LA Hard Tech Spotlight: First Resonance
LA Hard Tech Spotlight: First Resonance
Software for hardware manufacturing
In 2020, Karan Talati predicted what many of us take for granted today: we are in a revolution in hardware innovation that is revitalizing American manufacturing. Karan was part of this movement at SpaceX, where both hardware and software played key roles in making it the generational company it has become today.
Some of the lesser-known keys to SpaceX’s success in manufacturing hardware at extreme levels of speed, cost, and quality are the internal software tools they built in-house. For example, Warp Drive, their homemade ERP and manufacturing system, enables them to move at previously unbelievable speeds without sacrificing safety.
Having seen what software can do at SpaceX and noticing a glaring need to bring better hardware engineering and manufacturing software to the broader hardware innovation ecosystem, Karan set out to build a solution.
The aerospace, defense, and other hardware manufacturing industries are rapidly shifting to a more dynamic and efficient production methodology. First Resonance exists to help them achieve their goals with better software.
Introducing First Resonance
CEO & Key People: Karan Talati
Founded: 2020
Downtown Los Angeles, CA
Developer of systems software for rapid, iterative hardware manufacturing.
First Resonance’s mission is to build the software backbone that empowers hardware companies to succeed in the digital future of manufacturing. Their product ION Factory OS is a next-generation manufacturing execution system (MES) intended to power the next era of American manufacturing in aerospace, defense, robotics, energy, and other hard tech industries.
ION Factory OS
First Resonance’s flagship product is ION, a software platform that enhances manufacturing efficiency and agility by connecting all of a factory's discrete parts. ION enables real-time collaboration between engineers and technicians, accelerating decision-making feedback loops and supporting many workflows, from prototype development to full-scale production.
Traditional MES systems track the flow of inputs from raw materials through their journey into intermediate parts, subassemblies, and eventually finished products. They provide real-time control and monitoring of manufacturing operations to maximize production efficiency and ensure quality control and regulatory compliance. Factory OS transforms this MES paradigm with improved collaboration tools, better traceability and integrated supply chain functions, enhanced connectivity for IoT data, predictive planning, and seamless integrations with ERP and PLM systems.
Karan and his team have the sector experience required to lead, coming from SpaceX, Boeing, Toyota, Northrop Grumman, and more. They bring tribal knowledge into the complexities of modern manufacturing to design ION with a user-centric approach.
Picks & Shovels for American Manufacturing
First Resonance is poised to play a pivotal role in the resurgence of American manufacturing. The software helps manufacturers navigate the increasingly complex supply chain landscape. ION enhances efficiency and reduces manufacturing downtime, a critical feature when rising global conflict, deglobalization, and climate disruptions shed light on supply chain resilience. By continuously evolving to address critical supply chain challenges, First Resonance is already driving improvements in American manufacturing and complex hardware development.
Founded in DTLA in January 2020, First Resonance was early to the wave of new hardware-oriented software startups building in Southern California. They’ve gathered an enviable group of investors, including Series A lead Craft Ventures, Fika Ventures, Blue Bear Capital, Village Global, Stage Venture Partners, and more. They count roughly half of last year’s LA Hard Tech 50 list among their customers, including Varda Space Industries, Radiant Nuclear, Machina Labs, and Arc Boats, proving themselves to be an enabling technology in today’s hard tech boom.
Q&A with CEO, Karan Talati
What had to be true so First Resonance could exist? Why now?
While technology moves fast, Silicon Valley can sometimes forget the importance of a philosophy that has driven Nintendo’s success: 枯れた技術の水平思考, or ‘Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology.‘ Manufacturing globalization accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, leaving manufacturing innovation in the dark for decades. In the meanwhile, digital technologies like cloud and mobile accelerated in the 2000s and into the 2010s. The cloud, in particular, brings huge opportunities for enabling large data capture and processing, enabling many of the technologies we have come to rely on like ridesharing, social media, and more. Remember, manufacturing was left in the dark on innovation! It wasn’t until 2016 that options like AWS GovCloud became available for application innovators to develop and deploy cloud-scale workflow innovations into security-critical industries like aerospace and defense, biomedical, and more.
