Sewbot / robotic sewing.

A workline that replaces the operator's hands with cameras and grippers: the machine maps the fabric, measures how it distorts as it feeds, and steers it through the needle. SoftWear Automation of Atlanta owns the category and the SEWBOT trademark, and the most recent hard figure it publishes about itself is a $20 million Series B1 round led by BESTSELLER, closed in August 2025. Every throughput number in circulation is older than that, and none of it sits on a spec sheet. The quoted figures trace back to one 2017 announcement about the Tianyuan Garments plant in Little Rock, which in a single article claims 21 production lines, one T-shirt every 22 seconds, and 800,000 T-shirts a day. Those three cannot all be true: 21 lines at one shirt per 22 seconds is a few thousand shirts an hour, not 800,000 a day, and other per-year totals for the same plant have been recycled since with no primary source behind them. If a sewbot rate is quoted at you, ask which garment, which fabric weight, and whether the number came off a running line or out of a press release.