Aaron Slodov's Atomic Industries raises $25M Series A to automate injection mold manufacturing in Detroit

Fantastic. Well, without further ado, we should bring on our second guest and our first inerson guest. Let's go. Aaron, welcome to the show. How you doing, Aaron? To the show. Announced his series A today. Great to see you. Congratulations. Good to see you. Welcome to the Ultradome. Welcome. You got a mic here.

Keep it close. Hello. Introduce yourself. How's it going? Erin Slov, CEO, Atomic Industries. Very, very few people have sat here at this table with us. I thought this was appropriate, right? I mean, yeah, it's great. You got a round to announce. What's the news today? Well, the first news is I got some merch here.

Let's see it. The first first of kind merch and uh you can wear some of the shirts. Wild colors. I'm going with brown. Brown is the most underrated color on Earth. We got a clay. We got a good clay. Oh, a clay. Love it. Nice. Here we go. Industries. Very, very cool. Well, uh the inspo for these. Yeah.

So, these are obviously not like our official logo. Um and I have uh I'm going to have to airdrop you some hoodies, I guess, too. But do it. Uh I had a great guy on Instagram who basically takes corporate logos and, you know, vintageifies them. And uh yeah, so special special edition. 2019. It's overnight success. Yeah.

Yeah. We actually met in Pasadena. We got coffee uh probably 2021, something like that. Yeah. He broke it all down. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely brutal to start an American dynamis dynamism business like four years before the word was Yeah, for sure. The trend was created. Yeah. Uh yeah. Uh break down the news today.

All right. So, Series A, you can hold this while I do it. Um Oh, by uh so we have um a lot of gong hits. Yeah, a lot of gong hits. Uh, we've put that through its paces. So, this is kind of uh, you know, a bunch of great market validation. We're going to dump this into R&D.

Um, a little bit of like expansion on the footprint. And, um, actually, if you want, um, instead of doing like a fancy render, I can actually, uh, show you guys a little clip of the new factory. Let's do it. We have a video pulled up. Let's pull it up. Wait, this is in Detroit. This is in Detroit. Making Detroit.

Bring it to Detroit. Sign a lease. This is Wow, that's a huge make a lot of things in that. Yeah, it's a lot of uh We're going to keep the floor dirt like that. We had you we we had you call in and you were walking around the the previous facility. It didn't look small. Um what what goes on the floor?

Are you like at the point where you're like copy pasting the same work cell over and over again? Not quite yet.

But you know the idea behind what we're doing is we started kind of uh software first right to kind of prove the concept that we could actually uh design something in you know at the same clip that like a trade expert could. So we did that first. That was enough proof to actually get the first factory off the ground.

Um and then the design software started you know saturating into the molds that we would make right like at that factory. Now we're kind of moving into the actual production of parts. So, this facility, we're going to basically have factory one and two. That's the the footprint that we're using. Yeah.

Um, factory one makes the molds. We ship it to factory two to actually make the parts. So, that facility will just be nothing but part making. What's the wheelhouse part that you make? What What's the canonical example? Name all name part. Yeah. Name every part. Every part. You make parts. Name every part.

We got a lot of parts here. Um, yeah. I mean, basically what we're doing is trying to focus on taking like specialist shop knowledge, right? Like you would go to a shop that's really good at doing like automotive parts or aerospace parts and generalizing that same capability like across the board.

So our envelope or constraint is kind of like size instead of industry or part. So we can't do something like the size of the table obviously, but uh we can work up to that, you know. So, for now, we're kind of like parts that are a couple shoe boxes or smaller.

Like, what was the thesis for your pitch to have every person who works in manufacturing wear a pair of meta glasses and start collecting data? Like, how would that actually flow through? So, I started a lot of my earlier career in like self-driving cars, right? Um, I worked at Google 15 years ago doing this.

It's actually insane. Um, I don't even like thinking about that. Were you like 15 years old? Yeah, I was I was 10. was wondering. Um, and you know, a lot of a lot of the kind of like idea behind that is controlling a system well enough, right? Like a human would control a car.

Same principles kind of apply to a factory, right? Um, if you're producing the same thing over and over again, you can dial a factory like Elon does, right? And it's just like ultra efficient. Um, the holy grail is being able to take a factory and kind of adapt to different things, you know, over and over again.

And mold making is kind of like that because every part has a unique geometry. So ultimately the shape drives like the construction of every mold and it's a little bit different, right? But um yeah, ultimately that Yeah. I mean actually pulling data from someone who's working on a line.

I mean, they're going to see you're going to see someone using a screwdriver one day and then a hammer and then different tools and then pushing buttons and maybe sitting in front of their computer like taking notes. Like, uh, isn't that just like a ton of messy data?

