Michelle Sun is the Founder of Core Matter Labs, an independent research platform analyzing the global Physical AI stack, hardware supply chains, and manufacturing infrastructure. An active angel investor and advisor to early-stage robotics founders, her background spans equity research at Goldman Sachs, building an edtech company across five markets, and leading developer ecosystem initiatives at Solana. A strategic advisor to MIT CSAIL since 2017, she has been recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, a TEDx speaker, and featured globally across Bloomberg TV, The Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch.
The humanoid race will not be won purely by novel foundation models or elegant software demos. It will be decided by who controls the physical infrastructure down the stack. While the Western technology ecosystem remains hyper-focused on the intelligence layer, the actual scaling and deployment bottleneck sits squarely within highly concentrated component tiers. Actuators and precision mechanical reducers alone command 50% to 65% of a humanoid robot's total bill of materials (BOM), forming an acute hardware supply constraint with fewer than ten global suppliers capable of scaling to volume.
Drawing directly from the latest audited regulatory filings, industrial prospectuses, and factory data across major global robotics clusters, this session strips away the marketing hype to expose the stark economic and geopolitical realities of the Physical AI supply chain. Attendees will gain a granular breakdown of component-level cost structures, from strain-wave gears to linear transmission assemblies. The session will evaluate the critical "Anti-Vertical Integration" shift, analyzing how Tier-1 industrial giants are aggressively positioning to manufacture components for asset-light startups as an alternative to the vertically integrated playbooks of Tesla and Figure.
Finally, the presentation maps out the largely undisclosed cross-border dependencies currently embedded in Western robotic roadmaps, providing founders, operators, and investors with the exact frameworks required to evaluate real operational capacity, protect unit economics, and de-risk their physical scaling strategies over the next 24 months.
