How Lumafield Tells Stories in Business Media

Happy St. Patrick's Day! This week in the Industrial Innovation Advocate, Lumafield raises a big Series C for industrial CT scanning and illustrates how they build their brand through mainstream business and tech media, plus industrial tech founders on the rise, and why Amazon's approach to innovation works.

Industrial X-Ray Scanning Company Raises $75 Million, Gives Us Some PR Lessons

Lumafield , which provides industrial X-ray CT scanning and analysis software, has closed a $75 million Series C funding round led by IVP . The company has also picked up former Xometry CRO Bill Cronin as revenue head.

Lumafield has made CT scanning accessible for many manufacturers and product developers for the first time, and the company is committed to making X-ray CT scanning a practical inspection technology for a wide range of industries. Applications of the company's hardware and SaaS software include design verification and validation, defect detection, quality assurance and control, and reverse engineering, among others.

Mainstream business and tech media has been having some fun with it as part of what is clearly a deliberate ongoing public relations strategy. For example, the company analyzed Apple USB-C cables going for $130 vs. inexpensive ones for $5 in Ars Technica, helped Fast Company determine if lead in Stanley brand insulated cups might pose a safety risk, and showed the Financial Times what makes Nike Alphafly3 and adidas Adios Pro Evo 1 athletic footwear so special just in time for the 2024 Paris Olympics. All used Lumafield's Neptune scanner.

In each case, the what of the story is a consumer product, of interest to a wide audience. The how of the story is Lumafield's technology. It's a smart way to build visibility for the brand and help audiences start to understand its many applications. And it couldn't have hurt the fundraising effort.

Celebrating the Brave Founders of Industrial Tech

Early stage investor Joanna Lichter of Emerson Collective published a Substack of Five Founders Reshaping Industrial Tech that is worth a read. She expresses her appreciation for the ability of these visionaries to reshape a sometimes conservative industry without overlooking the inherent complexities involved with manufacturing products.

I've written about Squint and its founder/CEO Devin Bhushan before. Squint is tackling enterprise augmented reality, something I know about firsthand from my PR agency days. Despite the compelling need to find ways to train and transfer knowledge on the factory floor, it's proven challenging for startups. Squint is succeeding by making content creation easy and foregoing expensive hardware - you can use a simple mobile device if you like. And Fortune 500 manufacturers are signing on.

I'll also give a shout-out to Alex Huckstepp as a fellow former Stratasys alumni (and Carbon and Machina Labs and elsewhere) who went on to found Uptool. The company is bringing business operations automation to low-volume, high-mix SMB machine shops that have historically spent tons of money on expensive CNC machines but still runs a lot of the business on paper and pens. Alex and co-founder Benny Buller (Velo3D's founder) starting with sales and marketing processes and broadening from there.

And finally, as I've also written about extensively, semiconductor manufacturing is rapidly growing again in the U.S. (Let's hope it gets the support needed for that to continue.) But Shelly Henry founded MooresLabAI to address the skyrocketing costs and multi-year journey to design chips. He worked at Arm and Microsoft for several years before launching his new venture just last year. His focus right now is the verification process, using AI with electronic design automation tools to identify bugs, optimize performance, and implement fixes in real time, with the goal to cut the process to days from months.

Innovation Should Be Driven By Strategy, Not FOMO

In his latest piece in Forbes, "Why CEOs Keep Betting on the Wrong Innovations," Sherzod Odilov argues that when CEOs chase hyped technologies rather than looking to address real issues, they're asking for trouble. Consider Meta's expensive metaverse failures, and Apple's sluggish entry into AI.

In contrast, there's Amazon. Odilov specifically celebrates the roll-out of Amazon's AI-driven mobile Proteus robots in its fulfillment centers - 750,000 so far. They work alongside humans to transport carts of packages while avoiding obstacles. This focused approach reminds me a lot of 3M's operational excellence approaches that I covered in my last newsletter. Amazon's efforts to improve efficiency in fulfillment is expected to save up to $10 billion per year by 2030, along with improving delivery times.

Odilov encourages CEOs to start with a major problem, go deep in placing a few bets vigorously, and measure with metrics that are genuinely meaningful to the business - costs saved, revenue gained, etc.