Farhand

Our thesis

Reindustrialize the US. Train the workforce that runs the robots coming.

4.66 million industrial robots are installed worldwide today. US factories are absorbing a rising share of them, and the trade-school pipeline for the technicians who keep them running shrank for thirty years. Farhand closes that gap.

The problem

Automation is outrunning the workforce. OEMs can't staff enough Field Service Engineers to commission the robots they sell. Mid-market factories buy automation they can't operate reliably. Knowledge that should compound across every repair evaporates inside one technician's head.

The bill: $1.4 trillion a year in unplanned downtime (Siemens 2024). A preventive-maintenance market projected to grow from $8.2B to $22B by 2035. BLS projects 13% growth in industrial machinery mechanic demand through 2033 against declining trade-school enrollment. The CHIPS Act and IRA have committed $1.2T+ in factory construction — none of which runs without technicians to commission and service it.

If this gap isn't closed, reshoring stalls. The robots get installed but don't run. Production lines go down and stay down. American industrial capacity gets capped by the shortage of hands on the floor.

4.66M

industrial robots installed worldwide (IFR 2024)

$1.4T

annual unplanned downtime cost (Siemens 2024)

$8.2B → $22B

preventive maintenance market to 2035

+13%

BLS growth in mechanic demand through 2033

What Farhand does

Farhand is a deployment company, not a staffing agency. We combine three assets that together make US industrial capacity actually operate:

  1. A nationwide technician network. 1,700+ sourced Field Service Engineers across all 50 states, classified by OEM skill (FANUC, ABB, KUKA, Yaskawa, Universal Robots, Rockwell, Siemens, Allen-Bradley), trade, and geography. Contract-based per-job pricing.
  2. Relay™ — an AI engineer on every job.Ingests OEM manuals, repair tickets, sensor traces, and commissioning procedures. Becomes the senior engineer in the technician's pocket. $189/seat/month SaaS.
  3. An upskilling loop. Every service call generates training data. Electricians, mechanics, and ex-military move into PLC, robotics, and controls careers. The workforce compounds instead of depleting.

Why this matters for national policy

Farhand is not a labor-displacement story. We are an inverse-automation company: the more robots deploy in the US, the more technicians we train, place, and upskill.

Our outcome metric is robots running and technicians qualified — not headcount reduced. We are building the human layer that makes American reindustrialization possible.

How federal programs fit

Workforce development

DOL ETA

Farhand is a ready-made employer partner for Registered Apprenticeship in emerging AI-and-robotics trades. We commit to hiring graduates and contributing Relay™ as the assessment platform.

Industrial competitiveness

NSF · DoD ManTech · DOE

Relay™ is the technical bridge that lets US factories operate modern equipment. Three open research problems — cross-OEM schema, safety-constrained procedure grounding, edge inference — map cleanly to SBIR and ManTech project calls.

Reshoring

CHIPS · IRA · Commerce

Incentivizing factory construction is worthless without the commissioning and service capacity to run the equipment. We are that commissioning layer.

Manufacturing institutes

ARM · MxD · LIFT

Farhand contributes to Manufacturing Innovation Institute project calls as a small-business member. Our training corpus (8,000+ work orders across 15 clients in 40+ countries) accelerates member research.

Traction

  • • LOI signed covering 1,200+ robots
  • • 1,700+ Field Service Engineers sourced and vetted across all 50 states
  • • 6 pilot customers closing — named: Boschert USA, CU-Profi
  • • First revenue validated
  • • Aggregate team history: 8,000+ work orders across 15 clients in 40+ countries
  • • Founding team: CEO previously Engineer #1 at Verne Robotics (YC S25); Board member Amayr Babar as Primary Technical Supervisor

The robots are coming either way. The question is whether Americans own them or just watch them arrive.

Farhand is the company making sure Americans own them.

Get in touch.

Grant program officers, journalists, investors, partners — we reply within a business day.

Email [email protected]