Sunny Han

Chief Executive Officer

Sunny Han is the CEO & Founder of Fulcrum, a cloud manufacturing software creating a connected future for manufacturers.

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Podcasts Recognition Bio

As heard on...

Sunny has been a guest on over 50 podcasts and hosts the Capacity podcast. Some of Sunny's favorite topics to talk about include:

Supply Chain

"Supply chain coordination is so difficult it takes either a huge amount of money or small complexity to make something new."

"Automatic coordination between small manufacturers is the only way big outsourced omni-factories lose long-term."

Technology

"Startups are failing in troves at the top of the pyramid because the base isn’t strong enough to support it."

"Current architectures are at extreme levels of diminishing returns."

The Future of Manufacturing

"Humans are treated as a liability by the entire manufacturing software industry and the skill and power of those humans is changing forever."

"Design and engineering being the same thing massively reduces the amount of creative energy produced."

"All meaningful innovation in manufacturing is bottlenecked by the absence of a modern and connected ERP."

Recognized by

Dealmaker of the year

Tech 20 List: 2021

40 under 40

#1 Ranked Raid Guild

Early Life

Sunny’s path to entrepreneurship started in China. Born in the aftermath of the cultural revolution, Sunny was brought to the United States at the age of five. His parents settled in the Midwest, continuing their studies at the University of Minnesota. From a young age until college, Sunny spent his days in the Shepherd Hall computer labs, where his mother was one of very few women solving the complex problems in the nascent days of networked computing.

After years of being in labs, Sunny went on to receive his Bachelors of Science in Chemistry at Drake University and spent summers as a Laboratory Technician for Braun Intertec and a Research Assistant for Harvard Medical School.

The Maze

The vision for Fulcrum — to create global change in one of the largest industries on earth — began after what Sunny describes as “two spectacular but very quiet failures.” These companies were in logistics and financial analysis, each stemming from years of work with small businesses, including manufacturing businesses. While those first attempts at building a sustained business didn’t go far, it set the stage for a much bigger opportunity. In 2015, Sunny co-founded a consulting company called Atlas that built custom software for various companies. Those projects were often with manufacturers, creating scheduling or time tracking tools to plug into old ERP systems.

What emerged for Sunny was a clear void in the market for modern, transformative software, and an opportunity to drive meaningful change in the most important and fundamental industry on earth.

A Vision for the Future

Today hundreds of thousands of manufacturing businesses run on paper, spreadsheets, or dated software from the 1990s. Manufacturers’ software today are like old desktop computers in homes before the internet — useful in their location but limited to their own knowledge.

Fulcrum’s vision is not only to replace that old desktop with a sleek new computer and operating system, but also to connect manufacturers to each other, to their suppliers, and to their assemblers. This connectivity will enable the next industrial revolution — unlocking cost and operational efficiencies that are impossible today, in the same way the internet ushered in the digital age.