How a bread factory shaped one industrialist's automation mission
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Conduit co-founder and CEO Daniel Pereira inside the company's Corktown office. Photo: Joe Guillen/Axios
Daniel Pereira's journey to Detroit as a young industrialist started at his family's Las Vegas bread factory.
Why it matters: During the pandemic, Pereira, 26, saw firsthand the obstacles that smaller manufacturers face when deploying robotics.
- He thinks his new Detroit-based company has cutting-edge solutions.
Flashback: At Bon Breads, the artisanal bakery started by his Peruvian immigrant father, Pereira realized it would cost more in software programming and other integration work than it would cost to buy the robots themselves.
Zoom in: The experience was foundational for Conduit, the company he co-founded to make it cheaper and faster for American factories to automate.
- Pereira arrived here in April and set up an office in Corktown at Newlab on Michigan Central's campus.
- The company has more than a dozen employees and is hiring for seven more, with customers in Michigan, Alabama and Minnesota.
What they're saying: "Our whole mission is to help the country automate, the manufacturers automate, 10 times faster than we currently can," Pereira tells Axios.
How it works: Conduit's no-code platform connects robots, sensors, and factory systems quickly by eliminating the need for custom code.
- The result allows factories to centrally control multi-brand robot fleets through a single, ChatGPT-like interface.
Case in point: Landscape Forms, a furniture manufacturer in Kalamazoo, became Conduit's first Michigan customer.
- The companies signed a five-year partnership — positioning Conduit as a long-term automation platform rather than a one-off vendor, Pereira says, adding that Conduit helped speed Landscape Forms' automation plans by about 18 months.
Zoom out: Pereira frames Conduit as a response to what he sees as a broken American promise. He grew up watching factory work lift his family into the middle class, and says younger workers no longer see that path.
- " I want to see that come back, because I think Detroit is one of the biggest examples of what happens when that goes away," he says.
What's next: Conduit is hiring and plans to raise another round of funding as it expands deployments with manufacturers in Michigan and other Midwest and southern states.