Tulip, the leader in frontline operations, is helping companies around the world equip their workforce with connected apps — leading to higher quality work, improved efficiency, and end-to-end traceability across operations.
Natan Linder, Co-Founder & CEO, shares the details on Tulip and their culture.
In this Video
We discuss:
- Details on Tulip
- Customer Examples and Use Cases
- What’s next for Tulip
- Why you should be excited to join Tulip
Video Transcript
Details on Tulip
The company was set up to build those human-centric tools and provide them to the people who actually do the work in these operational environments—be it a lab, a warehouse, an assembly floor, what have you. And those people are, generally speaking, industrial process engineers. They could be doing different jobs from operational excellence, lean quality, industrial process design, or controls. There are so many engineers that matter in this space who are not software engineers or electrical engineers, and they had no first-class tools.
Their organizations really need one thing: productivity. That is a collective term for all the plagues of operations—everyone is chasing higher yields, lower cost of quality, faster time to train, and faster NPI (which stands for new product introduction) cycles. Human society in general uses technology to build things that ensure our survival: our medicine, our security, our mobility, our compute, and our entertainment. It is all manufacturing. We need manufacturing, otherwise, we are back to the caves, and there are no caves available anymore.
We need to manufacture, and we need to do it at a pace and on cost curves that fit the global supply chain and the economies we live in. We don’t have more people, so you have to generate more productivity, and technology helps. That is the origin story of Tulip, why we built the company, and why we are working very hard to scale it up. It is an exciting moment.
Customer Examples and Use Cases
We are considered the next-generation composable architecture for a breed of software called manufacturing execution systems (MES). No one agrees on what a manufacturing execution system actually is; there is no standard for it. But by and large, this is a piece of software that typically sits in the middle—northbound is your ERP and supply chain planning, and southbound there could be other production systems and manufacturing equipment, like the machines you use or the automation setups you have introduced. This equipment creates a lot of data, and the software provides interfaces to the humans who live in those production environments.
Tulip is the orchestration layer. We call this a frontline operations platform, and the use cases are many. It provides production visibility—showing what is being produced right now, collecting all the data, and creating reports. It hooks up the machines to give you monitoring and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). It handles auditing and quality, providing the ability to see what people are producing and capture critical measurements.
It also handles documentation. In regulated industries in particular—such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and aerospace and defense—this involves the notions of electronic batch records in the case of drug making, or electronic device history records if you are making anything that flies or goes into a medical device for an operating room. Think of a catheter; it requires that kind of documentation by law. You cannot produce or sell it otherwise.
Additionally, people use it to train their workforce. They use it in general to perform operational excellence, a term you might have heard from the perspective of lean manufacturing. Really, if you generalize it, we help companies rewire how they work and maintain a modern, digital-first, AI-based production system.
What’s Next for Tulip
We are attracted to working with companies that want to solve the same problems that we see, and when we both see it, the partnership becomes very natural. We are scaling up regionally, in Japan in particular, by building a much larger team there. In general, this is a scale-up moment for the company, which is extremely validating for our approach from both an architectural and architectural perspective.
The work we are doing with AI spells growth because we are at that stage of development. We expect the company to grow, and we are hiring in Boston with a lot of open jobs. If people are excited about the themes we are talking about here, we would love for them to come build Tulip.
We work in person. This might be a turnoff for some people, but that’s okay, because some people like it. We ask employees to show up in the office at least three days a week to work with real people. Even with all the AI, Zoom, and whatnot, we still care about that, which very few companies do.
Why You Should Be Excited to Join Tulip
We did not time this—it just kind of happened—but you get to experience this AI “Gutenberg revolution” moment right as we are scaling up. We have a phenomenal set of clients, basically the largest companies on the planet, who are really excited about working together and realizing the next evolution of the platform. Obviously, this is built on a decade of very meticulous work with them, so that growth is a natural momentum rather than being induced by “AI washing.”
There is a unique moment happening in industrial spaces right now. We keep hearing that knowledge workers are not safe anymore, so if you want to build something in the physical world—handling complex, highly regulated workflows that go into real industrial businesses that aren’t going anywhere—Tulip is a very interesting place to do that.