Conventional wisdom tells us the technology boom is over. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has sent a chill through the investment community, and the tech sector has seen a correction as interest rates have risen. But I’d argue we may be about to enter a new golden age of technological innovation and investment. The difference is that this time around, it won’t be about consumers, but industry.
Three-quarters of the world’s $100tn in gross domestic product is made up of traditional legacy industries — such as manufacturing, transportation, logistics and healthcare — that have yet to be deeply transformed by technology. That’s now changing, as part of what venture capitalist Greg Reichow, a partner at Eclipse Ventures, a Palo Alto firm that has $3.8bn invested in the digital transformation of physical industries, calls “industrial evolution”.
Two weeks ago, I visited one of Eclipse’s 70 portfolio companies outside Boston. VulcanForms, an additive manufacturing firm, takes Henry Ford’s River Rouge factory model, in which steel went into one end of a production line and finished cars came out the other, and replicates it across multiple industries by 3D printing with metals to create parts.