful way.

Like I I believe that like context is king and structure is key, right? Like a manufacturing facility can't just be like a dune buggy going off the rails being really crazy. You need a manufacturing facility to be extremely uh fast, repeatable.

You need to basically have a high-speed rail system as a manufacturing facility.

And so in order to do that, you need to be able to take that tribal knowledge in what might be like in the back of, you know, some dude who is in their 50s and about to retire might be in back of his head a little bit like unstructured, but you need to be able to make sure that you're capturing that information in a really structured and intentional way.

And so a lot of the way that we end up serving as a platform for that is allowing folks to like associate, you know, specific like standard notes and different pieces of context with specific components. So like that's one way to do it. But I've seen a lot of really interesting approaches in other places, right?

The key is not just the tooling though. The key is the culture.

And a lot of folks on the manufacturing side are actually like uh unfortunately for the past like 15 20 years some Silicon Valley folks have been just like flying into some facility in Texas or Michigan and saying you know what like here's just some gobbledygook SAS you know it'll take your manual pen and paper process and it'll still be manual but now it syncs with the cloud like whoa crazy thanks yes um so that the the problem is that like a lot of folks in the manufacturing world like they see a new tool coming in and they're like, "Oh, this is BS.

" Like, "This is another one of those. " And so, I've seen this. And so, what you have to do super intelligence. Exactly. Exactly. And so, it's uh what you end up having to do is build trust and love and affection from like the guys on the shop floor. We've been very very fortunate to be able to do that.

Like we have really great relationships with the folks who actually like doing the work. And so if you were a company trying to change the way the west builds, you can't just go top down, you know, go golfing with the C, you know, with the CO or the CEO and like force the top down adoption.

You need buyin from the guys doing the work. Otherwise, they're not going to use the thing. Tools going to sit on the shelf collecting dust. Yeah. And that's very common. I mean, that's like the that actually is like the adoption pattern for like cursor. You know, it doesn't come as a as an enterprise sale mandate.

Uh it comes by just one developer picking it up and then it grows internally and you have your internal champion. Um, well, I'm very glad everything's going well. Congrats on the new round. So bullish. We'll talk to you soon. You're the man. Showing off the guts for us. Thanks, man. Yeah.

Can we get a quick Can we get a quick uh There we go. You know what I want? I want I want your take on those shirts that allow you to bench press more. Are you familiar with these shirts? The compression shirts? Yeah. Shots. I think it's cheating. It's cheating. It's It's awful. It's awful. Yeah.

But what if it What if it gets you comfortable and gets you to that next level? Yeah. What if what if you're not ready to bench 315? This is the thing that gets you out of the out of the valley of uh despair.

If you're using a if you're using a slingshot shirt for if you're if you're using a slingshot shirt for 315, you got other problems. Like somebody like like that's crazy. That's crazy. Just take some creatine, get some protein in, take like a healthy a healthy helping of pre-workout and rip it. Like you'll you got it.

You don't need a slingshot. You heard it here. Uh thank you for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon, fellas. A good one. You're the man. Cheers. If you're looking to design parts, obviously go over to DRA. If you're looking to design anything else, go to figma. com. Make anything possible all in Figma.

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