Marianne Wu

I’m lucky to work alongside colleagues like Richard Fruehauf, who constantly push my thinking. His latest piece unpacks why U.S. robotics and drone manufacturing faces uphill economics, and how public policy can help turn the tide. One key takeaway: 232 tariffs on robotics imports could help reset the economics that are holding back U.S. investment and production. It’s a sharp perspective on how policy can shape the future of advanced tech here at home. Well worth a read: https://lnkd.in/edMPTQPQ Richard Fruehauf, Robert J. Szczerba, Michael Lutzky, Edward Ovando, Karl Sanchack, Herman Herman, Jeff Legault, Phil English, Richard Fruehauf, Ryan Aument, Michael Guido, Sheila Fitzgerald Sterrett, David McCormick

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🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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Excited to finally share what we’ve been building over the past year. Today we’re announcing the first investment from ARKITEKT EQUITY. Over the past year, we have been closely observing the structural shifts occurring within semiconductor ecosystems. As manufacturing systems become more complex, the infrastructure enabling those systems becomes increasingly strategic. These environments demand operational clarity, coordination, and long-term alignment. ARKITEKT was built around a simple idea: durable value is created where frontier technology meets pragmatic execution. Our investment in BBTech reflects this conviction. This is just the beginning of what we aim to build at ARKITEKT EQUITY. Stay tuned! https://lnkd.in/g_pQiBZY

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Global defense landscape is changing rapidly with drones. Today all drone attacks happen "surface --> air --> surface" - drone takes from from land, moves in the air, and land back. They move "horizontally", can be sweep-detected via RF / radar or optical sensors, and thwarted via proximity fused ammo, or other means. Our company Kalam Labs has built state of the art surveillance & defense / attack drone infra that picks up a fleet of drones to stratosphere/near-space (100K feet) and conducts missions while dropping "vertically". Size of a eagle, flying higher than a commercial plane, dropping from stratosphere: practically impossible to detect & thwart. This is the sort of sovereign capability India needs and we are super excited to see Ahmad Faraaz Sashakt Tripathi & Harshit Awasthi building it!

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Industrial automation is still stuck in the 1980s. Factories are running on fragmented systems, rigid code, and outdated logic. Xaba Inc. is changing that—by giving robots synthetic brains. With a fresh $6M Seed Extension led by Hitachi Ventures, Xaba’s xCognition platform brings generative AI to the factory floor—enabling machines to adapt, think, and even program themselves. No more code. Just intelligent automation. Thanks to the incomparable Dean Takahashi for covering their story in VentureBeat. cc: Massimiliano Moruzzi, Maggie Philbin, Rick Liebling, Reysita Llarena, Marco Andriano, Julian Madera, Marta Bulaich, Gayathri Radhakrishnan, Steffan Welch Link: https://lnkd.in/eH_ZWi7q

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Forbes published my latest article on what many investors may be getting wrong about robotics. Humanoid robots look like the future. But investing in humanoid hardware may not be. Manufacturing asymmetry is real. Competing with Asian supply chains is not a typical venture risk profile. Outside of companies like Tesla or Amazon, most hardware startups, even unicorns, will face extreme pressure. The long term U.S. advantage is far more likely to sit in embodied AI software and the intelligence layer, not in assembling robot bodies. In robotics, the control point will not be the factory. It will be the mind. https://lnkd.in/gmcVtCa5

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Reshoring manufacturing to the U.S. hinges entirely on advances in automation and robotics—and those advances, in turn, rely on next-generation tools like integrated development environments, foundation models, smart robotics skills, and flexible automation platforms. This isn’t merely an incremental shift; it’s the next industrial revolution. I estimate it will unlock up to $30 trillion in GDP over the next decade, as countries compete fiercely for leadership. Eclipse is our time!

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Real humanoid robots. Not demos. Doing real work with real ROI to real Global 1000 customers. In cooperative fleets. Autonomously. Agility Robotics is the only safe, US-made and sourced, insurable, human (and CFO) friendly robot doing meaningful work.