So while, to Silicon Valley, it may seem that we are over the cloud and mobile innovation curve, the reality is that it only became available in the mid-2010s. The need for it is accelerating into the 2020s because of the Covid pandemic and recent geopolitical changes that are forcing governments and their industrial bases to take a step back and digitize and make more efficient industries, like manufacturing, that were put on pause for 20-30 years. Furthermore, we are seeing geopolitical shifts that affect manufacturing policy for more factories distributed around the wold rather than a China-centric manufacturing policy. In addition, the IRA is incentivizing >$300bn in development and production of new energy solutions, which will lead to trillions in value. This means that the demand is there now more than ever.
How will the world change when you succeed?
Similar to what Github did for software development or what AWS did for infrastructure (storage, compute, and network), First Resonance is creating digitized abstractions for the world’s hardware engineers to be able to move information in, out, and through factory operations. When we succeed, hardware engineers and manufacturers will be able to rapidly iterate and ship hardware products rather than adhering to the slow, manual, and rigid process controls of the past. This will mean an acceleration in the forms of alternative energy, new types of space exploration and infrastructure vehicles, and more. We will power the imaginations of any who wants to build in the physical world.
What has been harder than you expected about building First Resonance?
First Resonance is serving some very serious customers that are building quality and safety-critical applications in aviation, spaceflight, nuclear energy, and more. Inherently, that comes with some difficulty. That said, we are not shy of this given our backgrounds coming from quality-critical applications such as the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft at SpaceX.
What had been harder than we thought is how quickly our customers are scaling into quality and regulatory workflows, which demand a heavier investment in our business solutions to partner with our customers. This means that the fast-paced and product development-oriented company-building playbooks are only part of the equation. Otherwise, we have to invest into key relationships that warrant high 6-figure and 7-figure ACVs (and more investment here would even allow them to go higher)
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you first started First Resonance?
As a first-time founder, I wish I had known just how much of the job involves people and organization design. Ensuring that you have the right people on the bus, they know exactly what they need to do and what they own is the whole job. Operational excellence makes a huge difference in being able to scale up our delivery to our customers. I wish I had known the signs to reorganize a team, so there are just the right number of people working on a specific aspect of the product without having too many cooks in the kitchen or being resource-strained.
What motivates you to build this company every day?
Our customers. We are incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to see that the world was going to change how we build in the physical world. With energy and climate change being one of the biggest problems in our generation’s time, we are lucky to have started solving problems for companies who are going after these high-value challenges – some of them didn’t even exist then. There are a lot of sexy problems in this set. For me, I don’t just want to build infrastructure – picks and shovels during a gold rush – but to increase the likelihood of the success of companies taking big swings at the biggest problems for our generation to solve. I think being a part of a generational shift is a very rare opportunity, and we are lucky to be powering many of the companies vying to revolutionize using space for new applications like energy mining, in-space manufacturing, and extending communication as well as companies packaging energy solutions in ways that are only possible with modern manufacturing progress.
Why is LA the right place for you to build your business?
As a software company, it wasn’t immediately clear whether we should build here in LA or in the SF Bay Area. Having seen what has unfolded here in LA, we have no regrets about choosing to stay here. This is where people are taking big bets on applying technology to solve the biggest problems, which are all in the physical world. The talent network here in LA as a function of companies like SpaceX and Anduril is better than anywhere else. Of course, the weather and the intersection of amazing ideas and culture coming from other industries only help build a better product with wider applications.
Behind every successful person there are people who play or have played significant roles in making it happen. Who’s one person who has helped you get to this point? How have they helped?
Shilpi Kumar originally pushed me to seriously consider building a company to solve problems in manufacturing. She initially opened my network to investors in Silicon Valley, which then opened doors to VCs everywhere. Funding and networks were critical for our platform development, and each of those blocks have compounded to build the company we have today. We wouldn’t have any of it if I didn’t get the push to take the first step.
Huge thanks to Karan and the First Resonance team for collaborating with us at Upfront Ventures on this piece and an event in April. We convened the builders at LA’s most promising young hard tech companies for a memorable celebration at the Zimmerman Automobile Driving Museum in El Segundo.
 | A guest post by
|