Machina Labs' Robocraftsman system reaches 18 units deployed, eyes Series C and third facility as DoD and Toyota partnerships scale

Speaker 2: And our next guest, Ed Mehr from Mackinac Labs. He's the cofounder and CEO. Look

Speaker 8: at that

Speaker 3: background. Woah.

Speaker 2: That is remarkable.

Speaker 3: You saw you did you see Blake's demo a couple weeks ago? You're like, I gotta

Speaker 2: go bigger.

Speaker 3: I gotta outdo him.

Speaker 2: This looks fantastic. Introduce yourself. Explain what we're looking at.

Speaker 6: Yeah. Ed Merritt, welcome to our shop floor. Yeah. No. I definitely had to offstage Blake. So Let's go. This is a a two forty foot actually, 20 foot containers that can manufacture anything. We call them Robocraftsman. It's a robotic system that basically manufacture any kind of metal product. We call it Robocraftsman because it can pick up different tools like a craftsman Yeah. And do all kinds of parts. Right now, it's actually manufacturing a drone. It's a drone scan, so that what you see over there is a metal sheet. It's a two millimeter aluminum sheet. The robots are actually deforming it into a shape of a drone, which we're gonna see in a little bit. That's a complete product. Just using kind of the way the potter forms clay ball. Like, there are two robots on two sides. We're gonna show you to the other side of the cell.

Speaker 3: Wow.

Speaker 6: Tinching it, deforming it into shape, into complex shape that can be defense products, auto products, all kinds of metal.

Speaker 2: This is amazing. How many of these machines do you have? How many parts are you making? Update us on the scale of the business. What's where are you today? Where are you going?

Speaker 6: Yeah. Right right now, we're in our second facility. We have two facilities here in Los Angeles. And, Chasse, we're close, so you guys should come for a visit at some point.

Speaker 2: Love to.

Speaker 6: This is actually, so the serial serial number 15 is this one. We're right now working on serial serial number 18 19. So so at least seventeen, eighteen of them right now to the state. Two of them outside of our facilities. The rest are here in our facility. We are a, right now, a series c company, right? Actually, we're gonna make a make an announcement about that soon, so we should we should talk about

Speaker 8: that. What

Speaker 3: that announcement

Speaker 2: could be. Show.

Speaker 6: Yeah. And and and yeah. So, you know, we worked with Department of War Yeah. With Aerospace Primes. Recently announced a partnership with Toyota on making something that wasn't traditionally even possible in automotive world.

Speaker 3: Wow.

Speaker 6: So we're gonna show some of that parts in a bit. But, yeah, no. The company's an exciting place. We're we're thinking about our third facility outside of California. So lots of good stuff.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Take us through that. There's the the partnership with the strategic development fund. How did you meet them? What's the plan? Walk us through the deal.

Speaker 6: So we have, like, a unique approach toward manufacturing. Right? You know, with defense, a lot of people are thinking about kind of going back to what it was in nineteen sixties and nineteen fifties. Central has manufacturing plants. They can do a lot of stuff. Our approach is different. We have these systems. If you go back, these systems are two containers. Right? So, actually, they fold like a container into a container, like a like a transformer. Wow. And can be shipped anywhere. Right? They open up on any shop floor, and they can basically self calibrate themselves and start manufacturing. So our approach to defense manufacturing is distributed. Right? Not one giant factory that can make a lot of things, but portable system that can go anywhere, open up, calibrate, and make any types of parts. That's how we got connected to the folks in UAE. Middle East, obviously, very unstable environment, and they're looking in a lot of different defense products. Mhmm. So their choice is either, you know, go to China or manufacture it locally. Mhmm. They are looking at solutions like us to set up a facility that can be brought up in a matter of, you know, weeks, not years. Right? And you can start making defense articles. Because tomorrow, you go into conflict in Middle East or in The Pacific, you know, you cannot manufacture everything in The United States. Right? How can we get the help of allies? Let's say, you know, if you're in conflict in Pacific, how can we get help from Philippines, South Korea, Japan to set up a facility in a matter of two months to start making USVs, UAVs, as opposed to making them in a central location of shipping?

Speaker 2: We talked to a couple folks that have different ways to make parts from additives, attractive manufacturing. We talked to three d printing, metal three d printing companies. How are you thinking about positioning the product as flexible for R and D use cases? The you want to do a few small runs, niche versus actually scaling up to something like, okay, we're making the shell of a cyber truck. That's obviously stamped. That's a very different requirement when you're talking about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of a particular shape of metal. How are you managing that transition?

