This startup raised $10 million to bring AI to existing factories

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Silicon Valley wants to build highly automated factories from scratch. This startup is betting on the ones America already has.

The funding comes as the US tries to reindustrialize after years of offshoring. Some startups, including Hadrian and Machina Labs, are building new factories designed to rely heavily on robots and automation. Harmoni, by contrast, is targeting the roughly 280,000 American factories filled with traditional machinery and workers.

"We've built this specifically to arm these guys to compete with these autonomous factories," cofounder David Caputo told Business Insider.

Harmoni's pitch is that factories should not have to stitch all those systems together themselves — a problem Caputo and his cofounder, Adam Ellis, a longtime manufacturing consultant, said they repeatedly encountered while working with factories.

Shokoufeh Mirzaei, chair and professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at Cal Poly Pomona, said large companies like Amazon are far ahead on automation, while many small and midsize US factories lack basic analytics and run on technology that predates the internet.

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"I remember walking around the shop floor and thinking, 'Oh my God, I made a mistake,'" Caputo said. Workers were lining up to clock in one by one, carrying USB sticks containing the programs needed to operate the machines. "This can't be how things are being done," he said.

After failing to find software that tied together the machines, workers, and processes on the factory floor, Caputo teamed up with Ellis in 2020 to build it themselves.

Because the system already knows which machine is running, what job is underway, and what happened on previous runs, workers can ask HAL questions without first supplying that context. A worker could ask why a machine is running more slowly than expected, tell HAL to file a maintenance request, or flag the issue for the next operator. Caputo said that HAL allows workers to "literally speak to the machines."