Geopolitical pressure accelerates a question in many countries and regions to rent again – that is, to redevelop the infrastructure of the critical industry and to reduce companies that had moved some or all their industrial activities to cheaper countries or outsource to cheaper countries.
But that is easier said than done. In the most important area of precision production, for example, most countries in the West are not set up to meet current production requirements that companies are confronted with.
This is the challenge Isembard aims to tackle. The British startup said it is planning to create a network of factories at different Western locations. CEO Alexander Fitzgerald told Techcrunch that the first of these began to work in London in January and claims that it can already respond to requests for high-cision parts. It has to make further public locations.
The aim here is to focus on companies that may not sink billions of Capex in their own factories, but usually have contracted with a manufacturer to produce on their behalf.
“Let’s say you make a detached antenna system, like a drone,” said Fitzgerald. “You send us a design for a number of important parts for this in a 3D file. We give you a quote for how quickly we can do that, and the price. And then we edit that part of which material is needed, and we send it to you. And sometimes we do the actual final assembly.” Isembard will also strive for economies of scale in his own activities, with a single patented software layer, Masonos, connecting and feeding its facilities.
This is not fundamentally different from sending the same request to a factory in Asia, but it is in line with the increasing demand for more local, resilient and greener supply chains.
Fitzgerald is of the opinion that the British Legacy suppliers will have difficulty keeping pace with the larger reshoring swing: supply chains are fragmented, skilled operators are retired or have moved to different roles, and factories are outdated – all the results that have been brought and promoted in the past few years. By using software and automation, Isembard believes that it can offer a feasible alternative to the current state of affairs, while it also presents options that happen to be faster and cheaper.
This pitch helped the startup a sperm of £ 7 million (about $ 9 million) under the leadership of Notion Capital, with participation of 201 Ventures, Basic Capital, Forward Fund, Material Ventures, Neverlift Ventures and NP-Hard Ventures, including EU Incoter-Promotor and SpaceForgehua.
The Go-to-Market strategy of Isembard initially focuses on space travel, defense and energy. Fitzgerald refused to call customers, but he said that the company saw the majority of his first traction from defense and fast -growing startups. He claimed that he and his team also have conversations with prime numbers and government agencies.
With only 12 employees, Isembard is still small. That is partly because so far it had been financed with the proceeds from the first exit of Fitzgerald-Hij sold its previous company Koekoek to Giganet in 2022. But that is also because he deliberately chose a less capital -intensive route than starting the American automation startup Hadrian, which in 2024 collected around $ 216.5 million to modernize the production of parts.
“We believe that it takes too long, too much Capex and too much concentration talent in one place to build this large, 100,000 square foot factories,” he said. “What we actually do is a distributed factory model where we have many smaller units, but all with the same operational model technology and automation.”
That is a reference to the functionality of Masonos, that own system that the plants of Isambard Power, which “will do everything, from quoting and treasuring work to a customer, to managing our own supply chain, automating planning and priorities, but also the core production and how to coert the machines yourself,” Fitzgerald said. “At the moment the problem is that all is based on paper or it was all software built in the 70s,” he said.
Despite this modern software layer, Isembard is very an engineering-oriented company. With a small spelling adjustment because the original is already in use, the name is a nod to the British industrial and engineer Isambard Kingdom BrunelKnown for his work during the industrial revolution. But it also takes a page from his father, as told by the startup in his manifesto.
“When the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel saw British soldiers return from the war in the peninsula with wounded feet as a result of sloppy suppliers of shoes,” says the story, “he founded a shoe factory.”
This reference is meant to display the spirit and ambition of Isembard, but it is no coincidence that it is about soldiers. None of Fitzgerald’s family was in the army, but he “always had a feeling of patriotism” and has been a reservist since 2016. This inspired Isembard, but the company’s ambitions go beyond the VK and Europe, possibly to North America, Australia and New Zealand. “We want to help solve industrialization for the West,” he said.
