Joohyun Cha is Co-Founder and CEO of Dawn Industries (YC S26), a Y Combinator-backed industrial AI startup building autonomous fault recovery systems for factory robot and machine cells.

Joohyun studied at Brown University and gained hands-on experience in industrial environments before co-founding Dawn Industries alongside Seojin (Heidi) Yoon.

Joohyun and his co-founder spent over a year embedded inside manufacturing facilities, directly observing how robot cell faults silently destroy factory throughput at a cost of $600 to $38,000 per minute, per cell.

At Dawn Industries, Joohyun led the development of VIM, an AI-powered system that reads PLC and device signals, identifies root causes, and stages safety-checked fixes that cut fault recovery from 30 minutes to under 2 minutes.

Dawn Industries is backed by Y Combinator (S26) and its VIM product is proven to save factories more than $15,000 per fault event, targeting a massive and largely unaddressed gap in industrial automation reliability.