Tempo Automation: Setting the Pace for Low-Volume, Quick-Turn Assembly

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes

Koenig: My background is in aerospace engineering. I have an undergraduate degree in physics and a master's degree in aerospace engineering. I worked for about a decade in the aerospace industry. I was doing guidance navigation and control engineering for satellites and airplanes. I would develop simulations that modeled the environment and the vehicles, and develop algorithms that would allow these vehicles to automatically control their pointing throughout complex maneuvers, as well as their position in space.  I would work with the software team to turn those algorithms into flight software.

Then I got into program management and business development, also in aerospace. Aerospace is great and I'm still fascinated with it, and we have customers who are aerospace companies, which is fun for me. All these machines and vehicles are fantastic technologically. Also, things like sending people to space and thinking about sending people to Mars is fun work to do.

After a while I started to want a change. The aerospace industry has very, very long timelines and I was starting to want something that's a little more immediate, and more accessible to many people. I was looking around at consumer electronics companies, trying to get to know the consumer electronics industry. I went to an Internet of Things meetup in San Francisco, which is companies presenting and people networking, in the Internet of Things segment of industry. I met my co-founder and our CEO, Jeff McAlvay, there. He already had this idea of making electronics development easier and faster with desktop robots. He had worked on a very early prototype with a couple of people that were helping him to convert a 3D printer into a pick-and-place machine.

The next iteration was going to be a new robot and he needed to bring it to Maker Faire, New York where he had reserved a booth to show it off. We were in San Francisco when we met, where he was working on this thing. When he met me, he said, "Yeah, I'm going to Maker Faire, New York in a couple of weeks. I have to bring this robot so we're working on building it." I said, "Where are you on it? How much of it is built?" He said, "We haven't started actually building it yet." I said, "But you've built other ones. This is just another copy of something you've already built, right?" He said, "No, we've never built it before."

In my mind, I'm thinking this guy is a little bit nuts, but I like it. I like that boldness. I started working with him then. We got a robot out to Maker Faire; it wasn't necessarily the most functional robot I've ever seen, but it attracted a lot of attention there and it got good conversations going, and it also got a conversation going with a person who ended up being our third co-founder. His name is Shashank Samala; he met Jeff at that show in New York. That's the story of how we started.

Goldman: And what you started out to do has since evolved. That's interesting.

Koenig: Absolutely. When we were building these robots we started to take assembly jobs from customers to test out what our customers needed and what capabilities they needed in this robot that we were building. We were taking the jobs as part of the development process for the robot, but then, in talking to so many customers, we decided that even though there is a market—if you could build a beautiful version of that robot that we were building, there is a market for it—there's a lot more R&D that we would have had to put into it to get it to where it needed to be. Then we were looking at the size of that market versus the size of the market for people who don't want to deal with the robot themselves. Some engineers want to have a robot to do their stuff, many others want someone else to take care of the whole thing. Especially because even someone who has that robot, they might need X-ray and they don't have X-ray capability. They need reflow, so what are you going to do about reflow?

We had some answers, but at the end of the day a lot of people want every single step to be done at a very highly professional level. We started to think how we could give them the most frictionless experience and let them spend the most time possible doing design work. To just take data from their designs and magically, from their perspective, produce a board in their hands three days later. That was our vision and so our work is towards that.

Goldman: I take it you've been growing, by leaps and bounds since then?

Koenig: Yes, we have. Right now, we have about 45 people in the company plus a few consultants. I think we'll be growing quickly. It's all relative; you hear some crazy stories in Silicon Valley of people adding hundreds of people in a year as a startup. I don't think it will be that fast, but we will be hiring fairly aggressively over this next couple of years. We are growing. We're a venture-backed company, so the goal is certainly to become very large and to become the gold standard for quick turn, low volume electronics for any application.

Goldman: Do you plan to become a worldwide presence?

Koenig: Yes, eventually worldwide. I think you asked before about prototypes—yes, it is mostly prototypes. It's not 100% because there are times when a customer needs 20 or 50 boards for some lab system they’re setting up or some trackers on some vehicles, or whatever it might be. That's never a high-volume application. In that case, we can build their actual final product as well. So sometimes it's the final product, but most of our business is prototyping.

Goldman: We have a term for that called low-volume/high-mix, with high-mix meaning lots of different jobs.

Koenig: We are 100% low-volume/high-mix. That is for sure.

Goldman: Jesse, thank you, this has been a very interesting and refreshing to talk with you.

Koenig: Sure, thank you. My pleasure.

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