1 hr. ago
Jenna O'Malley/PitchBook
In a fabrication shop outside Lexington, KY, MiddleGround Capital builds robotic work cells: self-contained stations where robots perform tasks with minimal human involvement.
The PE firm's automation team—roughly a dozen engineers and fabricators, many recruited from the Toyota plant up the road—assembles these cells near the firm's headquarters, then trucks them to the shop floors of its portfolio companies.
A typical build, founding partner Scot Duncan said, is "a robot arm on a little dolly." It opens the door of an industrial workstation, removes and measures a finished part, loads new material and starts the next cycle. "The human interaction is really almost nothing when it's actually running," Duncan said.
The setup is futuristic-looking, yet it is not generative AI, it is automation. That distinction is becoming increasingly important—and blurred—as PE firms race to put AI at the heart of an American manufacturing revival.
#duncan #shop #o 'malley #middleground
In a fabrication shop outside Lexington, KY, MiddleGround Capital builds robotic work cells: self-contained stations where robots perform tasks with minimal human involvement.
The PE firm's automation team—roughly a dozen engineers and fabricators, many recruited from the Toyota plant up the road—assembles these cells near the firm's headquarters, then trucks them to the shop floors of its portfolio companies.
A typical build, founding partner Scot Duncan said, is "a robot arm on a little dolly." It opens the door of an industrial workstation, removes and measures a finished part, loads new material and starts the next cycle. "The human interaction is really almost nothing when it's actually running," Duncan said.
The setup is futuristic-looking, yet it is not generative AI, it is automation. That distinction is becoming increasingly important—and blurred—as PE firms race to put AI at the heart of an American manufacturing revival.
#duncan #shop #o 'malley #middleground
