advanced-manufacturing
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Altitude Accelerator asks the awkward question: who will buy it?
The Brampton nonprofit helps technology founders turn promising inventions into businesses customers will pay for. Its next move brings more investors into the room.
At Newlab, the Pitch Has to Survive the Street
A Brooklyn shipyard became a home for hardware startups. Now Newlab is taking their inventions into ports, city streets and factories - where a working demo meets a much tougher audience.
Basel’s business card comes with a lab
Basel Area Business & Innovation puts relocation advice, biotech venture building and innovation campuses under one roof. Its bet: the right introduction can be as useful as the first cheque.
PhysicsX Wants Engineers to Stop Waiting for Physics
Born from Formula One's impatience, PhysicsX turns expensive simulations into near-instant engineering answers. Its real product is not a magic oracle but a carefully governed loop of data, models, validation and engineers who know when to call the old solver back in.
Jason Chen Put the Cabinet Shop on a Software Clock
After two decades in luxury home furnishings, the Ronbow founder made an unfashionable bet: custom cabinets could move at the speed of software without losing the touch of a craft business.
BioMADE Is Building the Factories Biotech Startups Can’t Afford
A good microbe can make plastic, rubber or protein in a flask. Proving it can do the same inside a 25,000-liter tank is where companies run out of equipment, money and time - so BioMADE is building the missing middle.
Billy McCall Is Teaching Polyester How to Leave
A lifelong surfer and polymer scientist built Kintra Fibers around one unfashionable question: what if a high-performance synthetic could do its job, then make a graceful exit?
The Battery’s Hardest Job Is Leaving the Lab
For three decades, Yutaka Wakai has worked where promising materials meet unforgiving machinery. His years at Blue Current put him at the quiet hinge of the battery business: turning a silicon-rich, fully dry chemistry into something a factory can repeat.
Sean Petterson Wants Plywood to Meet Its Replacement
After turning a student invention into an acquired industrial-safety company, Sean Petterson chose an older adversary: plywood. His second act is a lesson in selling change to factories that have no patience for disruption.
Mohawk College Turned the Community College Into an R&D Partner - Here’s the Playbook
The Hamilton college found a sharper edge than adding more courses: let students solve live industry problems, let employers borrow the labs, and make applied research part of the education rather than a campus side project.
PlantSwitch Bet $28 Million That Nobody Should Have to Eat With a Sad Paper Fork
The founders began by selling greener restaurant supplies, nearly quit when restaurants closed, and then moved upstream into resin and factories. A $17 million round and a World Cup-sized order have now tested whether compostable packaging can finally behave like the plastic it replaces.
Cresilon Killed Its Big Launch - Then Built a Bleeding-Control Business the Hard Way
A 17-year-old's algae experiment became a syringe of hemostatic gel. The useful business lesson came later, when blackened batches forced Cresilon to cancel a launch and become its own manufacturer.
Lumilens Bet $50 Million That AI's Next Bottleneck Is the Wire
The two-year-old photonics company has a product inside a hyperscaler's live data centers and a plan to replace short copper links with light. Its harder bet is not merely designing faster optics - it is manufacturing them like semiconductors.
Riot Ventures Built a $1 Billion Firm by Betting on the Physical World
While venture capital chased frictionless software, Riot went looking for friction - factories, fleets, power systems and defense hardware. Its concentrated, multistage strategy now stretches from the first institutional check to pre-IPO rounds.
The Tiny Fund Betting the Next Great Software Market Has Factory Floors
REFASHIOND Ventures writes small early checks into the systems that make, move, and remake physical goods. Its edge is not check size - it is a map of industry built before supply chains became dinner-table conversation.
Sarasota Has a Startup Factory - and It Is Building the Companies First
Suncoast Venture Studio is trying to make Sarasota more than a pleasant place to retire or relocate. Its wager is practical: build the startups first, recruit operators around validated ideas, and let a regional technology economy form company by company.
