CloudNC has secured $20 million in new capital to scale its AI precision machining technology across global supply chain networks.

The investment round was led by US venture investor Nimble Ventures, with participation from Calculus Venture Capital, Entrepreneur First, and LM Ventures, the venture capital fund of Lockheed Martin.

Founded in 2015, CloudNC operates from headquarters in London and an active production facility in Chelmsford. The company previously drew backing from Atomico and Episode 1 Ventures, alongside strategic partnerships with Autodesk and Lockheed Martin.

Precision component suppliers face pressures to balance tight engineering tolerances with compressed delivery schedules. CloudNC designs its lead software product, CAM Assist, to automate computer numerical control (CNC) programming—generating machining strategies and toolpaths from computer-aided manufacturing models to accelerate production runs.

Automating CNC programming for supplier networks

The software shortens the transition phase between technical part design and factory production, allowing machinists to increase physical component output.

CloudNC reports that CAM Assist is now active across more than 1,000 machine shops globally, including several hundred facilities in the US. Confirmed commercial users include Lockheed Martin and Major Tool and Machine.

Theo Saville, CEO and co-founder of CloudNC, said: “Machine shops everywhere are under pressure to quote and program faster, and deliver more with the people and machines they already have.

John Burbank, founder of Nimble Ventures, added that automated CNC workflows will support “massive increases in onshoring of manufacturing and global production” for precision industrial supply bases.

CloudNC says it will direct the capital injection into go-to-market operations, technical support infrastructure, and partner activity across international regions.

AI quoting targets procurement turnaround times

CloudNC is expanding its software line with Quote Agent, an AI-assisted estimating tool scheduled for release later in 2026.

Preparing job estimates represents a major operational drag for manufacturing suppliers. Evaluating incoming technical drawings, calculating cycle times, and establishing part pricing remains heavily manual, exposing supply shops to administrative delays or miscalculated margins once components enter physical production.

Quote Agent applies AI to early-stage costing, enabling suppliers to return customer bids rapidly while standardising cost estimations.

“Quote Agent is a natural next step for CloudNC as we seek to accelerate global machining with AI,” says Saville. “CAM Assist already helps machinists get parts onto machines faster; Quote Agent will help shops assess new work, prepare quotes more efficiently and respond to customers with greater confidence.”

“We believe our AI can make quoting faster, more consistent and more scalable, helping manufacturers win more of the right work while keeping expert judgement firmly in control,” Saville added.

Knox Systems partnership advances FedRAMP authorisation

CloudNC is collaborating with Knox Systems to achieve FedRAMP certification for CAM Assist.

The compliance roadmap aims to clear CAM Assist for deployment by US government departments, defence contractors, and aerospace manufacturers operating under federal data governance rules. 

Authorisation, if granted, will permit public-sector and defence suppliers to deploy automated toolpath generation across regulated production workloads.

See also: Samsung taps Mistral AI models for semiconductor manufacturing

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

The post CloudNC aims to accelerate AI supply chain machining appeared first on AI News.

Samsung has partnered with Mistral AI to deploy on-premises models across its semiconductor manufacturing and engineering operations.

The agreement was announced during the bilateral state summit held in Paris between South Korea and France. Samsung will integrate Mistral’s software suite – including its flagship Mistral Large model – into internal semiconductor facilities to build customised models for intelligence-driven factory infrastructure.

On-premises AI models for semiconductor fab infrastructure

The deployment relies on private enterprise installations to process sensitive engineering and operational records within Samsung’s computing perimeter. This architecture keeps proprietary technical data contained within company infrastructure, avoiding external cloud exposure while maintaining control over operational assets.

“Increasing complexities involved in AI chip design and manufacturing requires continuous innovation in semiconductor technologies,” says Young Hyun Jun, Vice Chairman and CEO of the Device Solutions (DS) Division at Samsung Electronics.

Mistral will provide Samsung with a specialised stack of software tools to assist in how processors are designed and produced.

“AI is reshaping how we build complex technologies, from silicon to software,” says Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral.

“We are proud to support Samsung Electronics with our expertise in electronics and semiconductors, helping to improve how chips are designed and manufactured, and to accelerate technical progress across the global semiconductor and AI value chain.”

Defect detection and yield stabilisation

Samsung plans to deploy the targeted models directly to automated defect detection and fab machinery tuning. As semiconductor production processes advance, rapid data analysis inside the fab becomes necessary to maintain factory throughput.

