Has another industrial revolution begun? Given the funding numbers, quite possibly.

Machina Labs, a Chatsworth-based advanced manufacturing startup, announced on Wednesday it raised $124 million in series C funding. The round included participants like Lockheed Martin Ventures, Balerion Space Ventures, United Arab Emirates-based Strategic Development Fund and Toyota’s venture department Woven Capital.

Machina Labs, which builds robotic factories, is part of the $16.4 billion U.S. advanced manufacturing companies have raised barely two months into 2026. The year is already shaping up to be the second-largest funding year for the national advanced manufacturing sector, just behind 2025 in which companies raised a record $34.6 billion.

It’s no surprise investors are funneling capital into manufacturing. As the U.S. continues to cement its onshore manufacturing capabilities and reduce reliance on China and other global competitors, companies like Machina Labs are mobilizing to beef up local manufacturing capabilities amid labor shortages and increasing demand for newly built weapons, rockets and vehicles.

“We’re not just making parts,” Edward Mehr, chief executive and co-founder of Machina Labs, said in a statement. “We’re reprogramming the factory itself to serve defense, aerospace and automotive customers who can’t afford to wait.”

Updating the assembly line

Machina Labs is using the fresh funding to build out its first large so-called “intelligent factory.” The 200,000-square-foot facility is composed of roughly 50 Machina Labs’ RoboCraftsman robots built to shape sheet metals, create 3D maps of surfaces, shave and trim edges, and refine surface edges with extreme precision powered by laser sensors and artificial intelligence. The company has two other factories that are less than half the size of the proposed large-scale one.

Chris Moran, vice president and general manager at Lockheed Martin Ventures, said in a statement that Machina Labs’ AI-driven strategy “will play a key role in shaping the future of aerospace production”

Moran added that “the launch of their new factory marks a major step forward, demonstrating how intelligent, robotic production can bring greater speed, precision, and scalability to the industry.”

Indeed, the software behind those robots unlock a scalability previously difficult to achieve when it comes to manufacturing complex, custom structures. Most highly engineered pieces are scaled only after engineers create a specific stamping die of a unique shape currently not available on the market, which itself takes years of engineering and billions of dollars to produce. Once the die is created, companies can begin to use it and, over time, pay off the cost investment of making said die. But as soon as a new structure needs to be made, that die is no longer useful.

“The world’s most advanced designs are being held back by 20th-century factories,” Mehr said. “This round allows us to scale manufacturing infrastructure that moves at the speed of software.”

The manufacturing hub

California is the center of the country’s new industrial revolution when it comes to advanced manufacturing – with 55% of all 2025 deals happening in the golden state. That amounts to more than $22 billion in activity.

Several companies in the Los Angeles-area have aimed to find a way to scale unique production designs efficiently without a robust manufacturing technological and labor force.

Divergent Technologies Inc., a Torrance-based manufacturing company, raised $290 million in series E funding back in September to build vehicle chassis, weapons parts and other complex machinery using its own engineered 3D printer. GrayMatter Robotics, based in Gardena, raised $45 million in 2024 to build automated robots meant to take over dangerous jobs as the manufacturing industry faces a crisis of unfulfilled jobs. Hadrian Automation Inc., another Torrance-based startup, raised $260 million in July to build AI-powered factories.

“When really looking at the built world, looking at the largest industries, primarily the auto industry, the aerospace industry, in the defense industry, and looking at the way that we engineer complex structures, almost all of them have a complicated metal and composite frame that is holding all of this together,” Lukas Czinger, Divergent chief executive, told the Business Journal in September. “It’s a highly engineered structure.”