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The golden age of AI and robotics in industry - and agtech - is fast approaching.   Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking during a recent visit to China, reflected on the shifting tides in technology: “Over the next decade, as we develop a new generation of advanced plants and factories, they’ll be highly robotic — helping us address the global labor shortages we’re facing.”   And this transformation doesn’t stop at factories. It’s coming to our fields, our greenhouses, and even the mushroom caves.   Although the agrifood tech sector has been slower to embrace AI compared to other industries, its role is becoming increasingly vital, particularly in processing the vast and growing volumes of data generated by IoT sensors and computer vision systems across fields, greenhouses, and food production facilities. AI is now turning complex data—structured, textual, and visual—into actionable insights that drive automation and enable more intelligent decision-making. In agriculture, these data streams span GPS coordinates, humidity, radiation, and temperature measurements, as well as key input data related to water, nutrients, and pesticides. Unlike many industrial sectors, this data is highly fragmented and not readily compatible with generic AI platforms, opening the door for specialized, domain-specific tools such as AI-powered farm management systems, vision-based robotics, and predictive analytics.   At the same time, robotics is advancing rapidly alongside AI. Modern robots are becoming increasingly adept at navigating and operating in complex, unstructured environments—significantly broadening their potential applications. This progress is powered by advancements in sensing technologies and computing power, enabling real-time, deterministic operations that are essential for safety in dynamic settings. Among the most promising technologies we’re tracking are autonomous farm robots capable of working independently or in coordination with human operators, AI-powered drones with autonomous navigation, and swarm robotics systems that coordinate decentralized, multi-agent operations. The same autonomy and perception technologies are now being applied across crops from lettuce to orchards to row crops, driving one of the most important transitions in agriculture.   Including the latest investment that we announced yesterday as lead of 4AG Robotics $40m Series B,  together with Cibus Capital, Astanor has invested in five AI and robotics companies, each with the potential to become a category leader in fast growing multi billion markets.   4AG’s breakthrough in automating mushroom harvesting shows how full stack AI-powered robotics can solve not only labor shortages but also boost yields, standardize quality, and reduce emissions. https://lnkd.in/e-YeTzDf  

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As a new Growth Partner at Intrepid Growth Partners, I was quite impressed by what their new portfolio company CoLab Software has accomplished—this is exactly the kind of company that defines the future of AI-driven growth. CoLab’s AI platform brings unprecedented speed and intelligence to mechanical design review and collaboration, unlocking new levels of efficiency for engineering teams worldwide. If you’re interested in how transformative AI applications are changing the industrial landscape, this is one to watch. More details below. #AI #Growth #IntrepidGrowthPartners #CoLabSoftware #VentureCapital #Engineering #Innovation

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My DCVC partner Milo Werner at the announcement of MIT's New Manufacturing Initiative: the highly automated factories of the future will re-industrialize the United States, tightly couple R&D and manufacturing to accelerate innovation, and decarbonize industry.

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We are thrilled to celebrate Powerline’s $7M Seed round and our partnership with this exceptional team. Led by Matineh Eybpoosh and Julian Lamy, Powerline is solving the most critical bottleneck of the energy transition: the "Intelligence Gap." As global energy demand surges, the grid requires capacity that is both faster to deploy and hyper-efficient to operate. Powerline is proving that the answer lies in software-driven intelligence. Their AI platform — the Battery Co-Pilot™ — radically improves the unit economics of energy storage, converting batteries from passive backup into high-yield financial assets. They are already delivering measurable results across the energy lifecycle: Existing Installations: Retrofitting "brownfield" battery portfolios with an intelligence layer that captures missed revenue and manages market volatility. New Deployments: Providing the digital testbeds needed to scale global fleets with institutional precision, significantly shortening the path to ROI. Legacy Displacement: Delivering a cost-effective alternative to polluting "peaker-plants," which can cost up to $200/MWh more than an optimized Powerline fleet. While solar-plus-storage is now consistently 20-30% cheaper than new-build gas, the real victory is in how that hardware is managed. At J-Impact Fund, we focus on the massive value creation that occurs when technology turns energy scarcity into abundance. By shifting the grid from a model of expensive, finite fuel to one of persistent, harvested power, we unlock superior financial upside. For us, deep decarbonization is the inevitable byproduct of this superior economic model. Congratulations to Matineh, Julian, and the entire team—we are proud to be on this journey with you. #EnergyStorage #AIOptimization #VentureCapital #AssetManagement #SeriesSeed #FinancialAlpha

