Industrial tech (2025)

1. Interview with Julian Senoner, cofounder and CEO, EthonAI

   Switzerland’s EthonAI specialises in “root cause analysis” in manufacturing. Which is what exactly?

   “Say you have a production line of chocolates, one week the quality is high, the next it dips. You want to find out pretty quickly what the issue is. We help companies do that,” says cofounder and CEO Julian Senoner.

   This is a real example: EthonAI works with Lindt by connecting the process data from all the chocolate maker’s production lines with data from factory quality control systems. This gives the line managers and production teams a full overview of their production lines with their dozens of parameters and quality measurements.

   Senoner was speaking to Sifted from New York where he’s setting up a new company outpost. “Business executives over here are very good at sniffing out whether you’re serious or not — you need one of the founders to physically be here,” Senoner says.

   For Senoner’s PhD at ETH Zurich, he studied AI tech applied to manufacturing. “When I saw how much money I’m saving companies, I decided to start a company of my own.” EthonAI clients include industrial conglomerates; the first ever customer was Siemens. “That was a big unlock for us.”

   Sizing up the opportunities on two continents, Senoner says that, “Germany is still the gold standard for manufacturing. US factories probably are less automated overall on average but I think there will be a massive mid-market opportunity in three-five years after everyone goes further along the automation path. . “Manufacturing has a very low threshold for BS,” he adds. “If you want to make it in this world, start with the problem, rather than going with a tech-first plus. These people are just too busy fighting fires to pay attention to stuff that doesn’t work.”

2. Interview with Andrey Bakholdin, chief growth officer, Brightpick

   Bratislava-founded robot developer Brightpick didn’t overthink the name of its new robot, which can extend 20 feet high: it’s called Giraffe. The company, founded in 2021 as a spin-off of Photoneo 3D, develops multiple bot models and has over 200 employees, most of whom are located in Slovakia. The headquarters is near Cincinnati, Ohio.

   “Having R&D in Slovakia is the only way to stay competitive on costs with China,” says Andrey Bakholdin, chief growth officer. Asia, in general, is “way ahead” on developing robot hardware, he adds.

   Brightpick offers a “full stack solution”, meaning it develops both hardware and software, which it sells mainly to e-commerce clients that need help quickly picking items off shelves. “Our robots are 100% manufactured and designed in-house. We’re one of fewer than 10 companies building the full stack,” Bakholdin adds.

   The company either sells its robots outright — the cost for one is between €50-80k — or there’s the “robots-as-a-service” option, where customers hire bots for €1,600-2,000 a pop, minus installation fees, typically on three year contracts.

   “It’s the equivalent cost of hiring a human labourer but you never have to worry about sick leave or training or churn. A robot can also work two or three shifts per day: that’s where the real ROI is,” says Bakholdin. A minimum installation job for Brightpick involves adding eight or nine robots to a warehouse; the biggest installations are for 100+ robots.

   Bakholdin says the low level of industrial automation across Europe and the US means there’s a big opportunity for his company in the next few years. “If you look at the split of the market, around 30% of warehouses are partially automated, another third are manual but planning to automate and the final third maybe isn’t planning to automate at all,” he says.

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