The Venture Studio Betting That the Best Startups Will Be Hybrids
Walsh Karra Holdings is assembling a portfolio where AI meets farms, finance meets infrastructure, and capital comes with operators attached. Its wager is that the next durable companies will be built between sectors, not inside a single lane.
The Fund That Put a Border Around Its Ambition
Most investors diversify by geography. The O.H.I.O. Fund does the opposite - using an Ohio-only mandate, a multi-asset portfolio and a local network to turn home-state knowledge into an investing edge.
The Recruiter and the Rocket Scientist Funding America's Hard Tech
A recruiter who once staffed early Snap and Tinder teamed up with a rocket engineer to fund the companies most VCs can't read a spec sheet for - and got the Space Force to sign first.
The Holding Company That Never Plans to Sell
OwnersEdge buys healthy companies, folds their employees into one diversified ownership plan, and keeps the exit door shut. Its wager is that patient capital, shared services and a stake for the people doing the work can turn succession planning into a durable growth model.
The VC Firm Where the Founders Salute First
Justin Nahama and three partners are betting that the discipline that runs toward gunfire also builds companies. Their first fund is oversubscribed, their portfolio has raised over $350 million, and a $50 million second fund is now open.
The Venture Firm Betting the Next Tech Boom Will Be Built From Atoms
8090 Industries is wagering that the next generation of valuable technology companies will sell electrons, molecules, machines and infrastructure - and that old industrial networks can help new founders build them faster.
The Tire Company That Wants to Sell Fewer Tires
Bridgestone Americas built a continent-sized business around the part of a car most people notice only when it fails. Now it is turning that overlooked circle of rubber into a service network, a data stream and a test of whether mobility can become less wasteful.
Gleason Corporation
The 160-year-old Rochester manufacturer is turning the humble gear into a connected data loop - linking design software, cutting machines and metrology so factories can correct quality while production is still running.
Sukup Manufacturing Co.
A farmer’s improvised answer to spoiled corn became a 60-year Iowa manufacturing business. Sukup now sells the machinery around the grain bin - and is betting that tighter controls and automation will define what comes next.
Magnera Corporation
The materials inside diapers, surgical gowns, coffee capsules and weatherproof walls rarely get a headline. Magnera, born from a 2024 industrial merger and backed by 160 years of inherited know-how, makes a $3.2 billion business out of that invisibility.
Zekelman Industries
Most steel companies stop at the loading dock. Zekelman follows the material into warehouses, job sites and even finished apartments - a 149-year industrial lineage betting that control of the chain can make American construction faster and more predictable.
Coherent Corp.
AI may live in software, but it moves through light. Coherent makes much of the physical kit - from laser chips and specialty materials to complete optical links - that lets data centers, factories and scientific instruments work at speed.
Arduro
Arduro is a Pennsylvania-based recovered materials company that uses a patented, low-temperature chemical devulcanization process to reclaim high-quality carbon black, rubber and silica from end-of-life tires and industrial rubber waste. Its process breaks the sulfur cross-links in vulcanized rubber without cutting the carbon-carbon polymer backbone, letting manufacturers replace virgin raw materials with recovered ones at comparable performance and lower carbon footprint. Its first commercial product, ELDARIX r1000 recovered carbon black, is PAH-compliant and 6PPD-free.
Ian Lowe
Ian Lowe is the founder and CEO of Arduro Sustainable Rubber, a clean-technology company turning end-of-life tires and waste rubber back into high-value raw materials. A former JPMorgan financial controller and Piper Jaffray project-finance banker, Lowe spotted a University of Louisville research project posted online and built it into a company commercializing a patented chloramine devulcanization process that recovers rubber, carbon black and processing oils at a roughly 95% reuse rate. Arduro's first product, ELDARIX r1000 recovered carbon black, is aimed at tire and rubber manufacturers looking to cut carbon footprints while keeping performance.