Accelerating Path Robotics' AI Growth with a Modern Data Platform
Navalia and Path Robotics partner to modernize data infrastructure and accelerate growth.
In just eight months, Navalia helped Path Robotics (a pioneering autonomous welding technology company) to transform a fragmented data landscape into a scalable, domain-driven data platform. Through the implementation of an evolutionary data architecture, Path Robotics accelerated their AI development cycles, reduced system maintenance, and positioned themselves to capture future opportunities.
This transformation empowered Path’s AI, Robotics, and Mission Control teams to focus on what matters most: revolutionizing manufacturing through autonomous welding technology.
Navalia's partnership was transformative for our data strategy. They didn't just build a platform – they helped us reimagine how our teams collaborate and innovate. Our AI engineers now spend more time on model development instead of data pipeline maintenance. This acceleration is directly fueling our market expansion.
Matt Randle, CISO & VP Product Reliability Engineering, Path Robotics
The Growth Challenge
Path Robotics is solving one of manufacturing’s biggest challenges: the critical shortage of skilled welders combined with increasing demand for high-mix, high-variability production. Their AI-powered robots autonomously determine welding paths and adapt to real-world variations, making them ideal for manufacturers who can’t rely on traditional programmed robots.
As Path experienced explosive growth – expanding from startup to serving major manufacturers – their data infrastructure became a bottleneck. Each robot generates massive amounts of sensor data, 3D point clouds, and operational metrics. What started as a manageable system had naturally evolved into a fragmented web of data pipelines that threatened to slow innovation.
Navalia’s approach focused on the business outcomes that matter most to Path Robotics—weld quantity, quality, and generality. By aligning the data platform to increase throughput, improve precision, and expand capability without added cost, Navalia ensured every architectural decision advanced Path’s mission to scale autonomous welding performance.
Transforming Complexity into Competitive Advantage
Working hand-in-hand with Path’s leadership and engineering teams, Navalia designed a modern data platform that transformed their biggest challenge into a strategic asset. The solution centered on creating autonomous data domains and data products – self-contained units that own their data and expose clean interfaces rather than direct data access.
This approach eliminated the tight coupling to schemas that plagued the previous process. Teams could now innovate independently while maintaining system stability. For example, the perception team could enhance their 3D modeling algorithms without worrying about breaking downstream systems, while the AI team could access the data they needed through well-defined APIs.
The domain-driven approach Navalia introduced has fundamentally changed how our engineering teams operate. Instead of just fixing our immediate problems, they helped us build a foundation for the next decade of growth with data autonomy and independent deployability.
Matt Randle, CISO & VP Product Reliability Engineering, Path Robotics
Key Platform Capabilities
The platform delivers several business-critical capabilities:
Domain Autonomy
Independent teams can innovate without system-wide impact. Data consumers' needs are well-defined via bilateral contracts.
Real-time Processing
Instant data availability for AI model training and robot operations instead of nightly batched jobs that ship data to the cloud.
Edge Computing
Reliable operation even during network disruptions – syncs data to the cloud as bandwidth allows.
Security
Enterprise authentication and authorization with fine-grained access controls for domain-specific access. Consumers authenticate broadly, then gain route-level access as approved by domain owners.
Productivity
Self-service tools that empower teams to discover data easily and move fast with existing platform patterns.
Measurable Business Impact
The results have exceeded expectations across multiple dimensions:
Accelerated Innovation
- Faster feature development cycles and onboarding
- Major reduction in time spent on data pipeline maintenance
- Fully scalable AI model experimentation approach
Operational Excellence
- 80% reduction in mean time to discovery and resolution of incidents
- Real-time data processing replacing slow, overnight batch jobs
- Data discoverability, traceability and governance for the different domains
Scalability for Growth
- Platform designed to support 100x data volume increase
- Flexible storage model allows balance of performance and cost
- Foundation for expansion to new manufacturing verticals without redesign
What made this engagement unique was the depth of collaboration between Navalia and Path Robotics. We didn't hand Path a reference architecture and walk away — we partnered with their teams, learned the welding domain, and built a platform that reflects how they actually think about data. That's when architecture stops being theoretical and starts compounding value. As Path continues to revolutionize manufacturing, their data platform will scale seamlessly alongside their ambitions.
David Johnston, Chief Data & AI Scientist, Navalia