Karlsruhe, Germany-based Daedalus, a technology company that claims to be building the world’s first autonomous and instantly reconfigurable factories, has raised $11.5M (approx €10.17M) in its Series Seed round of funding.
The investment was led by Addition, a VC firm that invests in early and growth-stage tech companies. Existing investor Khosla Ventures also participated in the round.
Capital utilisation
The proceeds from this round will accelerate Daedalus’ growth strategy, hypercharge production capacity, and further advance the capabilities of its proprietary software that allows fully autonomous production of bespoke precision components.
Daedalus is currently working on its first autonomous factory for high-precision mechanical components and is already producing parts for customers in the automotive, machinery, and medical device industries.
“World’s first autonomous CNC shop”
Founded in 2019 by Jonas Schneider, Daedalus builds lights-out factories for precision parts. Its AI-enabled robots democratise the benefits of mass production and enable companies to build more personalised products.
The company’s team comes from OpenAI, SpaceX, Stripe, Google, and many others, banding together to push the boundaries of what’s possible in AI, robotics, distributed systems, and computational geometry.
Jonas Schneider explains, “Before Daedalus, production robots needed to be painfully programmed and re-programmed again for every new task or object. The effort of programming them currently limits their use to mass-produced items – industries with batch sizes in the dozens or hundreds still rely on manual labor by expert machinists. Our software-driven factories make high-precision manufacturing scalable and bring the efficiency of mass production to high-mix manufacturing.”
The company’s aim is to transform the supply chains of companies and to liberate highly skilled production workers from repetitive tasks.
A new generation of industrial automation solution
According to Daedalus, manufacturing companies rely on precision parts in various stages – from prototypes for automotive components to customised machinery. However, the supplier landscape is highly fragmented and 80 per cent of suppliers have less than five employees. This results in companies facing inefficient and opaque purchasing processes, unreliable supply chains, and high costs.
Daedalus solves all these issues through end-to-end automation.
The Y Combinator graduate startup claims to be supplying parts to corporations in the medical and machinery sector, automotive OEMs and suppliers, and to “hidden champions” – highly specialised world-market leaders in Germany.
Schneider says, “What most of our customers have in common is a track record of difficult supplier relations and the strong desire for an improved, technology-enabled supply chain. Daedalus customers receive parts within a couple of days at a fraction of typical costs. And because our entire production process is digital, we are able to provide full transparency to our customers.”
“We’re building the core software for the next generation of industrial automation. Our technology enables a software-defined flow from task requirements to robot and resource planning and execution, and is independent of the manufacturing process and type of machine,” adds Schneider.
Besides growing its German-based factory, it also plans to set up a network of factories across the globe to serve customers in North America and Asia once the integration of Daedalus’ automation technology is completed.
01
From port to startup fort: How Lars Crama is ‘Making it Happen’ in Rotterdam