It's just business: Manufacturing moves from Augury, Trelleborg, Accenture, and more
As manufacturers strive to optimize and improve profitability, they often use various business strategies to stay competitive. These actions include mergers, acquisitions, promotions, layoffs, funding, and much more. Below are just a few of the companies that are making moves and making headlines in the industrial sector.
Capital: SAEKI has raised $6.7 million in a seed round of funding, which included investments from Lightbird, Founderful, 2100VC, and Danobat. The manufacturing automation business combines large-scale additive manufacturing with precision CNC machining in a unified production system, enabling SAEKI to deliver components in days rather than weeks. In a recent quote, Andrea Perissinotto, co-founder and CEO of SAEKI, said, "While engineers can now use AI to create hundreds of optimized designs, legacy manufacturing simply can't deliver these components cost-effectively. By automating the entire process, from quoting to final inspection, to make these advanced designs manufacturable at scale. Our mission at SAEKI is to make manufacturing faster, more efficient, and more reliable. By integrating additive manufacturing with CNC machining and quality assurance, we're giving industries the tools they need to innovate without constraints. This isn't just about making parts; it's about reshaping the way industries approach production. This is a defining moment for European manufacturing as we set out to build a future with fully autonomous factories".
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Acquisition: Accenture has announced plans to acquire the management consulting firm Staufen AG and its subsidiaries. Accenture hopes the acquisition will help drive operational excellence and competitiveness in manufacturing and supply chains. In a recent quote, Matthias Hégelé, Accenture’s supply chain and operations lead for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, said, “Manufacturers must continuously improve their entire value chains to stay competitive. The acquisition of Staufen aligns with our strategy to reinvent supply chains and manufacturing for clients. We will combine Staufen’s proven expertise in operational excellence and value chain transformation with our capabilities in digital technologies, such as AI, generative AI, digital twins and supply chain and manufacturing software platforms, to help clients transform their core value chains, improving efficiency and productivity, supporting sustainable practices, and building resilient, autonomous systems.”
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Capital: Augury, which specializes in industrial AI solutions for reliability and process optimization, has raised $75 million in funding. The round was led by Lightrock, with additional investments from Insight Partners, Eclipse, Qumra Capital, La Maison Partners, as well as SE Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. In a recent quote, Saar Yoskovitz, Augury co-founder and CEO, said, “Augury has a long history of firsts, from the introduction of prescriptive AI-driven solutions that eliminate downtime and the first truly global-scale Industrial IoT deployments in our category to the introduction of AI solutions that encompass both machine and process health. With this new funding we will continue that track record, breaking new ground in the introduction of Agentic-AI capabilities that build on our expertise and that our customers can trust across their most critical assets and processes.”
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Acquisition: nTop has announced its acquisition of cloudfluid, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software company. nTop, which specializes in computational design software for high-performance engineering, hopes the acquisition will allow engineers to iterate on designs in near real-time to create breakthrough products. In a recent quote, Brad Rothenberg, CEO of nTop, said, "We are hyper-focused on building software that helps engineers go from requirements to design as fast as the latest computing processors allow—that's the power of computational design. One of the biggest bottlenecks has always been solving the physics—it takes time to mesh and converge on a solution. cloudfluid solves this by integrating directly with our implicit modeling core, bringing CFD into the iterative computational design loop."
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Acquisition: Trelleborg Group has acquired Aero-Plastics Inc., which focuses on plastics and interior segments for the aerospace industry. The transaction is expected to be finalized in the second quarter of 2025. In a recent quote, Jürgen Bosch, President of Trelleborg Sealing Solutions, said, “Through acquiring Aero-Plastics, we are further expanding our total offering and product portfolio for the aerospace industry. At the same time, we are strengthening our position in thermoplastics and the interiors segment, which is expected to generate favorable sales synergies. We also add more capacity, knowledge, and a business built on strong, long-term customer relationships.”
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