While workers fret over whether AI and robotics will eliminate their jobs, Los Angeles-based GrayMatter Robotics sees a different, and more immediate, challenge: too much work for too few people. “Sometimes for these manufacturers in this application domain, the labor shortage is as high as 75%,” GrayMatter Robotics CEO Ariyan Kabir told Decrypt during a tour of its facility. The reason for the shortage is a laudable one, he noted, as the shortage of people entering the manufacturing industry shows an increase in the standard of living and technology, giving people the option to take less physically demanding jobs. “That’s where we are focusing on augmenting the workforce,” Kabir said. “The applications that we’re focusing on, there’s not enough people to do this in the first place.” To expand its operations and accelerate hiring, GrayMatter announced on Thursday that it had raised $45 million in Series B funding. With Generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude AI surging into the mainstream, businesses everywhere are looking for ways to leverage the emerging technology. GrayMatter Robotics was among them. Founded in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by USC Alums S.K. Gupta, Brual Shah, and Kabir, GrayMatter designs and produces autonomous robotic arms and also develops artificial intelligence models to program them. “[2020] was not the best time to start a business, we have been very fortunate,” Kabir said. “We started GrayMatter for two reasons: to help millions of people improve their quality of lives, and to help our economy.”

Full report : Millions of manufacturing jobs are going unfilled, says the CEO of GrayMatter, which today announced raising $45 million to expand its manufacturing efforts.