Announcing Podium Automation
By Kristian Branaes
We got to know Jamie Niu before Podium Automation existed. She and her co-founder Jacob Buser had both spent years at Bowery Farming, building and scaling a complex, vertically integrated manufacturing operation. Before Bowery, Jamie had worked at Tesla and Blue Origin. When the two of them left to start something of their own, they went looking for an old, overlooked industry where modern software and automation could deliver a step change; and they found it in control panels.
Over the months that followed, we spent a lot of time with Jamie and Jacob as the company took shape. The more we saw how they make decisions, and how quickly they move, the more our conviction grew. We are thrilled to be partnering with them as part of Podium’s Series A.
Why Control Panels
Control panels are the boxes that house the electronics controlling a machine, a production line, or an entire building. They are everywhere: factories, power plants, airports, hospitals, data centres. And almost no one outside of industry ever thinks about them.
They matter for the climate more than their profile suggests. Decarbonising industry means refurbishing most existing plants and building thousands of new ones. In nearly every case, that work runs through a control panel. When a facility wants to switch to a cleaner source of heating or cooling, install more efficient equipment, or take part in grid balancing, the control panel has to change.
The problem is that changing one is painful. Control panels are expensive to modify, heavily regulated, and usually understood only by the person who built them. If a panel fails during an upgrade, a production line can stop, and a replacement can take months to arrive. For many operators, the time and risk involved mean efficiency upgrades simply get postponed, and decades-old, inefficient equipment keeps running.
This is a large market that innovation has passed by. Control panels are mostly designed and assembled by small panel shops with little software and almost entirely manual processes. Lead times of 8 to 16 weeks are normal, and roughly a third of panels need rework. Across Europe and North America we estimate the market is worth around $30 billion, and it is tied to industrial capex that should grow faster than GDP as decarbonisation accelerates.
Podium is closing that gap. The company combines its own design software, Copper, with assembly that becomes more automated over time. The result is control panels delivered in weeks rather than months, at higher reliability and, increasingly, lower cost. With software and just two machines, the team has already cut labour cost per panel by more than half, while pricing in line with incumbents and winning work from leading industrial players.
The traction speaks for itself. Lead times are down from the industry standard of 8 to 12 weeks to 3 to 4, with a goal of panel delivery being measured in days, not weeks. Customers already include Redwood Materials, Commonwealth Fusion, Hadrian, and CSX, and many of them come back to order again.
Why Now
Three things have changed at once.
The technology is finally ready. A new generation of object-oriented design software, combined with affordable CNC and wire-processing automation, makes a software-led approach to panel building possible for the first time.
Customer expectations have shifted. A new generation of engineers expects to upload a drawing, get an instant quote, click order, and receive the part next week. Companies like Xometry, Protolabs, and Fictiv brought that low-touch workflow to machining and 3D printing. Podium is bringing it to control panels.
And the underlying demand is accelerating. The industrial sector accounts for around a fifth of emissions across Europe and North America. Building and upgrading the plants needed to bring that down will require far more control panels, delivered far faster than the current system can manage.
Looking Ahead
Podium’s focus today is control panels, but the opportunity is bigger. The leaders in industrial controls, including Siemens, Honeywell, Rockwell, and ABB, all built diversified businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars from a strong initial position. Podium has a chance to start from panels and expand across the broader industrial controls market, and even into areas where panels have been too expensive or complex to reach, from labs to small-run production.
We backed Jamie and Jacob because they have the ambition, the judgement, and execution to build that kind of enduring company. We could not be more excited to be partnering with them from here.