This Next Billion-Dollar Startup Wants To Save American Manufacturing

[Music] if you look at the shape of the last 30 years geopolitically it's pretty obvious that what happens in the rise and fall of great Nations is that step one is great success step two is hard industrial power step three is Outsource all the hard industrial power to lower cost countries then step four is because you did that you lost what made the country powerful and strong in the first place and eventually that comes home to roost you've probably followed the stats that American manufacturing has actually desined in the past few years it's actually stagnated

and I think that's because they've just hit a wall there is no real productivity leap there is no supercharged fuel underneath that will allow them to continue to grow the old processes that were invented in the 1900s the mid 1900s just are are done you know they just don't work they've gotten out all they can get out of and now they've started to slide backwards Los angeles-based hadrien has raised 180 million in Venture funding to build out software enabled factories for high precision machine parts for Aerospace and defense companies was a real like culture paradigm

shift that we realized was it's not about automating something because Manufacturing people to know what they're doing it's just how do you get the knowledge out of their heads systemize it get it in sofware and automation that's really the trick atrian founder is Chris power he's a 33-year-old Australian immigrant Australia is the best place to grow up or retire very rarely does anything big happen there so personally it always felt like sitting at the kids table at Christmas was pretty obvious is that the US is kind of the last great Democratic experiment in the next

50 years it will be decided whether the CCP rules the world or it continues to be like a western Le American order Adrian's big idea was to build its own software enabled facilities rather than selling software to existing ones were a company full of slightly insane people that believe in something slightly greater than themselves we work with basically startups who are trying to develop new technology either for space the dod or deep Tech in general Neo primes where they're starting to become these massive companies and need a lot of manufacturing support so our job is

to basically accelerate the new entrance while helping the Legacy or massive entrance that are the pillars of this country's manufacturing base transform their operations with technology and services very very very quickly [Music] [Music] most automation is built around a very defined product and Automotive is probably the best parallel so you have a production line making X type of cars or variations of cars and you build Automation in the highly repeatable task of where you're going to do the same thing over and over and over again it works really well even in a like Machining environment

when you're going to make a small subset of parts at a high rate where it tends to break is in introducing a mass amount of variability and that's what our system was designed to go ingest and so both with how we set up our process as well as how the automation is is built is to try and take Mass ambiguity and break it down into a set of standardized functions or tasks to make it digestible to make make it effective and to really kind of give us a lot more of that variability management that you

would typically struggle with Chris power first approached SpaceX employee Chris Baker back in 2021 with what seemed like a crazy idea Chris originally reached out when I was managing the machine shops at SpaceX and had this wild idea that he wanted to automate the work I was doing in that Factory at the time it was a extremely chaotic environment and was proof to me that what he was trying to push was not going to work I think you lose a lot of faith in the fact that this can be automated when you've been surrounded by

the type of Hardware that we have to manufacture and the amount of different variables both like human and just physic space problems that the space is surrounded with and you lose a lot of trust that you can really get down into each and every variable standardize it and build a system that can be replicated without a ton of human [Music] intervention despite his original skepticism Baker decided to join power at his startup named after the Roman Emperor power who is both Relentless and Charming soon convinced investors to back his idea too investing in Chris power

was a wonderful experience because he's one of those Founders who's a true Visionary and he lights up you know not just a room but a whole Market he explains the need in terms of the supply going down the demand going way up in such a way that if you didn't know you needed it now you know that you need it Chris's very first principles will challenge every aspect of of anything you're saying cannot happen and really gets you to question kind of your underling philosophy of why am I against this what is what is holding

me back and so I think it's an extremely aggressively helpful way of of approaching what we're going and building and what we're going of doing because if you don't know at its core why it can't work then you sure as hell better go figure it out it's long been hard for manufacturers to find people who want to work there you've got millions and millions of high-skilled Labor shortage that is going to get worse because people are retiring so we could train 10,00,000 people over the next couple of years we can't train Millions so it's like

how are they 10x more effective with Soft Robotics and then where is the pool of people that we can make manufacturing exciting for give them a great career one of our like core mission statements is to make meaningful jobs for the American Workforce and I think it's like one of the things we've we've done the strongest at like the majority of the tour and interview process is held out on the floor around equipment and a core element is seeing how they engage what type of questions they ask how interested they are in the specifics versus

it just being a job or something to to collect a paycheck it's really where are the pools of people that have similar skills that we can draw from and bring them into this industry where there is high Talent density and that's you know retail Hospitality oil and gas exmilitary nurses really really anybody who wants to who is like able and willing to go so we are down to a point where we can train and onboard anybody in like 30 days and the first part of that is using software and Robotics to make it a lot

less complicated and the other part is training and Workforce Development to enable the new people coming in to be successful and grow as fast as they can grow the variety of people we have here is really cool we have really like super smart people and equally smart people without the experience people who you know this might be their first job some of us have that context and and you have a little bit of mechanical engineering and Manufacturing background most people really don't and so when we try to bring them in here we're like we kind

of tell them like Hey we're going to teach you all that the thing that you need is to be interested when I joined manufacturing it was this dated thing that nobody wanted to be a part of and I think we're building something that can change that Dynamic and so the entire kind of strength of the US economy the US defense program is built on the ability to go build things internal to the US and I think we have the ability to go scale that and we have the ability to get more people familiar and exposed

in this environment and make them effective quickly adrien's Revenue reached an estimated $3 million last year its first year of commercial operations this year power figures it will grow tenfold to at least 30 million after that he has big plans to open additional factories around the country so we invested in the summer of 2021 and the product was just being built at that time so it has really gone from zero to exponential growth in that timeline they've you know not only brought their product to life they've built a factory around it now put those CNC

machines on their software platform and now have a wonderful set of customers many of which are of course confidential but are growing growing really really well and have supercharged demand in that space in terms of where we were 2 years ago or what we thought could have possibly happened is we blow our expectations out of the water and the proof is really in what customers think and also like just how efficiently we're operating we are 300 to 400% more efficient on how we utilize our Capital Equipment usually machines run 20% of the time we are

running at 79% 80% so we can get more with less secondly we are are about 6 to 10x more efficient on a like Workforce productivity basis it's been 4 years since Chris and I really started talking and again I started in this very I can't believe you're trying to do that good luck state today we're about 100,000 s ft it's a relative size of where we'll build our next Factory as we bolt on different capabilities or really look to grow the size of the hardware we support this is kind of the Playbook where trying to

go build out and and Define for those future factories but the ambition of the company is truly going to scale with us and so the amount of processes we support what we're trying to do to really be a single source is really going to stress what that Playbook looks like as we grow the long-term vision is that we will do everything for everybody in core manufacturing for the US every 6 months so we roll out one of those new product lines to customers to expand the capability of what we can do so ultimately we will

have you know 50 or so kind of very large facilities specialized in each of those areas so customers can tap into any one of those Services depending on what they're making what all leaders should aspire to do is like make yourself obsolete I think the interesting thing about hadrien is I have no line of sight or Vision to being able to do that based on the ambition of scale and growth how we develop the workforce just the amount of challenges in front of us both technically with people with just like infrastructure in the country is

so impactful and large that I really don't know where the road ends I think if we can look back in a decade yes we're financially successful but the test that I want to see is like a guy or a girl is like 17 they're deciding on what to do and they're like bragging to their friend at a bar that they're like the got a job in manufacturing they really excited about it opposed to you know a software engineering job and a finance job if we can make that cultural shift that is the biggest thing because

everything is Downstream from that [Music]