Prime Movers Lab Webinar Series: Digital and Physical Integration

In last week’s episode of the Prime Movers Lab webinar series, Partners Bryan Bauw and Alessandro Levi spoke with experts from partner companies about the current state and future of digital and physical integration in manufacturing and beyond.

Expert Panelists

• Andrew Duggleby, Co-Founder and CTO at Venus Aerospace, which is designing hypersonic aircraft. His career has spanned everything from being a mechanical engineering professor to an officer in the Navy Reserve, and he’s now a part of his third startup.
• Samuel Reeves, Founder and CEO at Fort Robotics, which is creating a communications and control platform for smart machines. This is his second startup; his previous company created robots that helped clear landmines.
• Will Gibbs, Co-Founder and CEO at Modica, which is focused on making systems integration of industrial equipment and workspaces easier. With a background in robotics and automation in aerospace, food processing, and many other realms, he’s now on his second startup.

Insights:

• Better integration will enable faster and cheaper upfront interaction of the development cycle, particularly with tools like digital twinning and AI for data mining.
• Need to continue to better understand how software gets embedded with hardware, and vice versa, to enable Industry 5.0 level machine intelligence.
• A key enabler of the integration is connectivity with the outside world and the necessary safety protocols to match.
• The integration is a driving force in hyper-localization/distributed manufacturing and in circular manufacturing.
• It’s not about replacing humanity, it’s about enabling humanity.

I want to thank the panelists, my co-host Alessandro, and the folks who helped produce this webinar. It was a fantastic discussion on scaling and if you want to watch the full video, you can find it here.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

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