Violet Labs: Making Hard Tech Easier
Atoms and Bits
It is the beauty of human ingenuity that abstracts away the complexity of things like cars, airplanes, computers, rockets and satellites, and makes them feel basic (maybe it’s a stretch to call a rocket basic, but at the rate SpaceX is launching them, they will feel more and more like airplanes in the years ahead). In reality, the systems that conceive of, design, develop, test, manufacture and operate these incredibly intricate machines are some of the greatest achievements in human history. And the real miracle is not the end product itself, but rather the process that brought that product to life. Or as Elon Musk has said, the factory is the product.
The Industrial Revolution of the mid-to-late 1700s marked the transition away from things built by hand to things built by machine. The factory system of manufacturing was developed during this time and was marked by using machinery, steam power and divisions of labor to mass produce products.
The Second Industrial Revolution began in the second half of the 1800s and was marked by the build out of the railroads, heavy factory machinery, large-scale iron and steel production and the use of petroleum and electricity. The Third Industrial Revolution started in the 1950s with the invention of semiconductors and microprocessors. This has been called The Digital Revolution and it has brought about the digitization of nearly everything in the manufacturing process.
Indeed, the history of human development has been intertwined with the invention of tools and systems that made it easier and more efficient to do things than it was before.
We are now in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution where the lines between the physical, digital and biological are blurring, and every person and object in the manufacturing process will be intricately linked in an always-on connected world. But despite this evolution, what we are building and how we are building it is not evolving fast enough.
There has been an “atoms vs bits’’ debate going back nearly 20 years with people like Peter Thiel commenting that there has been great innovation in the world of bits, but not in the world of atoms. Peter’s venture fund, Founders Fund was formed in 2005 with a manifesto whose rallying cry was we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
Marc Andreessen in his 2020 essay It’s Time to Build argues that part of the reason COVID-19 turned into a global pandemic was because of a “failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.” The world did not have enough physical “stuff” (masks, gowns, vaccines, ventilators, etc) because “specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build*.” His thesis seems to be that if we don’t have enough products, and the factory is the product, then we need more and better factories.
In 2022 Katherine Boyle, a newly-minted GP at a16z announced a new fund in an essay titled Building American Dynamism where she defines American Dynamism as “the recognition that seemingly insurmountable problems in our society — from national security and public safety to housing and education — demand solutions that aren’t simply incremental changes that perpetuate the status quo. These problems demand solutions from builders — and it’s never been more vital that startups tackle these serious American problems.”
The winning solution seems to be using bits to drive atoms. The entire stack of tools used to build needs to evolve, and we need to leverage new technology to build new and better things: cars that are safer and less destructive to our planet, vaccines that can save more lives faster, defense technology that ensures harmony and safety for all of Earth’s inhabitants, rockets, satellites and space infrastructure that can help us better understand our planet, ourselves and the universe beyond, and much, much more.
Violet Labs and Making “The Factory” Better
Today, a multitude of software tools are leveraged throughout the hardware development lifecycle, from requirements management through operations and execution. These tools are critical in developing high complexity, multi-disciplinary products such as spacecraft, autonomous robots and medical devices. However, information flow between them is largely manual. Today we are excited to announce our investment into Violet Labs, a cloud-based software integration platform for the development of complex hardware/software products. We are excited to be joining an amazing investor group in this oversubscribed seed round that includes Space Capital, Felicis and V1.VC.
Violet Labs aggregates data from software tools used across the hardware design lifecycle into a powerful centralized platform. Simply put, they are Zapier for the hardware industry. Soon, these various systems used to bring rockets and self-driving cars to market will be able to connect with one another and when one input is changed in one system, it will dynamically update in another.
Engineers and companies that build hardware like spacecraft, airplanes, and cars are increasingly finding that the tools they have now are insufficient to do their jobs, especially compared to the wealth of new tools used by software engineers. Cloud-computing, APIs, and platforms like GitHub let coders automate workflows, share modular designs, and update coworkers about changes in real-time.
Every aerospace company employs dozens of systems engineers that spend weeks manually cobbling together qualitative and quantitative data–like satellite mass property information (density, volume, mass, center of gravity, and moment of inertia)–in Jira, Confluence and Excel so that guidance and navigation teams can then manually input that data into GitHub for use in telemetry development.
Violet Labs will connect to each of these different software systems via APIs and allow data to dynamically flow between them so that when one system is updated, the other is too automatically. Their cloud-based platform will aggregate all data in one centralized repository so that it can be sent to other software systems that use that same data for other purposes.
Founder Earned Secret
Violet Labs was founded by two exceptional technical women who are builders. Their “earned secret” is that they felt the pain point they’re now working to solve as engineers at complex hardware manufacturing companies. As Violet Labs Co-Founder and CEO Lucy Hoag tells the story, she started her professional career working in R&D around how satellites and other spacecraft were designed and built. Her PhD thesis paper proposed a system to drastically enhance the generation, optimization and verification of spacecraft builds. She left the aerospace industry for the autonomous vehicle industry in 2017, and when she returned to aerospace at Amazon’s communications satellite division Kuiper four years later in 2021, she was shocked to see that the tool chain had not advanced at all in aerospace design. The same inefficiencies and processes were still firmly in place.
Lucy met her Co-Founder and Violet Labs’s COO, Caitlin Curtis at Amazon Kuiper and they immediately bonded over an obsession for tool utilization and shared frustration around the lack thereof. Caitlin has worked in complex hardware her entire career, starting at SpaceX in 2013 where she was working on the Falcon9 interstage and internal structures, and then onto Virgin Galactic where she worked as a composites engineer, and then the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft company Kitty Hawk that became Wisk where she worked as a systems engineer.
At Kuiper, Caitlin was working on a variety of tool sets: CAD, MES, PLM, and ERP systems, and Lucy was on the mechanical operations side. They were both on the system engineering and program management teams for satellite structures and mechanisms (thermal, manufacturing, etc).
Having worked on spacecraft, launch vehicles, eVTOLs, drones and self-driving cars for companies like SpaceX, Google, DARPA, Lyft and Amazon, Lucy and Caitlin will help further modernize the US manufacturing industry by enabling companies to move faster, operate with more accuracy and efficiency, and ultimately do much more with much less.
Michael Palank led the Violet Labs seed round for MaC Venture Capital.
About MaC Venture Capital
MaC Venture Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley that invests in technology startups leveraging shifts in cultural trends and behaviors. The general partners represent diverse backgrounds in technology, business, politics, entertainment, and finance, allowing them to accelerate entrepreneurs on the verge of their breakthrough moment. The firm provides hands-on support crucial for building and scaling category-leading companies, including operations strategy, brand building, recruiting, sales development, and mission-critical introductions. MaC Venture Capital is the result of a merger between Cross Culture Ventures, co-founded by Marlon Nichols, and M Ventures, co-founded by Adrian Fenty, Michael Palank, and Charles D. King. Find MaC Venture Capital online at https://macventurecapital.com and @MaCVentureCap.
