2026 IMTS Investor and Innovation Summit

🏭 Breaking the Bottleneck is a weekly newsletter and interview series covering manufacturing technology and physical AI. Want to chat? Reach out at aditya@machinafactory.org or connect with me on LinkedIn.

This newsletter is brought to you with support from our featured partners: AMT, IMTS, Jiga, Upkeep, Ironloop, and Industry 4.0 Club.

I’m excited to share something I’ve been working on for the past few months with the Association for Manufacturing Technology (AMT), tied to IMTS in Chicago on September 15th. Reshoring, the rebuilding of the defense industrial base, and the first wave of AI-native tooling have turned manufacturing into one of the hottest sectors in technology.

The Investor & Innovation Summit at IMTS is a one-day event for the investors, operators, and corporates building and funding industrial technology. On Tuesday, September 15, we’ll spend the day digging into what’s actually driving the sector and Breaking the Bottleneck is helping convene the room.

With U.S. manufacturing technology just posting a 22.5% jump in machinery orders in a single month, reshoring incentives working their way through the industry, and a defense industrial base taking shape, there’s never been a better moment for an event like this at IMTS. We’re bringing together the best in the field to speak to what’s actually working in go-to-market, what broke in production on the shop floor, and what reindustrialization really requires in capacity, capital, and contracts. The Summit is an effort to get corporates, investors, and startups into one room and those conversations out in the open.

We’ll kick off with AMT’s Ryan Kelly and Chris Chidzik opening with a read on where U.S. manufacturing stands in 2026, followed by five panels with great moderators Leland Chamlin, Julian Counihan, Annelies Gamble, and Em Moshouris.

• Hyperscalers to the Shop Floor - Praveen Rao, Shiv Trisal, and Les Karpas

• The New Defense Industrial Base - Aaron Slodov, David Caputo, and two other speakers to be finalized

• Building Software for the Factory Floor - Devin Bhushan, Sunny Han, Igor Marinelli, and Nick Haase

• Reinventing CAD - Brad Rothenberg, Sai Nelaturi, Hardik Kabaria, and Taylor Young

• Robots Get Real - Saman Farid, Edward Mehr, Andy Lonsberry, Ariyan Kabir

I’ve haven’t been this energized about something adjacent to the newsletter in a while, and I’m excited to share it with you! Registration instructions are listed below!

McCormick Place, Chicago, Tuesday, September 15, 2026 ·

• Sessions 9:00 am – 4:30 pm ·

• Reception 5:00 pm– 6:30 pm

[Register Now] Select Investor Summit as Ticket Option to Sign Up

Breaking the Bottleneck is brought to you with support from our partners.

• AMT & IMTS - The Association for Manufacturing Technology represents and promotes U.S.-based manufacturing technology and hosts the largest manufacturing technology trade show in North America, IMTS.

• Jiga - A platform that connects hardware teams with vetted manufacturers for custom parts. Instead of black-box instant quotes, you see exactly who’s making your parts and can talk to them directly.

• Upkeep - CMMS Software helping maintenance teams manage work orders, assets, and preventive tasks efficiently from any device.

• Industry 4.0 Club - Leading cross-functional group accelerating the adoption of Industry 4.0, delivering better experiences to consumers, better profits to manufacturers, and better jobs to factory workers.

• Ironloop - Ironloop is a modern OT/ICS software platform that delivers configuration-level intelligence, providing manufacturers with ground-truth security visibility and confidence in compliance across air-gapped networks.