Accelerating High Stakes Manufacturing
What the history of semiconductors can teach us about scaling high stakes manufacturing
Manufacturing is important. Domestic manufacturing is increasingly important. There’s a lot of areas we can improve in the process, but today we’re focused on inspection technology.
Manufacturing inspection has always been a game of trade-offs. More precision usually meant more time. More thoroughness meant more cost. And for decades, manufacturers lived within those constraints—measuring parts with micrometers, then coordinate measuring machines ("CMMs"), always bumping up against the limits of what was practical at scale.
It feels a lot like what happened in semiconductor fabrication. Early chipmakers relied on optical inspection to catch defects, but as features shrank and complexity increased, that approach became inadequate. Enter Applied Materials ($141B) and KLA ($95B), which built metrology and inspection tools using X-Ray, electron beams, and other advanced techniques. It wasn’t just a marginal improvement—it changed how chips were made and who could compete.
Something similar seems to be unfolding in high stakes manufacturing. Today, high-stakes industries—think aerospace, defense, medical, and nuclear—still rely heavily on CMMs. These machines are slow, require highly skilled operators (who are increasingly scarce), and can’t detect internal defects. The slow rate of inspection extends lead times and increases the working capital manufacturers have to carry. I think there's a big opportunity to build a competing alternative that allows us to maintain high precision at a low cost, while accelerating throughput. This is a hard problem, which likely requires significant advances in software and predictive modeling, coupled with unique hardware implementation.
The shift isn’t automatic. Just like semiconductor fabs weren’t eager to throw out their optical tools overnight, manufacturers have built their processes around CMMs. But as supply chain pressures mount and quality demands increase, it’s easy to imagine the transition accelerating—especially if a company can make high-speed, high-throughput inspection tech the new industry standard.
The question isn’t whether inspection will evolve. It’s how quickly—and who will win.
