AI Meets American Reindustrialization: Matthias Wagner at SF Tech Week

On October 8, during SF Tech Week, Flux hosted the 138th SF Hardware Meetup at our office in San Francisco. About 125 hardware founders, manufacturers and investors packed into the new event space next to our lab for a night themed around American dynamism and reindustrialization.

Flux co-founder and CEO Matthias Wagner opened the night. In under three minutes, he made the case that AI for hardware just hit its inflection point, and that the next frontier is not design. It's getting what you design manufactured, locally, by tomorrow.

Watch the talk below, or read the full transcript.

Watch the talk

Recorded live at Flux HQ in San Francisco on October 8, 2026.

The full talk

Lightly edited for readability.

All right. Again, it's me, Matthias. Welcome, everybody. Thank you to Michael and team, and thank you to our team for putting this together. This is amazing.

This is also amazing because the timing is so great. I've been walking around for seven years now telling people that we're going to take the hard out of hardware with AI. And people looked at me like, "What is he talking about?"

Then four weeks ago, everything changed. OpenAI released Astra and showed everybody that these models can in fact do MCAD work and PCB design work. Now everybody can see the light. Now it's crystal clear.

We're on a trajectory where, over the next 12 months, we're going to see the same change in hardware that we've seen in coding over the last 12 months.

Twelve months ago, nobody believed an AI model could code. People thought, "I've got Cursor and it's got autocomplete," and that was the top of it. What happened instead is that it went all the way to AI coding. Nobody uses VS Code anymore. Can you even imagine driving VS Code or Cursor through something like an MCP? That would be completely stupid.

But that's where we're at with AI for hardware and CAD right now. We're using an MCP to remote-control Fusion 360. That's going to be a very transitional technology. In 12 months, we're going to look back and laugh at it, because what's going to happen is we're going to get native CAD AI agents. They're just going to do this.

And we're going to take it further. At Flux, I see it here every day. Our team is designing, vibing hardware together now: the PCB, the enclosure, the whole thing. It's become super fun and super easy.

The thing that's still incredibly hard is manufacturing that stuff. And this is where I think American reindustrialization and AI come together. The next step is to let us not just have an idea today, but get that idea manufactured by tomorrow.

The only way to enable that is by leveraging AI. Not just to design toward manufacturing, but to have it manufactured locally, so we can deliver it like Amazon Prime, next day.

I think that's where this is going. That's why we're so excited to have all of you here tonight, talking about this and thinking hard about it. So welcome again. Super excited to have you. Let's do this.

More from the night

The lineup included Kimberly Hayashi (CEO, Mantle), Saba Khalilnaji (Almond Robotics) and Laurence Allen (Terranova), plus an open mic of two-minute pitches from hardware founders in the room. Thanks to Michael Raspuzzi and the SF Hardware Meetup crew for co-hosting.

Flux takes you from idea to schematic, routed PCB, enclosure and finished prototype, all from a prompt.