SDA Announces the State Layer for Physical AI

One system of record for the intended and actual state of a factory, unveiled at Software Defined Factory Munich

MUNICH, Germany – September 29, 2026 – Today, Software Defined Automation (SDA), the vendor-neutral platform for managing industrial controller fleets, announces the State Layer for Physical AI. CEO and founder Dr. Josef Waltl unveiled it in the opening keynote of the invitation-only Software Defined Factory conference at BMW Welt, in front of more than 120 operators, machine builders and industry leaders.

Industry generates roughly a quarter of global GDP and runs on at least 50 million industrial controllers – most still managed with vendor-specific tools, USB sticks and on-site visits, without version control. SDA makes those controllers addressable like cloud compute and extracts their code from proprietary vendor binaries into one normalized system of record. The result is the State Layer: for the first time, one system holding both what a factory’s machines were told to do and what they actually did – on real hardware and the existing brownfield base, with stable APIs, agent-ready interfaces and no data lock-in.

“Physical AI touches the world through industrial controllers,” said Dr. Josef Waltl, CEO and founder of SDA. “You cannot deploy intelligence onto compute you cannot address, you cannot train it on code you cannot read, and you cannot secure what you cannot see. Industrial DevOps is the first floor, not the building.”

Live data from SDA’s production platform backs the announcement:

• 5-fold growth in controllers under management since January 2026
• 10 of 13 supported vendor automation ecosystems running in production
• More than 23,000 code versions under management
• 4,164 cases in August 2026 alone where a controller ran something other than its target program

SDA is in productive operation at Henkel across its factory networks, and runs across PepsiCo’s brownfield plants and Electric Hydrogen’s newly built electrolyzer factory.

About Software Defined Automation

Software Defined Automation (SDA) builds the State Layer for Physical AI: one system of record for the intended and actual state of a factory, normalized across 13 vendor automation ecosystems and in production at leading manufacturers. Headquartered in Boston with engineering in Munich. Learn more at softwaredefinedautomation.io.