GrayMatter Robotics partners with Huntington Ingalls to bring physical AI to US shipbuilding

Goodbye. Uh, up next, uh, Gray Matter Robotics. We have the CEO and co-founder joining. Bringing physical AI into US ship building, scaling autonomous production for national security. We need this more than ever. And I'll let you introduce yourself. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me, John. Thanks for having me. Jordian,

co-founder CEO of Grey Metal Robotics. By the way, we're actually neighbors. Would love to give you a tour. Actually, we we should have done this today at our facility with the robots in the background.

Wait. Uh neighbors in Hollywood, neighbors in Los Angeles, neighbors in California. How how precise are we being? Because we have neighbors right behind us and I haven't seen you on the campus. Uh uh but uh yeah, why why don't you kick us off with a little bit of backstory how you got into the industry, how you identified the problem, and then what you're building now. Yeah, as you as you know, as as you both of you just kicked it off that, you know, we're living in a moment where it's more than critical, more important than ever to accelerate the production, accelerate the capacity building for our industrial base, especially in ship building, right?

US makes most of the advanced naval vessels in the world, aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, you name it. And we have more than 5 million manhour short in ship building in the US.

Sure. Between World War II until now is wise the amount of ships US has built, China built more than that in the last 12 months, right?

Yeah.

And we are actually today at a milestone moment in the history for ship building in the history of national security and our US Navy.

Yeah.

We are launching a partnership today. We're announcing this partnership with Huntington Industries, HII.

Yeah. They're huge.

And together we're bringing factory super intelligence to ship building.

Okay. What does the partnership entail? I mean, and maybe just to zoom out, Huntington Engles is they they literally make the aircraft carriers, right? They like they make the exquisite systems. They ship build at the at the biggest scales. Correct.

That is correct. They make all the large aircraft carriers, large submarines, and some of the most advanced vessels. Also, they're launching some of the latest and greatest unmanned vessels for the US Navy.

Is there a uh Shahed drone of ships that America should be copying? We just read a story. It's

called a jet ski. Is it a jet ski? I don't know.

That's actually what I mean. They have

I I I've seen a few of these demos, but I haven't I've heard about the Shahed drone for years and then it became very important with this latest conflict and then apparently uh with that that what was it called? Lucas drone uh that America built very quickly. It feels like that was copied. Is there some sort of nextgen uh autonomous surface vessel that you think is coming down the pipe in major way?

We we're seeing that. We're seeing that from Andrew. We're seeing that from Lockit. We're seeing some of that also from Seronic, right? Let it be the existing primes as well as the new primes. They're bringing lowcost,

sometimes even dispensable

unmanned vessels, let it be, you know, over surface or subsurface.

Yeah. So, what uh what does the partnership actually look like? I mean, Huntington is a huge organization. Like, how are you plugging in? What what organizations are you working with? How do you actually

How many rounds of golf does it take to land a partnership like this?

Zero.

Zero.

Zero. zero rounds of golf

because we're dealing with such a

that's a narrative violation.

We're dealing with such a such a big national security issue. We don't have time to play golf. We have to go build this autonomous

robots that can start building all these autonomous vessels.

Yeah.

So at Grim Robotics at the core, you know, you you asked me uh Jordy at the beginning like John, how did we get into it? Right.

Yeah.

So my co-founders and myself, we started Grim Robotics about six years ago. And when we started at that time, anyone doing robotics and AI was doing one of the two things either self-driving cars or pick and shaper assembly in logistics.

Sure.

No one was paying attention to this massive need in manufacturing. All of our factories, vast 90% of them are done manually by people by hand every single operation.

Yeah.

And we have this growing demand for physical goods. And we have this growing shortage of skilled people, skilled trades people in manufacturing, especially in ship building. And we had to do something to bridge that gap between demand and capacity. And robotics is one thing. But what truly started to change the picture is that when we started bringing in physical AI, marrying it with robotics. But then we also had to start thinking about beyond robotics. If you look at a factory operation, there are manufacturing processes like sanding, grinding, painting, coating, blasting. you name it. A lot of manual labor goes into it. But beyond that, there are a lot of other engineering activities. A lot of industrial engineering, process engineering, material science, a lot of sustainment operations, MRO, you name it. If you don't bring AI and autonomy across the full end to-end picture, if you don't start bringing AI agents in each layer of engineering, we're not going to unlock our factories. So that's our mission at Grim Robotics, connecting it all by bringing domain agents and factory super intelligence.

Yeah. How uh how agent ready are manufacturing systems? Do they have APIs? Are there CLIs? I imagine that they don't have MCP. Like like what? G give me an example of like there's one machine that makes a part that goes on the you know the aircraft carrier. Uh like how is the agent interacting with that? What is it doing?

Right? It's a if you look at a manufacturing operation, it's an in sequence of different processes. Sure. In each processes, you take a tool, you make some value added change to an object using a tool.

Yeah.

Let it welding the parts together, let it be grinding the weld, blasting the surface, coating the surface, a lot of inspection.

So, we deliver autonomous robot cells that are capable of

is this like a sixaxis robot arm? Is that what I'm visualizing?

Yeah, we we work with, you know, we're agnostic to hardware. We embody our physical AI into different form factors. Okay. little industrial robots sitting on the floor or industrial robots on a rail on a mobile base that can work, you know, move around a submarine and work on these very large structures.

We work with anything from as small as a military helmet to a fire truck to fighter jets to a submarine component, you name it. So, we're agnostic to shapes and sizes of robots.

Interesting. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down.

Yeah, great to meet you and uh amazing job navigating my soundboard here. I was throwing I was throwing a lot at you.

Yeah, very exciting. I I I want to learn more about Huntington at some point. It's it's such a fascinating company. Uh congratulations on the deal with them. Absolutely.

Thank you. This is a big moment for national security and US Navy.

Yeah. Have a great rest of your day.