From joists under bridges to metal platforms in factories, structural metal is literally the grimy, oft-forgotten underbelly of our built environment.

Yet structural metal is vital to industry. A joist or platform buckling under load can mean injury or death to the workers relying on it. And faster factory and infrastructure creation means faster construction within manufacturing, transportation, housing, and other buildings.

A revolution in structural metal would carry knock-on effects for all of heavy industry and construction. Faster design using improved CAD software and faster assembly using robotics and 3D printing could not only reduce component costs, but decrease build times, accelerating factory, warehouse, and apartment construction. Customers will be able to choose components after checking dimensions in CAD, then the manufacturer will have automated forklifts and robot arms being staging, assembling, and welding the component together. For more complex geometries, 3D metal printers will enable more flexibility, saving customers time.

Dropping Input Costs

Costs for robotic automation have declined 6x over the last 20 years. The number of industrial robots has increased by 2.5x in the last 15 years, and 50% of those are used for welding.

CAD software development costs have dropped at least 3x over the last 10 years when you take into account LLMs increasing coding speed, GPUs reducing the difficulty of building performant graphics, and an increase in the number of engineers and designers who have built complex UI applications.

Autonomous forklifts are exceptionally rare today, but multiple companies have started selling them, and globally, roughly 100k are deployed each year. For context, there are ~900k forklifts in operation in the U.S.