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I’ve been working on the theory of why small, shippable factories are the perfect inversion to the centralized prefab factory model. It all collapsed into one line of math (credit to Gilles Retsin): Factory Efficiency = Usage × (Throughput × Product Value ) / ( CapEx + Deployment OpEx) The idea is that the closer you can drive Usage to 100 % while keeping the denominator tiny, the faster the flywheel spins.  A shippable microfactory tackles this by primarily focusing on a high Usage factor. Because the microfactory can be packed up afterwards and reused, its CapEx gets amortized over multiple projects, effectively raising its overall Usage across the year. If one project alone doesn’t fully occupy the factory, it can simply roll over to another job to maintain high Usage. Its CapEx is often an order of magnitude lower than a centralized factory (< $1M vs. $10-50M min), so the breakeven throughput is more achievable on a small pipeline of work. The real breakthrough here is portability. There is near-zero stranded capital and almost no idle time. To flesh this theory out, I wrote 3000 words on the topic for Brad Hargreaves and Thesis Driven. The article breaks down: - why “fixed factories, shipped goods” is being inverted to shipped factories, fixed goods - what a sub‑$1 M robotic cell does to CapEx per home versus a £45 M off‑site plant - early production/cost data on a shippable microfactory from Mollie Claypool, Gilles Retsin, Sam Baker and the Automated Architecture (AUAR) team - the hybrid reality of robots tackling the heavy structural components and human crews assembling faster and cheaper - technical constraints to pull this model off and future considerations on the optimal business model (own vs. rent) Major shoutout to Gilles Retsin for helping me pull this together. https://lnkd.in/eRTnbZPa

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Chatting with ZEDEDA CEO, Said Ouissal, and he has an elegant way of explaining the evolution of industrial Edge. Zededa provides OS for orchestrating Edge AI. 2010s were about IoT/Edge Connectivity. 2020s were about Edge computing/processing. 2030s will be all about Edge AI.

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Everyone’s chasing model performance. But the real competitive edge in AI? Forward Deployed Engineers. These embedded engineers don’t just ship code - they capture the nuance of how your business actually works, and turn it into systems that scale. They’re your internal Scale AI. Your safeguard against commoditizing IP. In a world of open models and brittle SOPs, they’re becoming the most strategic hire in the enterprise. I’ve been seeing this across the Emergence Capital portfolio. Kyle Murphy and I wrote about it here: https://lnkd.in/gB8dJS4P Would love to hear how your team is enabling FDEs or building with this mindset.

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Check back if you missed it! The world is changing around us and it makes sense to own a piece of it. Remember we have two entry points into deep tech: 1) go direct into the CR Fund 2) write a small check into AIM Company *Must be accredited. Sorry, government rules, not mine.

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The difference between building the next Tesla and becoming the next Solyndra? Quantifying a technology's long term unit economics with data, AKA understanding its learning curves. Breaking the thesis that FOAK is new, when it is just new combinations of common building blocks - pumps, compressors, vessels, power electronics, control systems. Christian Okoye's new company, Occam-Edge.com is building a framework for analyzing budget risks and learning curves, how costs decline as production scales, is giving founders, investors, and policymakers a common language for what has long been discussed in vague generalities. NextGen Industry Group, Generate, Electric Hydrogen, DCVC https://lnkd.in/gHUqmH7K

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Camber Creek led the $3.7 million Seed round for TwinKnowledge, which is tackling an important problem in the built environment. Construction projects get delayed and rework is required because of discrepancies across construction documents, submittals, requests for information, design, and other plans. TwinKnowledge’s AI Agents absorb structured and unstructured project data, surfacing and preventing conflicts before the work begins. We’re excited about our partnership with CEO Ivan Panushev and his team. #construction #AEC #AI #technology https://ow.ly/mBYX50VtaVG

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