The Engineer Who Builds Companies the Way He Builds Machines

There are founders who start companies, and there are founders who build them. The difference is not ambition. It is the willingness to stay in the details long after the announcement has been made, to treat the hard work of integration and culture-building as the actual job rather than the backdrop to it. Darragh de Stonndún, CEO of Automated Industrial Robotics (AIR), is the second kind.

AIR was founded in 2023 by Brian Klos, Executive Chairman, and Darragh de Stonndún, CEO, supported by long-term strategic investment enabling continued growth. In less than two years, the company has grown to six acquired businesses, approximately 700 employees, and a global footprint spanning the industries that produce the world's most essential products. The philosophy behind it comes from something harder to quantify: a set of convictions about how companies should be built, how people should be treated, and what the automation industry has been consistently getting wrong.

Not the Typical Path

Darragh de Stonndún spent his career studying what makes companies endure. The answer, in his experience, is not strategy or capital structure or market timing, though none of those things are irrelevant. It is whether the people inside an organisation are genuinely oriented around shared success or individually optimising for their own position and recognition. The former builds something that compounds over time. The latter builds something that holds together only as long as the right individuals stay in the room.

That distinction shaped everything about how AIR was conceived. The prevailing model in industrial automation consolidation was consolidation in name only: acquire companies, put them on shared financial systems, and call it a group. Engineering teams remained separate. Customer relationships stayed local. The deep expertise that accumulated in one facility had no reliable path to another, and customers who engaged one part of a large automation group had no practical way to access the knowledge sitting elsewhere in the same organisation.

AIR was built to break that ceiling. When a manufacturer brings a production challenge to AIR, the engineering resources assembled to address it come from across the entire organisation, wherever the relevant expertise sits. A team in one country working alongside specialists from another is a core part of how AIR operates. Customers access expertise across AIR's organisation, not just the capabilities of the team nearest to them geographically.

Culture as Strategy

The most unusual thing about AIR's acquisition process is the order in which it evaluates companies. Cultural alignment comes first. Before engineering capability, before financial performance, before market position or customer concentration, the question is whether the people building a business share the values AIR runs on. Collaboration over competition. Collective ownership over individual recognition. Initiative over waiting to be directed.

Companies that demonstrate those qualities in how they operate day to day get brought into an organisation designed to multiply what they have already built. Those that rely on individual ego or internal hierarchy to function stay independent, regardless of how technically impressive their work might be. The filter is not arbitrary. It is the structural requirement for an integrated model to work in practice rather than on paper.

Internally, AIR reinforces this through recognition programs that reward selflessness and collective value creation over title and tenure. AIR emphasises sharing value creation across its teams. Engineers and technicians who help drive value creation share in it. Darragh de Stonndún is direct about why: a company built on people who are treated fairly, given genuine opportunity, and included in the value they help create produces better outcomes over the long term, and is worth considerably more when the time comes to measure what was actually built.

The Problems Worth Solving

The industries AIR operates in, life sciences, food and beverage, medical devices, automotive, semiconductor, packaging, and consumer products, are not forgiving environments for automation that merely works. The tolerance for error in pharmaceutical manufacturing or medical device production is extremely low. Building the systems that keep these facilities running requires a depth of engineering expertise that takes years to develop and cannot be shortcut by capital alone.

Darragh de Stonndún is deliberate about what AIR takes on. The company focuses on two things: helping manufacturers scale their production, and helping customers innovate their products. That discipline has made the company a trusted partner to manufacturers making long-term production commitments. Several major manufacturing investments currently underway in the United States represent multi-billion-dollar commitments to domestic production capacity, and AIR is supporting the automation infrastructure behind them.

AIR is exploring robotics applications in labor-constrained manufacturing environments where automation can improve reliability and throughput. The target applications are roles that create genuine operational constraints, positions that manufacturers cannot staff regardless of what the wage posting says, because the work itself has stopped attracting people in a labor market with more options than it has ever had. Darragh de Stonndún sees this not as a futuristic bet but as the natural extension of what AIR's collaborative engineering approach has always been built toward: solving production problems that matter, with technology serious enough to work in the real world.

What Endures

AIR has integrated multiple companies while maintaining strong team continuity. The engineering knowledge that accumulated in those businesses over decades is now accessible across the full organisation. Subject-matter experts who might have spent their entire careers contributing to a single regional business are now bringing that expertise to projects across multiple countries and industries.

For Darragh de Stonndún, the measure of what AIR is building is not the pace of acquisition or the size of the balance sheet. It is whether the organisation that exists five and ten years from now is genuinely better than the sum of the businesses that came together to form it. Whether the people inside it are doing the most important work of their careers. Whether the manufacturers who trust AIR with their most critical production challenges continue to find in that partnership something they cannot get anywhere else. AIR's approach focuses on long-term operational integration and measurable outcomes for manufacturers, while maintaining strict confidentiality around who it works with and how projects are executed.