Hey BF 👋 We are @Joohyun (CJ) Cha and @Robin Lee, cofounders of @Dawn Industries. We’re building VIM, Automatic Diagnosis & Fix for Industrial Automation Cells.

TL;DR:

VIM is Sentry for industrial automation cells. When a cell faults, VIM reads the error code and the live machine signals, digs the root cause out of the OEM manuals and the cell's own history, and stages one safe fix for the operator to approve. When a CNC drifts, VIM catches it with the machine's own probe seconds after the cut and stages the offset correction. Downtime goes from hours to about a minute; scrap gets caught at part one instead of final inspection.

Watch how VIM works:

Robot Cell Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfGQjorNS2U

CNC Machine Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgNPOtBLku8

WHAT WE BUILT

VIM sits on the cell and closes the loop from fault to recovery:

1. Connect. Reads PLC, HMI, robot, CNC, sensor, and driver state without touching the controls you already trust.
2. Understand. Matches the fault to live signals, the right page of the right manual, and this cell's own prior recoveries or trends the probe touches and traces drift to tool wear, thermal growth, a bumped fixture.
3. Recover. Stages one bounded, validated action: a restart, a parameter change, an offset correction. The operator approves it like a pull request.

Before anything moves, the safety chain is verified: interlocks, light curtain, area scanner. VIM cannot bypass it; that's a precondition in the action policy, not a feature. And when the fault is genuinely hardware, VIM routes the incident to the right person with the exact diagnosis and repair steps attached, instead of a generic alarm and a prayer.

Autonomy is earned, not assumed: VIM ships read-only, then one-click approval, then unattended recovery only on fault classes where it has earned trust. And it's mixed-vendor by design (FANUC robots and CNC controls, Universal Robots, Siemens, Allen-Bradley, Cognex, Keyence, Renishaw probes), because a cell is multi-vendor by definition and a copilot that speaks one vendor's language can't close the loop.

TEAM

We're four people covering both halves of the problem.

Robin Lee and Joohyun (CJ) Cha, cofounders, Robin was the founding AI engineer at an aviation AI startup, and built the production AI systems behind its $10M Series A and a 1st-place Minister's Award from Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT. CJ cofounded Zipper as CTO (acquired by MetaZone), did ML on genomic data at Avalo. We spent the past years in plants and machine shops learning all the faults and error that happen during manufacturing processes.

Our founding engineers, come from Tesla and robotics research labs. They spent years building and fixing automation cells and various robot cases.

OUR ASK

• Intros to plant managers, manufacturing engineers, and controls engineers at plants running robot cells (palletizing, case packing, welding, machine tending, inspection). If a stopped line ruins their week, we want to meet them.
• Intros to machining and quality leaders at plants and shops (primarily aerospace & defense) running CNCs, anywhere scrap gets discovered at final inspection instead of at the machine.
• War stories. Tell us about the cell that keeps stopping or the machine that keeps drifting. Best case, we make it your most reliable one.

Reach us at joohyun_cha@dawnxr.com or 401-226-3503, or book a demo at https://dawnxr.com.