IndustrialMind.ai was founded by Steven Gao and a team that spent years building the AI manufacturing platform used to solve critical bottlenecks at Tesla's Gigafactories. Rather than staying inside one company's four walls, the team set out to bring that same "decision-making brain" to manufacturing more broadly — an AI system that reads drawings and process data, recommends concrete adjustments, and helps validate impact on real equipment. "Engineers already have enough tools," says Gao, co-founder and CEO. "They need a real trustworthy teammate — an AI Engineer. The ultimate engineer on the factory floor combines manufacturing judgment with AI capabilities and delivers verified, actionable changes."

"They've solved real bottlenecks on real lines. IndustrialMind.ai is bringing that playbook to the broader industry." — Gang Song, former Tesla VP of Manufacturing

From print to performance

The product, which the company calls its "AI Engineer," spans the full path from print to performance. It understands engineering drawings well enough to extract features and auto-draft BOMs, routings, and should-cost quotes — turning what used to be a slow "drawing to process" step into a matter of minutes. On the line, it monitors production in real time, detects and predicts anomalies, and surfaces engineer-ready adjustments. When something does go wrong, a multi-agent root-cause engine blends institutional knowledge with live data to identify fixes and auto-generate reports, closing the loop far faster than manual investigation ever could. IndustrialMind.ai is already deploying the AI Engineer with industry leaders including Siemens, tesa, and Andritz, using a forward-deployed model that embeds the product directly into each customer's workflows to show measurable value within weeks.

From zero US presence to a $5M round in negotiation

Before Embark, IndustrialMind.ai had no customer in the US and no presence in Singapore at all. Since then, the company has landed and expanded a US customer to $200K ARR, landed a customer in Singapore, and is about to exhibit at Hannover Messe — the largest industrial expo in the world. A single released PR case study has already generated three sales-qualified leads within 24 hours, and the company is now in term negotiations with a VC to lead a $5M round.

From Steven Gao, Co-founder: "We were in a non-stop cycle of shipping, learning, and improving. Seeing how quickly PMF can be achieved was game-changing. Before this, we had no customer in the US and no presence in Singapore at all. Since then, we've landed and expanded a US customer to $200K ARR, landed a customer in Singapore too, and we're about to exhibit at Hannover Messe — the largest industrial expo in the world."

With a $1.2M pre-seed already raised — backed by Antler, Gang Song, TSVC, and Plug and Play — and a $5M round now in the works, IndustrialMind.ai is moving fast to prove that the playbook that worked inside Tesla's Gigafactories can scale across the rest of the industrial world.

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