Every self-driving car has cameras or a lidar system. It knows what's around it before it decides where to go. Now picture a factory built the same way, except nobody ever built the camera or the lidar. That's process manufacturing today: the reactors, pipes, and stainless steel equipment behind your protein bar, your prescription, the chips in your laptop. Half of everything the world manufactures runs through equipment like this, and almost nobody measures what's actually happening inside it in real time.
That's the gap Annie Lu and her brother David set out to close with Laminar.
In episode 8 of Code and Cobblestones, Annie joins us, Matt Crane and Will Lehmann, to walk through what physical AI looks like when it's not a robotics story. No sensing the room, deciding, moving an arm. Here the thing being sensed is a chemical reaction, not a room, so Laminar had to build its own version of that camera and lidar from scratch: proprietary sensors first, then closed foundation models trained on the chemistry data, then a direct line into the factory's own control systems.
They didn't start with the biggest possible use case. They started with cleaning. Every plant has to shut down between batches and wash everything out, so one product doesn't contaminate the next. Right now, almost every factory in the world runs that cleaning on a fixed schedule that never adjusts, and burns water, energy, chemicals, and downtime doing it. Laminar figured out how to make that process dynamic instead of fixed, and calls it the wedge that earns them the right to expand into everything else: fermentation, filtration, distillation, and beyond. It's why they're now running across six continents, inside seven of the top ten food and beverage companies in the world.
What you'll learn:
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Welcome
01:05 Why Physical AI Now
03:38 Laminar and Process Manufacturing
06:24 The Chemistry Intelligence Stack
09:51 Laminar's Origin Story
12:32 First Principles on the Shop Floor
17:40 Co-Founding With Her Brother
20:32 Winning Trust From Manufacturers
26:57 The Clean-in-Place Wedge
31:57 Advice for Physical AI Founders
35:24 Fundraising and Investor Fit
38:46 Rapid Fire With Annie Lu
40:07 Boston's Manufacturing Culture
42:17 How to Work With Laminar
Guest: Annie Lu, Co-founder, CEO at Laminar
Hosts:
Matt Crane, Founder of MGMT Boston https://mgmtboston.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewhcrane/
Will Lehmann Founder of Step Function VC https://stepfunction.vc/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wlehmann/
Watch/listen/Subscribe:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033HueFNlE1LPnEFPvVscs?si=e2351085b40b4334
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/code-and-cobblestones/id6785977680
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