Omron agrees to buy US industrial-PC maker OnLogic for $675m, paying about 30 times EBITDA for a physical-AI edge computer

Omron is paying roughly 30 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation for a company that builds computers in metal boxes. The Kyoto automation group said in a Tokyo Stock Exchange disclosure on Oct 13 that it has agreed to buy Interlogic, Inc., the parent of Vermont industrial-PC maker OnLogic, for USD 675 million on an enterprise-value basis, about JPY 104.6 billion at JPY 155 to the dollar.

The multiple is the story. Industrial PCs are usually treated as a mature, competitive hardware category, yet Omron's own figures put the price at 4.4 times OnLogic's 2025 revenue. The disclosure explains why the Japanese buyer thinks the box on the factory floor is worth that much, and it is the clearest statement yet from a large Japanese automation maker of where it expects physical-AI value to be captured.

A cash deal for a founder-owned company, structured to sweep up 167 small holders

Omron's board approved the deal and the contract was signed on Oct 10 Japan time. A Delaware subsidiary that Omron is setting up will merge into Interlogic, which survives as a wholly owned Omron subsidiary in a reverse triangular merger. Omron said it chose that route because 167 employee shareholders hold 8.06% of Interlogic's shares, and a merger lets it acquire every share at once. Founders Roeland and Lisa Groeneveld hold the remaining 91.94% and 99.11% of the votes. Omron will pay in cash, mainly from cash on hand, and expects completion around January 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions. It expects only a minor effect on results for the year to March 2027.

Revenue fell 5.6% in 2024 and then rose 26.1% to USD 154.2 million in 2025, when reported EBITDA nearly doubled to USD 22.6 million. Omron also disclosed an adjusted EBITDA of USD 27.1 million, which adds back costs it does not expect after the deal. The purchase price is 29.9 times reported 2025 EBITDA and 24.9 times the adjusted figure.

What OnLogic sells and why Omron wants the channel as much as the hardware

OnLogic, founded in 2003, designs and builds rugged, highly configurable industrial PCs to order and sells them mostly direct, without distributors. It had 301 employees and seven sites, two of them factories, at the end of March 2026, with subsidiaries in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Taiwan and Malaysia. More than 90% of sales come from the Americas and Europe, the regions where Omron wants to grow. OnLogic will keep its brand and direct model and run as an independent business under chief executive Sean Larkin and the current management.

Omron gave three reasons. It wants to combine OnLogic's computers with its own high-precision control technology to speed up a next-generation physical-AI platform. It wants to cross-sell Omron and OnLogic products through OnLogic's customer base. And it wants to package its sensing and robotics equipment, including the LD mobile robots MEKAWIRE covered on Oct 2, with OnLogic hardware as joint factory-data and physical-AI offerings.

Why the edge computer is the contested layer

A physical-AI model, whether a vision system that inspects parts or a policy that drives a robot arm, has to run somewhere near the machine. Cloud round trips are too slow and too fragile for closed-loop control, so the inference happens on an industrial PC or controller beside the line. Whoever supplies that computer sits between the model vendor and the robot, and can bundle software, updates and support on top of it. Omron's control business already sells programmable logic controllers and motion controllers. OnLogic adds configurable x86 and accelerator-equipped boxes and a direct relationship with thousands of Western engineers who buy them.