Startups- NASA, Bucket Seats & good Engineering

Welcome to Fall!

It's sweater weather, some horror flicks are popping up and the Indian Summer in Boston could sure use a few more warm days.

It may be hard to believe, but we are just one week away before the US election. Go Vote!

Also worth noting, FAMGA decided to report their quarterly profits this week before the election. Four of them - Amazon, Apple, Alphabet & Facebook on Thursday, basically at the same time, try keeping up with that!

The State of Manufacturing

The overall PMI Index in September dipped slightly to 55.4% but generally the economic activities in the manufacturing sector keep growing.

The biggest changes from the prior month were New Orders dropping by almost 8%, Prices going up by 3.3% and Employment growing by 3.2%.

Comments like "Still struggling with long lead times for components" seem to keep increasing with several component OEMs announcing further lead-time push outs. Capacitors are specifically noted as a short supply commodity.

Average production material lead time is at 64 days.

For all you ME's out there, if you want to better understand realistic tolerances in sheet metal bending, check out this report. For a comparison between air bending, coining and bottoming, read here. We found these quite helpful.

For all you engineers having to create rework instructions and defining acceptance criteria's, check out this NASA workmanship standards for electronic assemblies as a good example of how to create good pictorial and written content for suppliers.

National Winner - Coreshell Technologies

National Runner-up - Aeromutable

People's Choice - EnZinc

And a huge shoutout to Sunthetics which made it all the way to the Global pitch event. We were happy to provide some guidance along the journey. Well done Myriam and Daniela!

Find out more about all 2020 participating startups here.

Also a big shoutout to Resprana. It was great to be part of your journey Sofie! And Helios Hockey which is developing exciting products for all you Hockey fans.

Check out all the MassChallange Startups here.

Boston Startups raised $3.2B last month. As usual, biotech took the crown but here are the notable Hardware standouts:

Read more about which companies received funding last month here. (Source: BOSTINNO)

Altaeros launched it's ST-Flex portable rapid response aerial cell tower. Set-up for this SuperTower is less than a day and offers network deployment for disaster or rural connectivity. Find out more here .(Source: PR Newswire)

Boston Materials Boston Materials expands collaboration with MassCEC through $100K BRIDGES funding program. This funding furthers the application of novel lightweight composites to drastically reduce transportation emissions. Details are here. (Source: MassCEC)

Cambrian Innovation announced their participation in the Elemental Excelerator's 9th Cohort. Read more about this here. (Source: Cambrian Innovation)

Desktop Metal The three-year $2.45 million award will fund the development of a cost-effective, high-volume additive manufacturing process capable of manufacturing cobalt free hard metals into complex shaped parts without the use of any tooling. More on this here. (Source: Industry Week)

Figur8 and Toppan announced they will conduct pilot tests for online fitness instruction using musculoskeletal sensors to track fast, high- precision measurements and analytics to improve trainer and test subject feedback for optimal training need & feedback. More on this here . (Source: Club Industry)

Franklin Robotics now called Tertill Corp. has hired former iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner as CEO to make it's garden robot a household name. Read more on this here .(Source: AP News)

Owl Labs moved to a new HQ at Boston's North Station and also hired Josh Allen as Chief Revenue Officer to further accelerate their business growth. More details here & there. (Source: BBJ) & (Source: PR Newswire)

SparkCharge had a field day and secured $1M investment and got two sharks, as Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner teamed up for the $1,000,000 offer on Shark Tank. More on this here. In addition, the company also launched it's new EV charging hardware "Roadie" this month. (Source: InsideEVs & PR Newswire)

Starry in partnership with the city of Los Angeles and Microsoft will offer free broadband internet access to nearly 9,000 resident in public housing for the rest of the 2020/21 school year. Well done!

Find out more here (Source: LA Times)

Operation Chinchilla - Twenty-five of the endangered rodents are living on top of a multibillion-dollar Chilean gold reserve.... MinersAtWork (Source: The Atlantic)

If you ever wanted to kill the guy that invented the Ice Cream truck music ... a true monopoly, how one private company owns 97% of the ice cream truck music box market KillMeNow (Source: The Hustle)

The stuff you find on McMaster-Carr - a bucket swivel seat RoundAndRoundYouGo (Source: McMaster-Carr)

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