While workers fret over whether AI and robotics will eliminate their jobs, Los Angeles-based GrayMatter Robotics sees a different, and more immediate, challenge: too much work for too few people.

“Sometimes for these manufacturers in this application domain, the labor shortage is as high as 75%,” GrayMatter Robotics CEO Ariyan Kabir told Decrypt during a tour of its facility.

The reason for the shortage is a laudable one, he noted, as the shortage of people entering the manufacturing industry shows an increase in the standard of living and technology, giving people the option to take less physically demanding jobs.

“That's where we are focusing on augmenting the workforce,” Kabir said. “The applications that we're focusing on, there's not enough people to do this in the first place.”

To expand its operations and accelerate hiring, GrayMatter announced on Thursday that it had raised $45 million in Series B funding.

With Generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude AI surging into the mainstream, businesses everywhere are looking for ways to leverage the emerging technology. GrayMatter Robotics was among them.

Founded in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by USC Alums S.K. Gupta, Brual Shah, and Kabir, GrayMatter designs and produces autonomous robotic arms and also develops artificial intelligence models to program them.

“[2020] was not the best time to start a business, we have been very fortunate,” Kabir said. “We started GrayMatter for two reasons: to help millions of people improve their quality of lives, and to help our economy.”

Robotics-as-a-Service

GrayMatter Robotics products are designed to automate surface finishing and treatment tasks, including sanding, grinding, blasting, coating, trimming, spraying, polishing/buffing, and inspection. The GrayMatter Robotics warehouse contains rows of robotic arms on rails that can work in tandem to increase productivity.

“If you looked at any robotics company at that time, everyone was doing one of the two things, either self-driving cars or pick-and-place applications material handling,” Kabir said. “No one was really focusing on this massive more than half-a-trillion-dollar global surface finishing treatment application market. We decided this is going to be our focus, our initial starting point for GrayMatter.”

Graymatter Robotics clients come from a variety of industries, including aerospace and defense, first responders, maritime, metal fabrication, and consumer products like musical instruments and football helmets.

“One common misconception we often encounter is the belief that implementing robotics solutions requires a significant upfront investment in infrastructure and expertise,” Kabir said. “Which is true, but not for customers that automate with GrayMatter Robotics, because unlike most, we are able to do so using a Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) model.”

AI in manufacturing

Kabir explained that GrayMatter Robotics utilizes generative AI to tailor each project to specific needs.

“We use generative AI in certain areas of our tech stack wherever we need to create synthetic data for training our models or for filling the voids, whenever data is missing,” Kabir said. “In those cases, we use deep learning technologies, we use reinforcement learning technologies in certain domains in our tech stack, we use transformers in certain other domains.”

“The way we are looking at it, this is a productivity multiplier for our existing workforce,” Kabir added.

The manufacturing workforce has long had to adapt to working alongside robots, but thanks to AI, more change is coming. One report by IBM concluded that 40% of workers will need job training as AI becomes more common in the workplace. Another study found that jobs centered around AI offered 77% higher salaries than other occupations. According to Bizreport, the average salary for a machine learning researcher in Arkansas is $409,877, while an engineering manager in California has an annual salary of $406,949.

Cash to grow

Graymatter Robotics latest fundraising round was led by Wellington Management, with participation from NGP Capital, Euclidean Capital, B Capital, and other existing investors. It brings the total amount the company has raised to date to $70.4 million.

Others joining the round include Advance Venture Partners, SQN Venture Partners, 3M Ventures, B Capital, Bow Capital, Calibrate Ventures, OCA Ventures, and Swift Ventures. The funding will allow the company to grow, Kabir said.

“We're bursting out of the seams here,” he noted. “We are looking for roughly four or five times larger facility compared to where we are today.”

For Kabir, the big picture is one of great promise, but also great risk.

"Manufacturing is the backbone of our economy, and today, we are at the point where there are several million open jobs in manufacturing," Kabir said. "If we don't solve the labor shortage problem within manufacturing, the U.S. economy will be at risk of [losing] a trillion dollars every year by 2030."

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.