A factory with no PLCs in it
Before founding Neuron Industries in 2026 with Kenneth Rhee, Ren was the founding electrical engineer at Freeform, the metal 3D-printing company, through its Series B. When off-the-shelf controllers could not deliver the performance the process demanded, he built the control stack from the chips up: an FPGA-based real-time controls platform and a family of in-house PLC-replacement I/O devices. The result was an autonomous factory with no PLCs in it.
That experience of replacing the controller industry's products because they couldn't keep up is the direct origin of the Cortex AIC.
Apple, Amazon, Tesla
Before Freeform, Ren was a founding member of Apple's Vision Pro System EE team, where he owned the eye-tracking and Optic ID subsystems' form-factor system and board design. Earlier at Apple he worked on iPad Pro and Apple Pencil; he also worked on Amazon Go and at Tesla's Fremont factory, where he dealt with the PLC industry day to day.
Why Neuron
Neuron's bet is that the controller running every machine and factory, largely unchanged in architecture since the 1990s, should be rebuilt from first principles for the AI era. Ren describes the mission as dropping the barrier of entry to industrial automation “as close to the floor as humanly possible,” so the engineers already on staff can program, troubleshoot, and reconfigure their own machines.
See what that looks like on a production machine in the CureWood retrofit case study: a 1991-commissioned finger-jointing line moved to the Cortex AIC in one 8-hour cutover, running on the first try.
Education
Ren holds a BS in electrical engineering from UC San Diego ('18), where he led Colossus, the largest student-built rocket-engine test stand, sponsored by NASA Stennis.
Press & appearances
- Launch YC: Neuron Industries, the world's first purpose-built industrial controller for AI · Y Combinator, 2026
- YC-backed Neuron Industries launches to build a new industrial controller as the engineers who program the old ones retire · launch press release, August 2026
- The computer America runs on, and the YC startup rebuilding it · Atoms Not Bits, 2026
- How CureWood replaced a 1991 controller in one 8-hour cutover · Neuron Industries case study