Request for Startups That Will Reindustrialize America

I am lucky enough to walk into a factory every day. I am surrounded by a great team of people on one collective mission to reindustrialize America by supplying metal to factories across the US. Through this unique experience, we end up having lots of different customers who need metal. We have this view that truly shows America's industrial capacity. 95% of our customers, X has never heard of. But, they make a large majority of the parts for airplanes, defense primes, widgets in your home, you name it... could go on and on. Our customers are the factories. And these factories have problems which can be solved by the creation of new ventures. At the floor, one thing matters more than anything else: raw industrial capacity. Why raw industrial capacity solves everything else Raw industrial capacity is the ability to make anything, at volume, on demand. That ability comes from two inputs: capacity and technology. Enough factories, equipment, workers, and energy to produce at scale. And enough software, automation, and data to produce fast. Either one gets you part of the way. Both together, inside the same company, is what actually wins. In 2000 the US was 25% of global manufacturing value added and China was 6%. By 2023 China was 29% and the US was 17%. UNIDO projects China at 45% by 2030 and the US at 11%. China now manufactures more than the US, Japan, and Germany combined. Manufacturing is 25% of China's GDP. It is 10% of ours. China passed Germany and Japan in robot density in 2023 and has roughly 5x more operational industrial robots than we do. China built capacity at scale and is now layering technology on top of it. The US tried to skip capacity and own only the technology layer. That is the trade that failed. The companies that win from here are the ones that vertically integrate both. Running the floor gives you the data. The data trains the software. The software runs the floor better. The loop compounds. Any company that only does one side loses to the one that does both. Every company below is a specific piece of raw industrial capacity that America needs and does not have. Each sits on a market that is huge, fragmented, technologically stuck, and usually already being built better in China. These are the ones I think are super necessary to exist. 1. Machine Maintenance as a Service $222 billion a year in the US goes to machine maintenance and repair. The US MRO market alone is roughly $93 billion. The average industrial facility loses about 25 hours a month to unplanned downtime. In the automotive industry, one hour of unplanned downtime costs $2 million. Unplanned downtime costs Fortune Global 500 companies roughly 11% of their yearly turnover. And the people who actually know how to fix these machines are retiring. 42% of facilities say aging equipment is the top cause of unplanned downtime. The tribal knowledge is walking out the door. The company I would build: Quarterly PMs on every machine under contract. A full digital service history for that exact serial number, plus aggregated history from every other machine of the same model across every customer. Predictive signals from sensors and cameras. One-click spare parts from an online store. Operator training modules built from the service history. An AI chat bot that has ingested every repair ever done on that model. Hire the oldest guys with the most tribal knowledge. Pay them well. Every repair they do gets documented with sensor data, photos, root cause, parts used, time to fix. That data compounds. After five years you have the only real dataset of how American industrial machinery actually fails and gets fixed. The robotics buildout makes this inevitable. Every humanoid, every AMR, every automated cell needs a maintenance layer. The incumbents are the OEMs themselves, and they are slow, expensive, and tied to one brand. 2. Modern Metal Mills If you buy rolled aluminum or steel tube in the US, lead times of 8 to 30 weeks are normal. Most buyers cannot even purchase directly from mills. And despite high prices, mills still operate on thin margins. Worse for inconel, titanium, and stainless. Meanwhile, China produced 1.005 billion tonnes of crude steel in 2025. The US produced 79 million tonnes. China has roughly 1.17 billion tonnes of installed steel capacity and exported a record 131 million tonnes in 2025, almost double US total production. The OECD now measures global steel overcapacity at 640 million tonnes, about seven times total US steelmaking capacity. The American aluminum story is worse. The US has 6 primary aluminum smelters, 4 partially or fully curtailed. China has over 40 million tonnes of annual smelter production. Canada supplies 56% of US aluminum imports. One more smelter went dark in New Madrid, Missouri in 2024. Luckily, one did just come online but not until 2029. The problem is not labor cost or worker skill. It is that American mills were designed decades ago. Production planning, scheduling, quoting, and ex