About LineSide

Built by people who have lived the factory data problem.

LineSide exists because manufacturing leaders keep getting asked to deploy AI on top of ERP records, spreadsheets, and shop-floor systems that do not agree with each other. We started with the unglamorous work: make the data trustworthy, keep it trustworthy, then build the apps and agents operations can actually run on.

CEO & Co-Founder

Pranav Srihari

Pranav leads LineSide with a simple conviction: manufacturers cannot run AI, planning, or automation on data they do not trust. He set the company's thesis early — fix the foundation first, then build what operations actually needs on top of it.

Before LineSide, he shipped production software at NetApp and worked data science at Cisco. He studied economics with a computer science minor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a combination that still shapes how he thinks about incentives, systems, and what plants will actually adopt.

Today he works directly with manufacturing leaders and operators to turn messy ERP, MES, and spreadsheet reality into a governed operating model — one where every change has a name on it, and decisions rest on operational truth instead of tribal workarounds.

CTO & Co-Founder

Leo Jiang

Leo owns LineSide's product and technical architecture — from the living data model that unifies factory systems to the agents, apps, and automations that run on it. He builds for the shop floor, not the slide deck: systems that hold up when the schedule slips, the BOM is incomplete, and the answer has to be right now.

As a vision and robotics engineer at IRIS Factory Automation, he spent years inside real plants designing inspection, palletizing, and custom automation. That is where he learned the hard truth behind most "AI for manufacturing" pitches: the bottleneck is rarely the model. It is the broken, drifting data underneath.

At LineSide he turns that experience into durable infrastructure — continuous data integrity, governed workflows, and AI that operators can trust because it is grounded in how work actually happens.

Advisors

Guided by decades of high-mix manufacturing expertise.

LineSide is built for the shops that textbook Lean was never designed for. Our advisors keep the product honest about how high-mix, low-volume operations actually run.

Advisor

Dr. Shahrukh A. Irani

Dr. Irani is one of the defining voices in high-mix, low-volume manufacturing. As President of Lean and Flexible, LLC, he has spent decades helping job shops, forge shops, fabricators, and other HMLV manufacturers implement Job Shop Lean — the methodology he created to adapt Lean for plants that cannot run on Toyota-style flow.

He spent sixteen years as Associate Professor of Integrated Systems Engineering at The Ohio State University, where his research produced Job Shop Lean and the PFAST (Production Flow Analysis and Simplification Toolkit) software used to put it into practice. He later served as Director of IE Research at Hoerbiger Corporation of America, proving the approach inside live HMLV facilities.

Today he teaches Lean Manufacturing at the University of Houston, authored Job Shop Lean (Productivity Press, 2020), and edited the Handbook of Cellular Manufacturing Systems (John Wiley). At LineSide he advises on how real shops operate — so the platform stays grounded in the planning, flow, and data realities that high-mix manufacturers actually face.

Why we built this

Operational truth first. Intelligence second.

Between them, Pranav and Leo have worked the problem from both sides: enterprise software and data systems, and the automation cells that have to survive contact with the floor — with Dr. Irani keeping the work grounded in Job Shop Lean and the realities of high-mix manufacturing. LineSide is the product of that combination: a data foundation that detects when systems diverge from reality, closes the loop, and gives plants a place to build software that earns trust.

Talk with the team