Ex-Northvolt execs launch AI startup with backing from top VCs: ‘This is industrial superintelligence’

At Slush in Helsinki today, former Northvolt CEO Peter Carlsson and Siddharth Khullar, the battery firm’s previous VP of software engineering, officially launched Aris Machina – a deeptech startup building what they call an Agentic Operating System (OS) for manufacturing.

“This is the industrial superintelligence that connects science, labs, people, machines, test equipment, and data into a single loop of intelligence,” said Khullar during a presentation at the tech conference.

The founders have been quietly gathering pre-seed funding for their new venture since the beginning of the year. Now at Slush they officially brought Aris Machina out of stealth – along with a hefty $10.7m (€9.2m) in pre-seed funding.

The round, first reported by Bloomberg in May but now confirmed, was led by Earlybird Venture Capital, with participation from Germany-based impact investors Planet A Ventures and AENU. Also investing is Village Global – a venture firm backed by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and SNÖ Ventures, a Norwegian VC funded by Peter Thiel.

Tapping Northvolt talent

While raising funds, Aris Machina has also been hiring directly from the pool of ex-Northvolt talent, with almost all of its 17 employees made up of former staff at the coveted battery firm, which went bankrupt in March.

But instead of building gigafactories, the startup's new employees will help develop an AI-based platform for factory management.

For now, there are two key systems under development: one is a “co-engineer” for R&D designed to accelerate battery discovery cycles, reduce trial-and-error, and help teams bring new chemistries to life faster. The other is an agentic system for the factory floor that adapts production in real time. It aims to cut waste, boost yields, and lower resource and energy footprints.

“Factories are fragmented worlds of legacy systems,” said Khullar. “Expert knowledge sits trapped in silos and does not scale.” And despite terabytes of sensor streams, he argues manufacturing remains stuck in a descriptive rut. “Industrial data… it shows what happened, not the why.”

Batteries first

Aris Machina wants to close that gap by turning a factory’s complex systems into knowledge graphs that AI agents can reason over. The company believes this marks a fundamental shift in manufacturing philosophy.

“The next leap is not about prediction. It’s about causality,” Khullar says. “That’s the shift from predictive to generative manufacturing, where the system itself can suggest what should happen next.”

Aris Machina’s first use case is battery manufacturing – unsurprising, given the founders’ lineage. But eventually they want to make the tech applicable to a wide range of industries such as semiconductors, aerospace, robotics, defence, biopharma, and fuels.