Digital Cloud Manufacturing for Electronics: Our investment in MacroFab

We are incredibly thrilled to announce our investment in the Series C financing round of MacroFab. MacroFab offers a technology platform for electronics manufacturing to build millions of electronics products every year through a network of factories across North America. MacroFab’s platform offers customers resilience in the PCBA supply chain by acting as a provider of flexible capacity for customers who need to build electronics. By aggregating partner factories’ capacities, MacroFab allows these partners to increase the utilization of their factories.

MacroFab is a cloud-enabled electronics manufacturing platform designed to make it easier, faster, and less expensive to get new electronics manufactured while providing complete transparency in the process. MacroFab's technology takes information directly from the customer, via a modern easy-to-use web interface or via REST APIs, to the manufacturing floor reducing the upfront cost and complexity of getting manufacturing jobs running. MacroFab addresses the pain points of the players within the demand and supply of the EMS space in the following ways:

For Customers:

1. MacroFab offers resiliency to a customer’s supply chain: MacroFab builds resilience for the customer’s electronics supply chain by offering electronics procurement, inventory management, and delivery of assembled products. In addition, MacroFab ensures that orders are shipped in a timely manner with the correct components rather than relying on CMs who may prioritize certain orders over others.
2. Macrofab provides transparency for building electronics: MacroFab offers visibility to customers interacting with the platform and to the customers’ own organizations. Customers can simply drop in designs and track the progression of their orders. By uploading designs onto MacroFab’s platform, customers do not need to go back and forth with a traditional CM to clarify the specifications. In addition, MacroFab’s technology platform allows electronics engineers, supply chain managers and MacroFab production teams to collaborate using software while providing real-time inventory and production information through a set of software tools and APIs.

For Factories:

1. MacroFab reduces idle time for factories: With MacroFab, factories can increase their utilization of machines, smoothing out and ultimately increasing the cash flows of partners.
2. Macrofab provides outsourced operations for factories: MacroFab offers electronics procurement, project management, and design transparency for partner factories. For procurement, MacroFab essentially removes the burden of material sourcing away from factories who need the support. For project management, MacroFab models the process timeline for partner factories, allowing them to stay on schedule on orders. On design transparency, MacroFab’s ability to share the design specifications on its digital platform speeds the process of factories fulfillment of jobs given the clarity provided upfront.

We believe that MacroFab is well-positioned to bolster resilience within customers’ electronics supply chain and optimize the capacity within factories. Our investment will support MacroFab as they continue to expand their network.

MacroFab is led by an extremely seasoned team with firsthand experience in electronics assembly. Their experiences of scaling upstarts and attention to customers’ needs emphasize our team’s high conviction that MacroFab will lead the way for producing electronics products faster, more cost-effective, and closer to their end-users.