factorymaker

Industrial buildings have long been the backbone of economic development. Today, this category spans far beyond traditional factories to include data centers and other forms of industrial and digital infrastructure that underpin a data-driven, automated economy.Together, manufacturing facilities and digital infrastructure increasingly define industrial competitiveness, resilience, and energy demand. As these systems become more automated, interconnected, and regulated, the complexity of designing them grows, while economic, regulatory, and environmental constraints leave little margin for error.The decisive leverage lies in early planning. Yet this phase remains highly fragmented, spread across hundreds of specialised software tools and months of manual coordination. Vast amounts of time and capital are consumed before a single design decision is secured, often locking in inefficiencies that persist throughout the lifecycle of a facility.factorymaker addresses this structural challenge by replacing fragmented planning workflows with a single computational environment. Instead of narrowing options early, teams can systematically explore, evaluate, and compare alternatives, making trade-offs explicit before decisions are locked in.In this sense, factorymaker is not simply a planning tool. It is an infrastructure layer for how complex industrial buildings and digital facilities will be conceived, evaluated, and built in the future.By turning early-stage planning into a computational process, factorymaker allows efficiency, flexibility, and sustainability to be designed into a facility from the start. Planning becomes a strategic capability rather than a constraint.

Founders and team

factorymaker was co-founded by Julia Reisinger and Maria Antonia Zahlbruckner.Julia Reisinger’s work focuses on computational methods for industrial planning, grounded in her doctoral research and close collaboration with planners and infrastructure operators. Through this work, she identified a fundamental mismatch: while industrial facilities are highly automated in operation, the way they are designed remains largely manual. Maria Antonia Zahlbruckner brings complementary experience across industrial systems, technology development, and company building. Together, the founders set out to make the planning of industrial buildings precise, scalable, and computational. factorymaker is built by a multidisciplinary team of architects, engineers, AI researchers, and software developers working across industrial planning, optimisation, and physical systems design.

Our investment rationale

At XISTA Science Ventures, we invest in companies that build foundational technologies for future industries. factorymaker addresses a structural problem that has been underestimated for too long: while industrial buildings and digital infrastructure are increasingly automated in operation, the way they are designed remains manual, fragmented, and constrained by limited exploration. As Annu Gmeiner, Principal at XISTA Science Ventures, sees it, the critical leverage point lies at the very beginning of industrial development:

“Planning and replanning industrial buildings is currently a manual, labor-intensive process where, according to different sources, 90% of project errors originate. These oversights lead to billions in annual rework costs and years of suboptimal operations. factorymaker addresses this via Automated Design Agents and Integrated Optimization for both new infrastructure and the adaptation of existing facilities. The fact that the platform is already used by industry leaders like Siemens Energy, Hilti, and Schaeffler validates the critical nature of the problem and the transformative impact of this technology. We are excited to work with the exceptional co-founders Maria and Julia to take this venture to new heights."

factorymaker shifts this balance. By turning early-stage industrial planning into a computational process, the platform enables systematic exploration instead of experience-based approximation. This allows planners and operators to reason explicitly about trade-offs and to embed efficiency and sustainability into the structure of a facility from day one. Our decision to invest was driven by the convergence of:

• the scale of global investment in industrial buildings and digital infrastructure
• rising pressure to reduce cost, energy use, and emissions simultaneously
• increasing planning complexity across fragmented IT environments
• and AI-based methods capable of exploring design spaces beyond human limits

From our perspective, factorymaker represents a new class of industrial infrastructure software. Not a point solution, but a base layer for how complex physical systems are designed. We believe this approach will define the next step in industrial productivity, resilience, and competitiveness.