Like, how do you actually compress that into something that's actionable? So, the self-driving analogy is very similar to that, right? Like, um, being able to actually intuit it, uh, like a mechanical task, right? Or I don't know, anything like programming a machine or something like that, right?

um if we have the ability to actually collect the data seamlessly and relatively easily. Uh that's kind of a floodgate, you know, to being able to do a lot of these things, processing them is a different problem um depending on how general they get.

But I do think that that's actually a pretty interesting use case for them. Yeah. Uh give us the update on uh reindustrialization broadly.

Uh there's been some headlines on the job side this year that have been not super uh thrilling to look at actually reduction in in uh manufacturing workforce but what's actually yeah a lot of energy in the what's the vibe what's the vibe like on the ground the vibe on the ground actually and and to be clear I I want to get a sense of like what the vibe is like legacy manufacturing and then like the the re-industrialized crowd no way you got to take that I can't I can't do that right now take Yeah, take it right.

He'll call back. He'll call back. That's actually I mean I don't know if you're [ __ ] with us, but yeah, I don't know if you're messing with us, but that's fine. The It's crazy. Big if true. Big if true. Um the uh Yeah, I mean the vibe on the ground for this stuff is it's interesting, right?

Because there's a huge need for it and like economic data, you know, numbers go up and down all the time and people will panic. um businesses might not actually take on more because capex is ultra expensive or something, right? Um at the end of the day, stuff still has to get made, right?

And there's a lot of work that we're doing right now with the admin um which, you know, maybe we'll talk about someday, but uh people are very aware of this problem, right? And we need to pump resources into the industrial base uh in a really meaningful and fast way. So ultimately there's a huge demand and need.

Um even without the tariffs it was still there, right? Um and I mean yeah starting this company when I did was a really interesting moment in history and like I was trying to frontr run that problem and ultimately I didn't really do anything for you know 2020 at all.

But yeah, I think I think people, you know, they're actually churning out parts and components are, you know, extremely happy uh with where things are at.

But, you know, overall, this is something that like we have the same conversation about over and over and over again, which is, you know, factory jobs and manufacturing jobs.

Like a lot of people don't know if that actually means a specialist, you know, CNC machinist, a CAM programmer, like somebody just pushing a button on a machine on a line somewhere.

Um, and ultimately you'll kind of see, you know, a collapse or you'll probably see, you know, a little bit of condensing of skilled trade labor as like technology flows more into the industrial base and we get more efficient factories that are cheaper. Ultimately, it's not a zero- sum game, right?

It's like Jeban's paradox for for stuff. If you can figure out a way to make more, we're going to make more. I feel like there's a ton of energy like the biggest American dynamism story or the the biggest reindustrialization story has oddly been like the XAI Colossus like the Neoclouds what Crusoe is doing.

like it feels like there's an immense pull from the industry to build big things and they're building multi-billion dollar projects in America. It's very much uh assembling parts from all over the place.

Um we just got a report that Elon's uh potentially buying a power plant internationally and then just rebuilding it in Memphis or Mississippi.

Um, but like do you think that that actually translates to um going down the stack or do you think that uh like all the AI energy will just wind up uh resulting in just build a big data center but still continue to make the transformers wherever they need to be made or make the you know the the networking equipment wherever it needs to be made.

I mean the chips like the the actual energy around moving chip production back to America. It's it's a multi-deade project. Yeah.

I think I think um I think there's like a secret plan here that nobody's really talking about which you you've you've seen uh Elon and like Jensen hint at this right um in some of their public stuff that they've said. Um they're all driving for applying AI to like the physical Oh, sure. Right.

Um, obviously we have to play with LLMs for a little bit and like cool video and image tools and stuff, but ultimately I think that like, you know, we saw what was that like a week ago Elon talking about making transformers now, like just going straight for the kill.

Um, I think that ultimately and like how Jensen talked about like, you know, yeah, I mean, SpaceX vertically integrated a ton of uh a ton of part making internally because they were they were fed up. Uh, but what does that mean for your business, right?

So ultimate ultimately what it means is that like you're going to have a trade-off where skilled trades people are kind of like you know the replacement rate is very low.

Um so you might actually see some kind of like conglomeration or lomeration of these trades kind of you know forming like a foundational layer of building blocks where we can make components and parts. Yeah. And the technology is applied to that. Right.

Like that's what I was saying like Jensen his whole thing is like using tokens for whatever. Right. Sure. um if we can apply that to the part making layer, right? It's just foundational kind of stuff and then from there you can build whatever you want. Yeah.

Um I are there uh I I remember early on when we were talking one of the interesting use cases for AI in a manufacturing context was you have you have a part that needs to be injection molded. You need to build the build the the casting for that, right?

And you need to figure out where you drill the holes to dissipate heat, right? Uh and then and the example you gave me was like if you're if you're molding a bumper for a car, uh the it's a very odd shape. It's not just like something you can roll out on a sheet or cut stamp or do anything else, right?

