Nexterity wants to automate the hard, dangerous part of pipefitting; plus, Feather is building the ‘Android of robotics’ for developers

This is Tech Crunch. This episode is brought to you by Framer. Listen, your wardrobe is not the only thing that should be changing with the season. Now is the perfect time to start thinking about updating and refreshing your website with new content. And Framer makes that easy to do. Even easier than trying to plan out your next outfit. Framer has everything you need to build and run a website, a canvas tool for design, hosting, a built-in CMS, and AI agents that work alongside you to help bring your vision to the screen. And it's all in one place, so you can stop skipping around to a hundred different apps. You can update your site and have it go live in a few minutes, or build a new one from scratch. Now, I love Framer's powerful SEO tools that have really helped me zero in on my target audience. I can track my traffic through their analytics, and I can optimize my site so that it works across any device. Plus, there's enterprise-grade security to protect all my info. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com slash tcstartups for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash tcstartups for 30% off. framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. Lindsay Elliott is big into bolts. At last year's Bolting Symposium, the 13th annual one of those, she said the highlight was playing bolting bingo against the many self-proclaimed torque dorks who were in the room. A former engineer and planner at ExxonMobil, Elliott has spent years thinking about how to improve the infrastructure that moves oil, gas, and petrochemicals. Bolts are what she landed on. Specifically, the bolts that connect sections of pipe, technically called bolted flange joints. These bolts require hard, physical work to loosen and tighten, and are the source of many pipe fitters' injuries. Like many trade industries, there's also a labor shortage. In an interview with TechCrunch, she said, Those people get really tired when they're asked to work 12 hours a day for three months in a row. I've talked to pipefitters across the U.S., across Canada, and just repeatedly have been told North American pipefitting productivity is notoriously low. The solution Elliott came up with at her startup Nexterity, which is one of the startup Battlefield 200 selected to participate in TechCrunch Disrupt, is a remote-controlled robot that can handle that part of the job. It's the kind of idea that could fundamentally change this particular blue-collar job if widely adopted, making the workers safer and more productive. Think More dork, less torque. The robot comes in two main pieces that fit around a pipe. Powered by batteries, the robot can slide across the pipe once it's attached and quickly loosen and tighten four bolts at a time. Elliott said Nexterity has developed a few different configurations of the robot to fit different standard pipe sizes, but they're all small enough to fit in a Pelican case and be carried by a single worker. That makes them easy to deploy to new sites, flexibility that is crucial to Nexterity's business model of treating the robot like rental construction