The company expects targeted AI models to accelerate development cycles, improve manufacturing precision, and stabilise production yields across advanced memory and logic chips. The operational scope covers Samsung’s memory division, logic design units, and contract foundry business.

Samsung also led Mistral AI’s Series D funding round, securing a strategic equity stake to support long-term technical cooperation.

The lead investment expands cross-industry collaboration between silicon manufacturers and AI developers across advanced memory, logic, and foundry operations.

See also: Arm launches Total Design for Physical AI and robotics framework

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

The post Samsung taps Mistral AI models for semiconductor manufacturing appeared first on AI News.

Arm has launched Arm Total Design for Physical AI alongside a new robotics framework to establish common standards across automated systems.

Physical industries – spanning mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and global transport – account for trillions of dollars in economic activity and an estimated $200 billion annual compute opportunity by the 2030s.

To address engineering fragmentation across these sectors, Arm is convening more than 80 partner organisations spanning software, hardware, and AI. Initial ecosystem participants include AWS, ECARX, Hugging Face, Liquid AI, NXP, PlusAI, PSYONIC, QNX, Qwen, Siemens, and Unitree Robotics.

The initiative targets physical systems that combine AI models, runtime software, compute silicon, sensors, and actuators to sense, reason, and act in operational environments. Hardware manufacturers and software developers require standardised baselines to reduce integration risk, optimise compute workloads, and move from proof-of-concept testing to deployment at scale.

Arm standardises capability tiers for robotics systems

Robotics currently lacks a common method to describe, compare, and communicate system capabilities, according to an architectural manifesto (PDF) published by Arm chief architect Richard Grisenthwaite. This fragmentation makes robotic systems harder to design, integrate, and scale across industrial deployments.

In response, Arm has introduced the Robotics Capability Framework as a collaborative starting point for a shared technical vocabulary, patterned after the SAE Levels used for driving automation.

Arm’s new framework categorises robotic systems across progressing tiers of operational sophistication, mapping machines from reactive setups to context-aware, cognitive, and self-improving systems.

Each capability tier links real-world use cases to machine behaviours, outputs, and hardware constraints. These criteria establish parameters for system latency, compute placement, memory allocation, power constraints, determinism, and safety standards.

Arm developed the initial baseline using feedback from across the robotics sector. Participating organisations contributing to the framework include Anaxi Labs, ANYbotics, FMC³ Robotics, Fourier, GALBOT, Gravis Robotics, Lenovo, McKinsey, and Robotec.ai.

Virtual platforms accelerate pre-silicon automotive physical AI development

Arm Total Design for Physical AI extends a collaborative development structure previously used for cloud AI infrastructure. The programme brings together AI models, virtual platforms, digital twins, sensors, compute silicon, and software stacks to enable earlier development and testing cycles.

Autonomous transport and robotics face common technical requirements across sensory perception, AI processing, real-time control, safety, and power-efficient compute. Arm demonstrated this collaborative methodology in the automotive sector alongside AWS, Google, HERE, RemotiveLabs, and Siemens.

The participating automotive companies developed an integrated digital cockpit reference solution. This environment enabled software engineering teams to develop, test, and validate complex automotive code on the Arm Zena CSS platform prior to physical silicon availability.

Arm is now soliciting technical contributions from the wider engineering community to expand the Robotics Capability Framework as physical AI implementations progress.

Learn more about physical AI during the Physical AI Expo held in Amsterdam, London, and North America.

See also: NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano 2 brings physical AI to drones and robots

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

The post Arm launches Total Design for Physical AI and robotics framework appeared first on AI News.

OneRail has launched an AI-powered delivery platform that uses Nvidia technology to help retailers, wholesalers, and distributors decide how individual orders should be delivered.

Called OmniSTAR, the system evaluates options including owned fleets, couriers, parcel carriers, and other delivery modes, then selects the lowest-cost option that meets the required service level, according to OneRail.

The platform combines Nvidia’s cuOpt decision optimisation engine and cuDF data processing software with OneRail’s delivery pricing and performance data. Nvidia accelerated computing infrastructure is used to process the routing and delivery-mode calculations.

OneRail said the system can reduce computation times by as much as 10 times. A calculation that previously took 20 minutes can be completed in under two minutes, while a calculation taking a week can be reduced to about two days, according to the company.

