Amar Hanspal's Bright Machines uses software to automate manufacturing

Bright Machines, a San Francisco based company which provides software-based systems to automate manufacturing, announced this week that it will list as a public company. This will result from its planned merger with SCVX, a special purpose acquisition company, which is expected to close later this year.

“Our industrial automation platform…allows even the most traditional manufacturing companies to quickly and easily deploy flexible automation solutions at scale,” said Amar Hanspal, founder and chief executive of Bright, in a statement. The company’s products currently enable manufacturers to cut costs and improve productivity and quality in assembly, testing, and inspection.

Founded in 2018, the company has 25 major customers including in network infrastructure, data centers, automotive, consumer products, medical devices, and industrial equipment.

Bright possesses 36 patent filings and has over 500 employees, including about 150 software engineers. It has research and development centers in the U.S. and Israel, and field operations in the US, Mexico, China, and Poland.

Following the merger, the company will have an equity value of $1.6 billion. It will receive $435 million in cash from SCVX, a SoftBank subsidiary, Fidelity Management and other investors. Existing investors in Bright, including BMW’s venture arm, will continue to own shares.  

Bright plans to use the funds to expand into new markets and develop additional software in areas such as production analytics and quality inspection. In 2020, it had $34 million in revenues and foresees rapid growth in the years ahead.  

Prior to founding Bright Machines, Hanspal was co-CEO of Autodesk, which he joined in 2002 as a vice president. It is a vendor of design software with a market value of $64 billion.

As co-CEO, Hanspal oversaw Autodesk’s software portfolio, including its innovative manufacturing and construction applications. He transformed Autodesk’s products into software as a service and shifted from licensing to subscription revenues. He also led Autodesk into cloud-based offerings, enabling the company’s 12 million customers to access their designs on nearly any device. While at Autodesk, Hanspal charged $10,000 to $20,000 to speak at an event, according to the Speaker Booking Agency. .

Before Autodesk, Hanspal was the Co-Founder and Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for RedSpark, which focused on collaborative product development applications for the discrete manufacturing industry.

Hanspal is on the board of Aspen Technology, a software company based near Boston, and advises early-stage venture companies. In 1984, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Bombay University, topping the class as gold medal winner; a master’s in mechanical engineering from State University New York in 1986; and in 2016 completed the executive managerial program at Stanford University.

From 1970 to 1978, he attended Don Bosco High School in Mumbai, run by Salesian priests of the Catholic Church. He represented the school in debate, quiz and drama competitions and was a member of the cricket team which won the inter-school Giles Shield in 1977.

Automation is controversial since critics argue that it is used by employers to cut jobs. Today, apparently seeking to defend Bright Machines business, Hanspal tweeted this quote from David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a Washington Post article: “You don’t fire workers and hire a robot. That happens exactly no times.”

But others like Carl Benedikt Frey, an economic historian at Oxford University, argue that over the next decade “one out of three American workers are at risk of losing their job to new technologies. And unlike previous waves of automation, new jobs will not appear quickly enough, or in large enough numbers to make up for it.”

Bright Machines views its technology as combining software, machine learning, and computer vision to “give eyes, brains, and touch to industrial machines.”

Photo: from Amar Hanspal’s Twitter account.

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