Speaker 6: Yeah. I think you you wanna think about kind of manufacturing in two different paradigms. There is a traditional paradigm when you have an assembly line, you make the same thing over and over again. Yeah. And what we're thinking is actually closer to how data centers operates. Right? You have these systems that actually end up becoming pretty cheap. Right? That we are we are making these things to become very much commoditized hardware, off the shelf hardware, so they can easy to finance. But the way you get throughput out of these is that you replicate them horizontally. You set up a facility Mhmm. That can have 50 to a 100 of these and manufacture in parallel as opposed to one assembly line that makes the same thing over and over again. In our next facility, we're deploying 50 of these. Right? And that allows us to get, like, you know, defense articles up to a few thousand a year. Right? Obviously, not a good fit for making, like, a million of the same, you know, Toyota Tacoma. Yeah. But when we are talking about few thousands, which is all aerospace, you know, all defense, all heavy equipment and machinery. This is a good choice. Right? But, yes, you wanna go to, you know, millions of parts a year, then we might wanna start thinking about the traditional paradigm. But that's also something that we're actually exploring with Toyota now because we can combine this paradigm with traditional manufacturing to get the benefits of both. Right? So this is actually a door of a, you know, a f one fifty, and we what what happened is that you can actually stamp the general shape of the door. Right? But then you can customize, in this case, the LA Dodgers logo on the door so that this door is uniquely Yeah. Kinda designed for the customer. We're doing this with Toyota right now. Right? So this is a topological map of LA that has been formed on top of a hood for for a four runner. Right? Yeah. Interesting. This is something a lot of people in the off world care care about. Right? You know, putting these topological maps. We actually showed this in a in a in a show that we did with Toyota a while back in SEMA in in Vegas. That's a aftermarket show. And then here's an example of something we did with the with the tailgates. So you can combine a stamping to get a lot of throughput. Yeah. And then at the end of that line, it goes on our machines and then customize it.

Speaker 2: So That's super cool. That makes a ton

Speaker 3: of sense. So yeah. So is this cool. How have sounds like manufacturers have responded positively to this. The workflow would be a customer goes and and specs out a car, and then there's like a personalization feature at the end where they have some other designs that they can imprint it on that they can imprint on to make it

Speaker 2: It's like engraving, but way better and way more complex and way more unique. And so you're gonna be able

Speaker 3: to really roll that out. You could put a a gong on the hood of a Ford GT, John.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what I want, actually.

Speaker 6: Exactly. Exactly. And this is actually, like, you can go beyond just, like, cosmetic stuff. You can start putting functional because the shape of the hood is not never gonna really change, the bulk shape of it. But, you know, from model to model, you start having more features, more little designs in there that you can kinda modify with our technology, and it only takes a few minutes. Right? Mhmm. So you get the throughput as well. But speaking of Gong No. I think we also formed a Gong

Speaker 2: for you guys

Speaker 6: way. This whole time. Started in the morning.

Speaker 3: Look at this. No way.

Speaker 6: This is insane. And we just finished it now.

Speaker 3: Way. No way.

Speaker 6: So we're gonna do a

Speaker 2: little little hitting of the gong for you guys. Amazing.

Speaker 6: And Robo Forum gong.

Speaker 2: Robo gong. Wow. Wow.

Speaker 3: This is a moment we've been waiting for. What a way what a way to cap off the year.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: That is insane.

Speaker 2: Well, congratulations on all the massive progress. Is there anything else you you you'd like to share? Are you hiring? What's the anything else that we haven't touched on that might be worth mentioning?

Speaker 6: Yeah. No. We're growing. In the next two years, you know, we're gonna go from seventy, eighty people that we are right now to 240, 250 people. Wow. New location in another state. So anybody who's excited about manufacturing, we're about reshoring, helping out allies have distributed manufacturing, we're looking for them.

Speaker 2: That's right.

Speaker 6: And, yeah, now we have exciting announcement in January as well.

Speaker 2: So Fantastic.

Speaker 6: Stay tuned.

Speaker 3: We're looking forward to having you back on then. And feel free to feel free to come by in person Yeah. If you can.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. That'd be great for for the announcement.

Speaker 6: Oh, that was great.

Speaker 2: That's

Speaker 3: incredible. Well, congrats to the whole team on a crazy year. The the seeing it all in in real life here is incredible.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's wild.

Speaker 6: Awesome. Thanks, guys. Awesome.

Speaker 2: Have a great one. Goodbye. Eight Sleep dot com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized.