It’s Tuesday and today we’re taking a look at Manukai, a Swiss company that uses data and AI to increase efficiency in the metal machining industry. The company was founded in 2023 by Daniel Wälchli and Pascal Weber, and recently secured a $3 million pre-seed round from QBIT Capital, with participation from Bloomhaus Ventures.

If I want to shape a piece of metal, I use a CNC machine. CNC machines are automated tools that use computers to precisely cut and shape materials, including metals. CNC stands for Computer Numerical Control.

The catch is that I still need to set up that machine by telling it how to move, where to cut, how deep, how fast, and so on. To do that, I have to program it using computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software—the tool where all the instructions are created and stored. According to Manukai, this is a very inefficient process: about 30% of total manufacturing costs and 50% of workers’ time go into translating designers’ plans into CNC machine code.

And so that’s where Manukai comes in. It instantly finds the best CNC machining programs by tapping into historical production data. The AI looks at that data and, based on what’s worked in the past, suggests the most suitable program.

So this is where Manukai comes in. It finds the best CNC machining programs instantly by tapping into historical production data. The AI looks at the historical data, and based on that data, suggests the most suitable program.

Their product contains three components:

All optimization and analysis happen on-premise, so no data leaves the plant and everything is stored securely on local servers.

There are three basic layers in the automated manufacturing process. Two we’ve already talked about: CAM, where we write the instructions, and CNC, the machine that executes those instructions. The third is CAD (Computer-Aided Design), the software used to design the part in the first place.

Manukai integrates into the CAM layer and is designed to be CAM-agnostic. The company told me they’re working on adding support for Mastercam, GibbsCAM, TopSolid, and Siemens NX CAM—some of the most widely used CAM platforms. But even those are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other CAM tools, each with their own use cases and quirks.

On the one hand, that makes Manukai’s job harder. It’s not like building for Windows and macOS, where you’re dealing with two well-defined environments. Here, you’re dealing with a fragmented world of niche, legacy, and modern software, each with its own format and logic. On the other hand, that complexity also makes the business more defensible. It’s a lot harder to build something that works with 20 different systems than with just 2—and once you do, you’ve created a serious moat.

That said, is the comparison fair? Maybe only partially—after all, Windows and macOS are full operating systems, and CAM tools are more like plugins in a broader workflow. But from a go-to-market and integration perspective, the point holds: building across many ecosystems is messy, and that mess can be a moat.

On the monetization front, the company offers an annual tiered subscription with price depending on the number of parts the client has to program, and the number of machines they operate. It pretty much follows the logic of CAM software, which for the most part also offer a yearly subscription, at least if we look at a more mid- or high-end market, like Autodesk or Siemens.

One more note I want to make on Manukai’s business:

One way to look at product-market fit is that a great product simultaneously:

Manukai checks all these boxes. It fits into the broad trend of automation, it’s in the AI hype market, and it serves the niche market of metal machining.

For many decades, Switzerland has been a manufacturing powerhouse—and it’s not just about watches.

The country is producing over $10 billion worth of fabricated metal products, over $12 billion in machinery and equipment, and over $25 billion in electronic and optical products. It produces 17% more metal products than Poland, even though it’s four times smaller. Only three countries (Germany, UK, and France) produce more machinery, and only one (Germany) produces more electronics.

Switzerland has both a strong metal fabrication industry, which Manukai directly serves, and strong downstream industries that rely on fabricated metal parts, such as machinery, medical devices, and precision instruments.

Manukai is a ETH Zurich spinoff, which is one of the leading universities in the world, and ranks as the best engineering institution in Europe. Aside from enabling Manukai’s existence, access to such talent has two major consequences for the business. First, Manukai can continue building on the talent foundation it already has by recruiting top experts. Second, graduates can go on to start their own companies in the metals space or the related downstream industries I mentioned.

To put a finer point on it, according to Crunchbase, only 15 universities in Europe have more alumni founders than ETH Zurich. And outside of the UK, which has a completely different funding landscape, there are only five—across all fields, not just engineering.

That said, accessing talent in Switzerland is still a challenge—as it is in most of Europe. Skilled workers are hard to find, with the country’s skill shortage index rising 69% in 2022 and another 24% in 2023. Moreover, Switzerland has the largest number of occupations experiencing a lack of talent.

But that’s skilled people overall. What about manufacturing?

One study by Swissmechanic, which surveyed SMEs in the mechanical, electrical, and metal industries, found that for 26% of them, labour shortage is the biggest challenge (Mangel an Arbeitskräften, for those of us who don’t speak German). And we’ve got plenty of signals that back this up—finding qualified metal workers is genuinely tough. The job vacancy rate for metal professionals is almost 8%—more than double the national average. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate sits below 3%, which usually indicates full employment. And hiring someone in this field takes on average 68 days—one of the longest hiring cycles across all occupations.

It’s always easier to build for one platform than ten. No matter how long it takes to adapt a product to a specific system, 1 < 10. That math checks out. So tailoring Manukai’s product to each CAM is a bit more painful than to just one. Plus, there’s probably a big range in how modern—or outdated—different CAM tools are. There might be legacy software that’s still widely used but so old that integrating Manukai becomes a nightmare.

I once chatted with a company in a similar space—CloEE—and asked the obvious question: if this stuff boosts plant efficiency, why doesn’t everyone use it? Turns out there’s a whole checklist of reasons: tight budgets, slow decision-making, skepticism that the product will actually deliver, fear of disruption, and inertia. Sometimes, there still may be seven obscure reasons why a client might walk away.

From a manufacturer’s point of view, figuring out the ROI on this kind of tool isn’t straightforward. You’d need to measure everything—from the time workers spend fiddling with CAM settings to the cost of errors or inefficiencies—to figure out how much value Manukai is actually adding. You might feel the productivity boost, but proving it with hard numbers? That’s a different story. And if you can’t measure it, it’s harder to justify it internally.

Yes, it’s hard to sell. But once it’s in, it’s just as hard to rip out. Integrating Manukai takes time and effort—and companies are generally reluctant to undo something they’ve already spent resources to implement. That resistance to change goes both ways: it slows down adoption, but also keeps churn low once the product becomes part of the workflow.

Manukai is a layer on top of other tools, which makes it relatively flexible. As long as the foundation—the CAM software—is there, it should be possible to scale the product beyond Switzerland and into other European markets without reinventing the wheel. That’s a nice position to be in.

You still need skilled workers to operate CAM software—but maybe not as skilled. Manukai could effectively lower the bar by making the software easier to use, which helps manufacturers widen the talent pool. That’s especially valuable in a market where highly qualified workers are hard to come by.

Even though the company explicitly says it’s not trying to replace people—and I don’t know the technical ins and outs well enough to argue either way—it doesn’t seem like factory work is something many people will want to do long-term. So if tools like Manukai end up replacing some of those jobs, it might not be such a bad thing. Factories will still need people—to run operations, supervise software—but it’ll be fewer than we see today, even in the most advanced setups.

My point is that automation and replacing human labour isn’t a bad thing, if it enables people to do something better with their time, or if it just makes clear economic sense. And in manufacturing, where both time and people are in short supply, that tradeoff is starting to look more and more reasonable.