The Future of Manufacturing: Localised Micro-Factories.

In light of the recent budget announcements, I’ve been vocal about what we need here in the UK: a supportive environment where founders feel encouraged to build, grow, and invest in innovative companies that drive progress.

If we want to lead in cutting-edge sectors, we need both the right infrastructure and people to make it happen. Just look at the tech giants in California—companies like Google, Amazon, and Netflix didn’t just emerge; they were born in an ecosystem rich with talent and investment.

I met Rev N Murugesan , founder of Antonym , at the recent Praetura Ventures PraeSeed 2024 Cohort Showcase. Their concept of micro-factories is an example of the kind of innovation we need to encourage: a blueprint for how manufacturing could look in the future—agile, sustainable, and highly adaptable.

This model of localised production doesn’t just address real supply chain issues; it has the potential to reinvigorate manufacturing, fostering economic resilience and significantly reducing our environmental footprint.

Check out Rev's story below ??— this is the kind of innovation the UK should be championing.

?? Company: Antonym

Factory in a Box. We are building a distributed network of robotic micro-factories to enable critical industries like aerospace, energy, and semiconductors. to switch to local manufacturing. Our fully-containerised portable micro-factories can be rapidly deployed anywhere across the globe to produce essential spare parts on-demand, right where they’re needed. This just-in-time, point-of-need manufacturing model dramatically cuts costs, emissions, and lead times while making supply chains more resilient. We currently help Aerospace Maintenance, Repair, and overhaul MRO organisations minimise downtime and avoid delayed maintenance costs by helping them access the necessary spare parts on-time and on-location.

??? Founder: Rev N Murugesan

?? Location: Leeds (USA in 2025)

?? Mission: Hyper-local manufacturing, anywhere anytime. We aim to build a globally distributed micro-factory network to bring manufacturing closer to the points of need.

?? Story: The name "Antonym" captures what we’re all about—challenging norms and finding the opposite of what's expected and what’s widely conformed to. From the start, my life has been about antithetic curiosity. I was born with a collapsed lung, and surviving my first night wasn’t even guaranteed. I was sent to boarding school at age 5 for being too naughty and I guess that led me to develop a sense of defiance and it stuck with me through and through. By the time I finished school, I was constantly going against what was considered the rational path. Instead of becoming a doctor or engineer like my Indian parents hoped, I pursued competitive bodybuilding and then professional motorsport racing—much to their dismay.

The same sense of defiance came in handy when I founded my first startup right after post-grad in international business. It was 2018, and the electric vehicle hype was everywhere, but there was a huge amount of greenwashing going on. Everyone was talking about electric cars being clean, but what wasn’t being talked about was the carbon emissions from the manufacturing process itself. So, I set out to decarbonize that part—using Metal 3D printing to locally produce EV parts in a way that was actually green. One of the greatest advantages of 3D printing is that you can localise manufacturing, so we were producing parts locally, even before “reshoring” and “onshoring” became hot topics during the pandemic.

Then COVID-19 hit, and the world’s supply chains started falling apart. The Suez Canal crisis made it worse, creating massive shortages in critical industries. Even the NHS was struggling to get ventilator parts. It also became clear that nearly half 46%) of the UK’s emissions were coming from overseas manufacturing and imports. We weren’t just outsourcing production, we were outsourcing our carbon emissions too.

And while the economical and environmental case for local manufacturing was obvious, companies didn’t have the tools to make the switch from global to local production. While others were crippled by these disruptions, our local manufacturing setup kept us operational. That’s when I realised—why dig for gold when you can sell the shovels? So, we pivoted from making parts locally to making localised micro-factories to help other companies do the same. That’s how Antonym was born—to offer a turnkey, plug-and-play solution for local manufacturing. Antonym is about flipping the traditional manufacturing model on its head. We’re challenging offshore manufacturing with hyper-local production, replacing physical supply chains with a digital one, and turning a planet-scarring process into a planet-friendly one.

As the name suggests, Antonym is all about being the opposite.

?? Forecast: 1000 micro-factories by 2030. Audacious, yes!

?? Ask: We are currently raising ￡1.25m, and as part of the this round, we are opening up a ￡250k angel tranche for angel investors who are passionate about ‘Make in Britain’, planet-friendly manufacturing, and industrial decarbonisation. Plus, we are planning to

make our way into the US market (Arizona / Texas) in 2025, so any contacts, networks,and introductions to capital and talent in aerospace manufacturing would be invaluable.

??Most challenging and most rewarding parts of growing your business so far?

The most challenging is raising capital, because we are a hardware deep-tech startup that operates in frontier sectors like aerospace. Life would’ve been a lot easier if we founded a B2B SaaS or a B2C app, but we are here to build tangible stuff.

The most rewarding part is that we’re building atoms, not bits. What we do directly contributes to the triple bottom line—economic, environmental, and social. In fact, we’ve developed a metric called “Total Addressable Impact TAI” to measure, quantify, and convey this impact, and help us showcase the market size and growth beyond the traditional bottom-up TAM.

Have a great weekend all,

Dominic McGregor