Neuron Industries Raises $10 Million Seed Round to Accelerate Industrial Automation

Neuron Industries, an industrial hardware and software company building an AI-native industrial controller, announced a $10 million seed round following its public launch in August. The oversubscribed round was co-led by FCVC and Obvious Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Thin Line Capital, Zee Prime Capital and Founder Factor.

“We raised our seed round with funds that support builders in this space. Our goal is to become the common operating system that people use to build hardware. We’re accelerating hardware development from months to days using an AI-native system that runs with a plain English interface to build the logic to run machinery,” said Dennis Ren, co-founder and chief executive of Neuron Industries.

As America rebuilds its industrial capacity, Gardena-based Neuron puts AI-native controls in the hands of engineers designing new factories and production equipment. It is rebuilding the industrial control stack to help engineers develop, test and deploy automation for new machines, production lines and factories. Traditionally, this development has been handled by engineers using outdated programming language, because there hasn’t been any improvement in the technology for decades.

Ren was the founding electrical engineer at Hawthorne-based Freeform where he built the control stack behind an autonomous metal 3D-printing factory. He found that off-the-shelf controllers failed to deliver the performance and flexibility demanded by the application.

Kenneth Rhee, co-founder and chief technology officer, has experience on the software side of mission-critical infrastructure. He has worked at various tech companies, including Amazon, where he worked on Elastic Block Store, a reliability-critical service in AWS. The pair first met at Amazon and later collaborated on Freeform’s manufacturing execution system. They left to form Neuron in May and entered Y Combinator’s El Segundo program this past summer where they were in the top quartile of the group as measured by fundraising and traction for the product. Their team includes engineers from Apple, Tesla, Rivian, Amazon, Blue Origin, General Atomics, Freeform and a leading controls researcher from UCSD.

Neuron’s Cortex AI Controller and Synapse development environment let engineers describe machine behavior and build user interfaces, generate readable control code and test it before deployment. It is focused on companies that are building new production plants, factories and machines, helping teams establish their controls platform from the earliest stages of design.

Neuron is the system of record for industrial automation for over a dozen rising manufacturing startups, such as Hawthorne-based Lazarus Energy, Rise Reforming, Radify Metals and Nox Metals.

For these types of companies, they can operate on a different timeline than competitors by greatly reducing the time and cost to design their hardware. It also addresses the shortage of engineers working on these problems as many skilled engineers retire, because any engineer can run these processes without the knowledge of specific programmatic language.

“We are working hard to get ourselves embedded in this community. My goal is to build something meaningful that has a positive impact in the world,” said Ren.

Information for this story was provided by Neuron Industries.