Samuel Weiss

Co-Founder & CTO Instrumental Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Samuel Weiss is co-founder and chief technology officer of Instrumental, a manufacturing intelligence company built around a deceptively simple observation: engineers designing electronics have almost no visibility into what actually happens to their products on an assembly line thousands of miles away. Instrumental installs high-resolution cameras on production lines, combines the imagery with manufacturing test data, and uses machine learning to find defects and trace them to their causes, often before a failure pattern would otherwise be noticed. Weiss came to the problem from the inside. He was a product design engineer at Apple, where he worked on the original Apple Watch and had a hand in its mechanical architecture, microphone, speaker, antenna and Taptic Engine, and where he spent long stretches on assembly lines in China alongside Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, who led product on the same programme and is now Instrumental’s chief executive and his co-founder.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and chief technology officer of Instrumental, named as such on the company’s own about page alongside co-founder and CEO Anna-Katrina Shedletsky.
• Worked on the original Apple Watch as a product design engineer, contributing to its mechanical architecture, microphone, speaker, antenna and Taptic Engine.
• Became, by Instrumental’s account, one of the leading experts in the world on the engineering problems behind the Apple Watch’s launch, within a year of joining full time.
• Shares a patent with Shedletsky from their time at Apple, covering a switch mechanism for an iPod.
• Co-designed Instrumental’s core approach, pairing assembly-line camera imagery with manufacturing test data and applying machine learning to surface quality issues and root causes.
• Instrumental raised a $50 million Series C in February 2022, led by BAM Elevate, taking total funding past $80 million.
• At that point the company reported 30 customers running 50 programmes across 10 countries, 150 per cent net revenue retention for 2021, and 75 employees, with Honeywell, Motorola Mobility and Bose among its named customers.
• Holds a dual degree in mechanical engineering and mathematics from MIT and a master’s in mechanical engineering from Stanford.

Professional Journey

Weiss studied mechanical engineering and mathematics at MIT as a dual degree, and was in his third year when he took a summer internship at Apple in Silicon Valley. That internship is the origin point of everything that followed. A new full-time hire named Anna-Katrina Shedletsky was working alongside him; the two completed several projects together and, as Instrumental tells the story, ended up sharing a patent for a switch mechanism on an iPod that probably never got built. He later took a master’s in mechanical engineering at Stanford.

He joined Apple full time as a product design engineer and was assigned to the Apple Watch, the company’s first entirely new product category in years. The work was at the hardest end of consumer hardware: fitting a mechanical architecture, a microphone, a speaker, an antenna and the Taptic Engine haptic actuator into a case worn on the wrist, where every millimetre and every milliwatt is contested. Instrumental’s account is that within a year he had become one of the leading experts on the engineering problems behind the Watch’s debut. Shedletsky, by then the product lead on the same team, was working the same programme from the other side.

Both spent a great deal of time in China, on the assembly lines where the designs became physical products. That experience produced the question Instrumental was founded to answer: why is it so hard for the engineers who designed a product to get the data and insight they need from the line that builds it? Manufacturing problems surface late, are diagnosed slowly and are frequently described back to the design team second hand, which costs weeks at exactly the point in a hardware programme when weeks are most expensive.

The two left Apple and started Instrumental in the mid-2010s. The company’s own site dates its founding to 2014 and TechCrunch’s reporting gives 2015; the two accounts have not been reconciled. The first concept was a robot, referred to internally as “Mechasaurus”, but the idea evolved into something less mechanical and more useful: a data collection and analysis system that watches the line directly. In the shipped product, cameras capture units at high resolution at stations along the assembly process, the images are paired with the test data already being collected, and machine learning models are trained to spot anomalies and connect them to root causes.

As chief technology officer, Weiss owns that technical direction. The company raised a $50 million Series C in February 2022 led by BAM Elevate, bringing total funding past $80 million, and reported at the time that it had 30 customers running 50 programmes across 10 countries with 150 per cent net revenue retention, working with Honeywell, Motorola Mobility and Bose among others, from a base of 75 employees. The customer set featured on the company’s current materials includes Meta, NVIDIA and Toast, which suggests the platform has moved further into large-scale consumer and data-centre hardware since.

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dual degree, Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics

Stanford University

M.S., Mechanical Engineering