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Manufacturing dates back about 2.5 million years, when early hominins fashioned stone tools. Since then, it’s been an industry formed and reformed by technology.
And as AI has become the axis on which all technology turns, it makes sense AI would make its way into factories of all kinds—but startups focused on AI in industrial applications are still rarer than you may think, said Devin Bhushan, founder and CEO of Squint.
“For whatever reason, it can still feel like a forgotten industry by a lot of the tech world,” said Bhushan. “Even today, it can be hard to, say, get together for an industrial founders dinner. There’s not a group I can meet up with. There’s not that many people [in Silicon Valley] serving it. When we look at our competitors, our biggest competition is binders—physical binders.”
Bhushan’s Squint uses AI and augmented reality (AR) technology to capture and document the expert knowledge of experienced factory operators. The idea is this: to use AI to turn everyday workers into experts and to make the invisible backbone of the economy smarter, safer, and more efficient.
“We’ve basically built a manufacturing intelligence platform… that uses AI to extract that knowledge from operators who have been in the environment for 30 years. They have all this stuff up here,” said Bhushan, gesturing to his head. “We extract it by watching them do the work. Then AI auto-documents it and creates procedures. From there, we can enable anyone to be an expert on pretty much any task.”
Squint has raised a $40 million Series B at a valuation of $265 million, Fortune has exclusively learned. The Westly Group and TCV led the round, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Menlo Ventures. Bhushan founded the company in 2021, and the company’s current customers include PepsiCo, Michelin, and Ford, tens of thousands of operators at hundreds of factories. The round comes at a time when “every industrial company in the world is searching for ways to keep their workforce… ahead of the curve,” said Steve Westly, founder and managing partner at The Westly Group, via email. This is, of course, both because of Trump-fueled geopolitical tensions rising around manufacturing and the rise of AI.
“In our factories, there’s more desire to insource,” said Sequoia partner Jess Lee. “There’s more pressure and incentive to move manufacturing back here. For geopolitical reasons too, there are folks in some of the essential critical industries to manufacture here… In order to make that possible, factory productivity really matters.”
To Lee—who met Bhushan when both were at Yahoo, he as an engineer and she in the aftermath of the company’s acquisition of her startup Polyvore—the realm of physical work is vast and filled with untapped potential.
“The world of tech is so white collar-focused, so much about digital work,” Lee told Fortune. “But the world of physical work is enormous, and it supplies us with all the things that power even the digital industry. I think tech has barely scratched the surface of modernizing that, and I think that’s where some of the next biggest tech companies are going to be created.”
Bhushan once built features for Yahoo’s fantasy sports platform, where he also met Tim Tully, partner at Menlo Ventures, who led Squint’s pre-seed on the idea that “there was a thirst for richer experiences in manufacturing,” a thesis that he says via email has “rung true.”
Though he’s moved on from building the platform millions play fantasy sports on, Bhushan keeps sports metaphors close.
“We have this saying inside the company—it’s our number one value—’dunk the three,’” he said. “Do the thing no one has ever done. No one’s ever dunked a three in an NBA game, right? But when someone dunks a three, it’ll become a stat. Then, more people will dunk threes. That’s how it works.”
But no one can dunk a three, I point out.
“Well, Michael Jordan did in Space Jam,” Bhushan laughed. “He extended his hand, and dunked the three. That’s what we’re trying to do with our tech.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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