Factory Reset - Recap #1
Introducing a new community to gather the builders rebooting how the world gets built, powered, and moved.
Well, that was fun!
Thank you to the 70+ founders, engineers, industrial enterprises, and VCs who packed into The Westly Group’s SF office last week for the inaugural Factory Reset hosted alongside our friends at J.P. Morgan.
This community has clearly been missing in San Francisco and you all proved it on night one.
What is Factory Reset? A new community & event series for anyone innovating in physical industries. This includes manufacturing, energy, industrials, mobility, supply chain, the built environment, and all of the verticals that make the real world work.
Who should get involved? Founders, engineers, enterprises, and partner level-VCs active in AI, robotics, and hard tech for physical industries.
How do I get in the mix?
Attend the next Factory Reset: Save the date for our next event - Monday, January 26 at 6pm in downtown San Francisco.
Pilot opportunities with The Westly Group’s corporate partners: Check out the pilot requests from our corporate partners below. Send us a customer facing deck and blurb on your startup specific to these pilot opportunities at factoryreset@westlygroup.com.
Get a job at one of our presenting companies: If you’re a world class engineer or operator looking for your next role, the three teams that presented Monday night have open roles across engineering, product, and go-to-market. Links to open roles are below.
Not just another VC mixer
Factory Reset is designed for practical outcomes: we’re here to trade ideas, make intros that lead to pilots, and share opportunities to join some of the most exciting startups building for the physical economy.
Our first event featured three founding teams that represent the spirit of this new community:
Will Drewery, Founder & CEO, Diagon
Company: Diagon is an agentic AI procurement platform and marketplace that helps leading companies source the right capex equipment for their facilities in minutes, not months. Led by Tesla’s former Head of Capex Procurement, the company creates supply chain efficiencies by connecting equipment buyers with new and surplus manufacturing equipment from a global supplier base.
Hiring for: Senior Autonomous Data Systems Engineer, Principal AI Full Stack Engineer, Global Supply Chain Manager, Full Stack Engineer, Head of Engineering
Adi Prasad and Aditya Ranjan, Co-Founders, Matter (stealth)
Company: Matter is an end to end contract manufacturer building autonomous factories to nearshore last mile assembly and sub assembly. The team is made up of manufacturing experts that have launched more than eight gigafactories and previously built digital manufacturing and industrial AI platforms at Rivian, Tesla and CloudKitchens.
Hiring for: Product Manager, Head of Controls Engineering, Head of AI
Devin Bhushan, Founder and CEO, Squint
Company: Squint is the leading manufacturing intelligence platform for capturing tribal knowledge, enforcing standard work and analyzing rich insights, all on a platform operators love. Based in San Francisco, Squint recently raised a $40 million Series B led by The Westly Group and TCV with participation from Sequoia Capital and Menlo Ventures.
Hiring for: Product Engineer, Controller, Executive Assistant to the CEO, Senior GTM Recruiter, Director of Enterprise Sales, SDR, Sales Engineer, Senior Sales Engineer, Strategic Account Executive
Call for pilots
The Westly Group is backed by global enterprises that include ABB, Alaska Airlines, Audi, Bridgestone, CNH, Hitachi Energy, State Farm Insurance, Volkswagen, dozens of energy developers and utilities, and many others across the industrial landscape. These partnerships give us a front row seat to the problems industrial enterprises are actively trying to solve.
Below are pilot requests collected directly from our network. If you are building in these areas, email factoryreset@westlygroup.com with a customer facing deck and blurb on your specific solution.
⚙ A large distributed asset operator seeking middleware that sits between LLMs and industrial data historians like AVEVA PI
🏭 A major pipeline operator evaluating digital twin platforms for pipeline modeling, predictive maintenance, and flow optimization
⚡A Western utility searching for asset cataloging solutions that combine drone imagery with computer vision for 5,000 to 10,000 grid asset types
🔌 A multistate utility looking for next generation VPP platforms that unify thermostats, batteries, EVs and water heaters without expensive middleware
Thank you again to everyone for helping launch Factory Reset. We’re excited to build this community with you and welcome your input.
Reach out to factoryreset@westlygroup.com if you are:
Founders who have, or are thinking about, launching your own startup to solve one of the biggest problems in the physical economy
A founder interested in presenting at the next Factory Reset event
An industrial company exploring startup solutions or launching an RFP for a pilot
An engineer or operator looking to join your next startup
See you on January 26 for the next Factory Reset! RSVP link coming soon.
Jason & Noemi
The Westly Group