OneRail said the shorter processing time allows the optimisation to run within live delivery operations, where multiple fulfilment options can be evaluated before an order is assigned.

“If you don’t have the ability to make lightning-fast decisions, you’re giving up margin,” Catania said in an interview with CNBC. “Last-mile fulfilment is expensive.”

From prediction to delivery decisions

OneRail’s broader AI systems use prediction and optimisation for different parts of the delivery process. The company said its machine-learning models estimate factors including service time, lateness risk, the probability of first-attempt delivery success, and expected price ranges.

OneRail said those predictions feed into optimisation systems that determine how an order should be executed. Separately, the company said OmniSTAR compares different fulfilment modes before selecting an option based on cost and service requirements.

Research on dynamic vehicle routing makes a similar distinction between predicting changing conditions and recalculating operational decisions as new information becomes available. A 2024 review in the European Journal of Operational Research identified travel-time prediction and real-time re-optimisation as separate areas of time-dependent routing research.

Nvidia cuOpt handles route optimisation

Nvidia describes cuOpt as an open-source, GPU-accelerated optimisation library for vehicle routing and other mathematical optimisation problems.

Nvidia’s documentation shows that cuOpt can account for vehicle costs, capacities, travel times, operating windows, starting locations, and other restrictions when calculating routes. Its cost models can also use distance, time, monetary cost, or a weighted combination of those measures.

OmniSTAR applies cuOpt to both routing and delivery-mode selection. OneRail said this allows the system to compare available fulfilment options for an order and identify the lowest-cost option that still meets its service requirements.

OneRail said many retailers still rely on static rules or manual planning when making these decisions, and that OmniSTAR is designed to evaluate more delivery combinations within shorter operational timeframes.

Nvidia said cuOpt does not exhaustively test every possible route. Instead, the solver generates candidate solutions and iteratively improves them using GPU-accelerated heuristics to produce high-quality results within a set computation time.

The platform also uses Nvidia cuDF, a GPU-accelerated library for tabular data processing, including filtering, joining, and aggregating datasets.

OneRail combines those capabilities with its own delivery data and operational models. Its dataset is based on millions of deliveries across a network that the company said includes more than 12 million drivers and over 1,000 logistics partners.

The data covers pricing and delivery performance across different transportation modes. OneRail said OmniSTAR can use the information to identify delivery rules that increase costs and assess how delivery choices affect item-level profitability.

The architecture disclosed for OmniSTAR centres on GPU-accelerated data processing and mathematical optimisation. Nvidia describes cuOpt as the optimisation component used for problems including vehicle routing.

Because cuOpt is stateless, changes in operating conditions require the optimisation problem to be modelled and submitted again. Nvidia cites vehicle breakdowns, driver absences, road blockages, traffic, and new high-priority orders as examples of changes that can prompt this type of dynamic reoptimisation.

OneRail said OmniSTAR can rerun delivery scenarios as variables including fuel costs, weather, and shipping conditions change. The company has separately said its use of cuOpt allows it to evaluate more routing scenarios and recalculate routes faster than its previous approach.

OmniSTAR moves into live operations

OmniSTAR is already deployed with selected enterprise customers.

At US Foods, OneRail said the system identified delivery configurations that were reducing margins, including low-margin products being transported long distances using higher-cost equipment. US Foods subsequently used the findings to adjust pricing and restructure some delivery patterns, according to OneRail.

OneRail also told CNBC that an unnamed large tire distributor using the platform achieved $40 million in run-rate savings over three years. The customer was not identified, and the savings figure was provided by OneRail. The company also told CNBC that it expects OmniSTAR to exceed $6 billion in gross merchandise volume during the fourth quarter of 2026.

CNBC reported that OneRail and Nvidia had worked on the project for three years before its launch. OneRail said the collaboration included direct engagement with Nvidia’s cuOpt engineering team on last-mile delivery and large-scale logistics optimisation, alongside its participation in the Nvidia Inception programme.

In March this year, FedEx launched FedEx SameDay Local in collaboration with OneRail, connecting customers to a national network of more than 1,000 delivery providers.

(Photo by Brecht Corbeel)

See also: A quarter of Nvidia’s business next year comes from labs it is financing

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

The post OneRail uses Nvidia AI for real-time last-mile delivery optimisation appeared first on AI News.