Geopolitical pressures are accelerating a demand in many countries and regions to reshore — that is, to redevelop critical industry infrastructure, and to bring back businesses, which had moved or outsourced some or all of their industrial operations to cheaper countries further away.
But that is easier said than done. In the key area of precision manufacturing, for example, most countries in the West are not set up to handle the current production demands that businesses face.
This is the challenge Isembard aims to address. The British startup said it plans to create a network of factories across several Western locations. CEO Alexander Fitzgerald told TechCrunch that the first of these started to operate in London in January, and claims that it can already respond to requests for high-precision parts. It has yet to disclose further locations.
The aim here is to target companies that may not be sinking billions of capex into their own factories, but typically would have contracted with a manufacturer to produce on their behalf.
“Let’s say you are making an uncrewed aerial system, like a drone,” said Fitzgerald. “You’ll send us a design for some key parts for that in a 3D file. We’ll give you a quote for how fast we can do that, and the price. And then we machine that part out of whatever material is required, and we ship it to you. And sometimes maybe we’ll do the actual final assembly.” Isembard will aim for economies of scale across its own operations, too, with a single proprietary software layer, MasonOS, connecting and powering its facilities.
This isn’t fundamentally different from sending that very same request to a factory in Asia, but it aligns with the rising demand for more local, resilient, and greener supply chains.
Fitzgerald believes that British legacy suppliers will struggle to keep pace with the bigger reshoring swing: Supply chains are fragmented, skilled operators have retired or moved to different roles, and factories are outdated — all outcomes brought about and furthered by supply chains moving to China and other countries over past years. By leveraging software and automation, Isembard believes it can offer a viable alternative to the current state of affairs, while also presenting options that happen to be faster and cheaper.
This pitch helped the startup secure a £7 million seed round (approximately $9 million) led by Notion Capital, with participation from 201 Ventures, Basis Capital, Forward Fund, Material Ventures, Neverlift Ventures and NP-Hard Ventures, as well as angels including EU Inc promoter Andreas Klinger and SpaceForge founder Joshua Western.
Isembard’s go-to-market strategy initially focuses on aerospace, defense, and energy. Fitzgerald declined to name clients, but he said the company saw most of its initial traction come from defense and fast-growing startups. He claimed that he and his team are also having conversations with primes and government bodies.
With just 12 employees, Isembard is still small. That’s in part because up to now, it was self-funded with the proceeds of Fitzgerald’s first exit — he sold his previous company Cuckoo to Giganet in 2022. But that’s also because he purposely chose a less capital-intensive route than U.S.-based automation startup Hadrian, which raised some $216.5 million in 2024 to modernize parts manufacturing.
“We take the view that it takes too long, too much capex, and too much concentration of talent in one single place to build these large, 100,000 square-foot factories,” he said. “What we’re actually doing is a distributed factory model where we have lots of much smaller units, but all with the same operating model technology and automation.”
That is a reference to the functionality of MasonOS, that proprietary system that powers Isambard’s plants, which will do “everything from quoting and estimating work to a customer, through to managing our own supply chain, automating scheduling and the prioritization, but also the core manufacturing and how you code the machines themselves,” Fitzgerald said. “At the moment, the problem is either that’s all paper-based or it’s all software built in the 70s,” he said.
Despite this modern software layer, Isembard is very much an engineering-focused company. With a minor spelling tweak due to the original already being in use, its name is a nod to British industrialist and engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, known for his work during the Industrial Revolution. But it also takes a page from his father, as told by the startup in its manifesto.
“When Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s father saw British soldiers returning from the Peninsula War with injured feet due to shoddy footwear suppliers,” the story goes, “he founded a shoe factory.”
This reference is meant to reflect Isembard’s spirit and ambition, but it is no accident that it’s about soldiers. None of Fitzgerald’s family was in the military, but he “always had a sense of patriotism” and has been a reservist since 2016. This inspired Isembard, but the company’s ambitions go beyond the U.K. and Europe, potentially up to North America, Australia and New Zealand. “We want to help solve industrialization for the West,” he said.
