Announcing our investment in GrayMatter Robotics

Today Stage Venture Partners is pleased to announce the launch of our newest portfolio company, GrayMatter Robotics. We led the company’s oversubscribed $4.1 million seed round that closed in May, with our friends at Calibrate, OCA, Pathbreaker, B Capital Group, and 3M investing alongside us.

Led by three PhD roboticists — Ariyan Kabir, Brual Shah, and SK Gupta — GrayMatter applies robots to industrial surface treatment applications that could never before be automated. Every large physical part that has a smooth finish and a coat of paint requires multiple surface treatment steps before meeting production requirements. After casting or molding, it gets deburred, ground, sanded, coated with performance layers, and only then painted. Today, humans perform every step of this process, working in hot, dusty conditions with protective equipment and occupational safety standards that vary by jurisdiction, even within the United States.

Of course, that’s if you can find the workers to do the job. Sanding, spraying, and grinding — medium-skilled jobs all — pay as little as $25 per hour, and as much as $100 per hour. Many of the communities where this work is performed, like the recreational vehicle capital of the world in Elkhart Indiana, report unemployment rates below 3%. Supply chain disruptions due to COVID continue to disrupt production, as the bullwhip effect reverberates up and down value chains. Major industries, like Class 8 truck manufacturers, report “dizzying industry backlog.”

Automating labor-intensive tasks like surface treatment is one of the best ways for factory managers to respond to today’s volatile production climate. In the narrowest sense, GrayMatter’s robots are an investment in cost savings, as they can perform tasks more cheaply than humans. 

In a broader sense, cost reduction is just one of many reasons to automate surface treatment. By using robots to treat surfaces at all stages of production, manufacturers can accept purchase orders that would otherwise go unfilled, reduce work-in-progress inventory, and generate more revenue over the same base of fixed investment. Most importantly, they can reallocate their most valuable resource, their people, to higher value jobs where they can contribute to their teams and grow more in their careers than they would if they were stuck operating an industrial sander for the rest of their career.

GrayMatter is already working with customers including Performance Composites, a Los Angeles area manufacturer that supplies engineered composite products to the production of municipal buses, maritime communications equipment, and large capital equipment. The company also has a pilot with a tier one defense prime contractor. Dozens of manufacturers in several industries are currently evaluating first applications for GrayMatter’s robots, and we expect deployments to accelerate in 2022.

Stage Venture Partners is proud to invest in GrayMatter, where we have found a world class team working on a hard problem that matters. At scale, GrayMatter will strengthen the industrial base of the United States, keeping jobs and production capabilities here, all while supporting supply chains with thousands of medium sized businesses. GrayMatter is hiring software developers, applications engineers, technical interns, computer vision specialists, and account executives for in-person roles in Los Angeles. If you’d like to join the company, please reach out to us or to the company directly!