Sid Khullar: Raising $10M (Pre-Seed) to Build the Agentic OS for Manufacturing

About this episode

🌊 The Excellence of Machines, Inside Aris Machina’s $10.7M Pre-Seed

How do you build an agentic operating system for manufacturing, and why now?

We’re joined by Siddharth “Sid” Khullar, Co-Founder & CEO of Aris Machina, the company building an agentic OS for complex manufacturing, starting with batteries. Sid previously led Software & AI at Northvolt, where he experienced firsthand the success and failure of the company as well as the manufacturing complexity that inspired Aris Machina’s creation.

In this episode, we dive into what industrial super-intelligence really means, and what it takes to build software that can reason across tens of thousands of parameters, bridge the gap between human operators and AI agents, and transform modern manufacturing.

In our conversation, we covered:→ How Northvolt’s collapse shaped Europe’s next wave of industrial founders→ Why modern factories drown in data but starve for insight→ The “aha” moment: a catastrophic yield problem that no dashboard could explain→ What an agentic OS actually is, and why it’s not “just an LLM”→ How Aris Machina avoids becoming a consulting company→ Why battery factories are the ideal proving ground→ How Sid raised a ~$10M pre-seed after 300 investor nos→ The long-term vision: an app store for manufacturing

***

Links:

Sid on LinkedIn

Aris Machina

Or ask me for an intro!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newwavenewsletter.substack.com