You need to actually mold it. Uh and it does that have any indexing towards uh like what goes on the data center like what are there parts that are uh that are benefiting in the data center context from that type of like injection molding optimization work?

Um potentially I mean it's going to be a lot of like racking and componentry right so if if there's some kind of weird new you know uh form factor what probably not but yeah most of the data center just feels like it's like like vertical racks just bolted together very like I mean Zuck's building data centers intense now like they're they're they're not going with like bespoke like beautiful like you know custom shapes or anything like that.

I think I think a lot of it like whenever you need to form a part of some kind, right, you have to pick what type of methodology you're going to use, like whatever is most cost effective. Um, and also meets the requirement.

So, if it's a bunch of metal stuff, you're probably going to stamp it or, you know, it'll be made out of sheet metal or CNCed or something. And then if it is a plastic thing that you can actually blast out in high volume and it's it's actually worth it, that's a great problem to solve, right?

And what we're doing is actually trying to lower that barrier and not everything can be a plastic part and people don't want that.

But if you actually lower that barrier then you know engineering changes actually because now you can actually rescope what is plastic what is metal and consider a different you know production method for it.

How are the capital markets treating manufacturing businesses and especially tech enabled manufacturing businesses today? So I'm assuming you're not getting AI multiples but uh hopefully there's there's plenty to go around. Well that's that's the thing is like there's no comp for this right?

Nobody's actually done this before. Um, so, you know, TBD on that. But I do think that even even like announcing the raise earlier, right, was a huge uh mistake on LinkedIn, you know, just because I now have gotten probably a hundred different emails and texts from, you know, people on the other side of venture. Yeah.

They're just like loans, you know, it's just like it's a wellspring of money. There's an ocean of capital on the other side of this if you can prove something viable. Where's the where's the business? I mean you you said $25 million series A massive facility that you showed us.

How are you tracking with like revenue headcount? Anything else that you could share? Yeah. Um so with that kind of progression of going like software to mold making to part making. Um we picked up like our first couple big you know part production contracts. So interestingly enough it's kind of like SAS.

Um it's just like you know I need a widget for five years. Like you're in charge of making the mold and the part now. Yeah. Um, so we're going to start stacking like multi-year production programs. Um, so we're kind of in the mid eight figure range for that right now. Um, and let's give it up for the mid eight figures.

It's it's an amazing place to be. Underrated, right? People already talk about nine figures. Being in the mid eight figures. The next time I'm back here, we'll be we'll be we'll be at, you know, nine figures. So fantastic. There we go. There we go. And then Yeah, we're kind of Come back tomorrow.

Yeah, come Yeah, we'll be back tomorrow. Um yeah, answer that phone call and then roughly uh 50 people right now. Um Oh, wow. And it's it's interesting too because it includes people that are like in in the factories themselves like helping Yeah.

I mean it's it this is one of the main reasons we actually wanted to build in Detroit, right? Because uh you know even though I love California um that talent is not here. Yeah.

Um, so we do have to kind of like rely on that initially to build out the footprint there and then once we actually have Would you come to California? Yeah, for sure. But is California anywhere near the top of the list? I feel like Texas, there's other I mean what's happening in Memphis and in in Mississippi?

Like there's so many other states that are more like please bring your business here. Yeah. I mean, we're going to have to take a look at uh statewide, you know, incentive packages and see see how that's looking. But that's that's kind of the model, right?

Is like 80% California offer incentives for these kind of things or they disincentives. Exactly. Disincentives. Yeah. If you come here, we'll make your life hell, but the weather's great. I was so funny.

I was looking at uh I was looking at the weather report yesterday and I was like, this is this is why we this is why we do what we do. 75 today in Malibu, 75 and sunny, then 78 and sunny, then 77 and sunny, then 79 and sunny, then 79, and then 79, then 77. I'm sure it's not that bad in Detroit right now. It's summer.

It's probably same exact forecast. Everybody talks about don't talk about winter California. People don't talk about fall in Detroit. Well, in Detroit, I mean, in in Chicago, it's the same thing. Chicago has fantastic summers. Yes. People call Detroit the Staint Trope of America. It is. It is.

Anyway, uh congratulations. Thanks so much for coming on the show, dude. Thank you for the gong. Hit that as hard as you can. Blow. That was a good hit. That was you kept it. You kept it in. That's a true test of strength being close to the gong and still getting that that contact. Congratulations. Yeah.

Thank you so much for all the progress. Go take that call. We will talk to you soon. And we have Ariana coming on the show in just a few minutes. In the meantime, let me tell you about eight sleep. 8. com. Get a pod 5. 5year warranty. 30 risk-free trial. Free returns. I put up a shipping. What did I do? You did well.

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