The Reboot Chronicles | Darragh de Stondún, CEO of AIR

Every medical device implanted in a patient, every cell phone produced at launch scale, every vaccine vial filled at twelve hundred units per minute exists because of industrial automation. It is the invisible infrastructure behind modern manufacturing, and it is one of the fastest growing sectors in the global economy. Darragh de Stondún has spent his entire career at the center of it. After leaving Ireland in 1998 in pursuit of the automation innovation happening in America, he spent decades building and leading automation businesses across the US, Germany, Ireland, and the UK. In August 2024, he co-founded AIR, an automated industrial robotics platform that has already acquired six best-in-class automation companies across three countries, grown to more than 500 employees, and is producing hundreds of millions in revenue. The timing could not be better. Reshoring, semiconductor expansion, and the race to automate manufacturing across life sciences, logistics, and consumer electronics are pushing the sector toward a hundred billion dollar market. AIR is building the platform designed to serve that market, and de Stondún is building it the same way he has always built machines: with precision, discipline, and an obsessive focus on getting every part of the system right.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Darragh de Stondún, CEO of AIR, to unpack how he is building a unified automation powerhouse rather than a collection of acquired companies, why automation is no longer optional for manufacturers competing in a reshored America, how AI is reshaping what is possible in industrial robotics, what humans in the loop actually means on a factory floor, and why the biggest challenge in building AIR is not technology but separating signal from noise in a market moving faster than ever.