american-manufacturing
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Gibson Turned a Guitar Shape Into a 130-Year Business
The Les Paul is a product, a platform and a piece of cultural shorthand. Gibson's modern task is to keep that inheritance desirable - without sealing it behind glass.
The 130-Year-Old Foundry That Turned a Skillet Into a System
Lodge does not merely sell heavy pans. From two Tennessee foundries, it has built a loop of manufacturing, education, mass retail, collecting, and care that keeps a 19th-century material useful in a nonstick age.
Airstream Turned a Shiny Metal Trailer Into a 95-Year Passport
The Ohio manufacturer does not merely sell campers. It sells a recognizable piece of industrial design, a dealer-supported route to mobile living, and membership in a road-going culture that began before the interstate highway system.
Zoeller Company
Zoeller built an 87-year business around a machine most people notice only when it stops. Its edge is not novelty for novelty's sake, but obsessive testing, contractor trust and a family portfolio that follows water almost everywhere it needs to go.
STIHL USA
STIHL built its American business around machines that can be serviced, dealers who know their customers and a Virginia factory that makes more than many buyers realize. Its next test is carrying that old-school advantage into the battery era.
Red Wing Shoe Co.
Red Wing Shoe Company is a family-owned American footwear manufacturer founded in 1905 in Red Wing, Minnesota. It builds durable work boots, safety footwear and heritage lifestyle shoes - anchored by icons like the Moc Toe and Iron Ranger - and operates its own leather tannery, hundreds of retail stores and a global dealer network. Now in its fourth generation of family leadership, Red Wing pairs old-world craft with modern safety technology for tradespeople, industrial workers and boot enthusiasts worldwide.
Base Power Company
Base Power is an Austin-based energy company that installs large-capacity home batteries and sells electricity to homeowners as a licensed Texas retail electric provider. Founded in 2023 by Zach Dell and Justin Lopas, it pairs whole-home backup with low fixed rates, using its growing fleet of distributed batteries as a virtual power plant that charges when power is cheap and discharges when the grid is strained. The company raised a $1 billion Series C in October 2025 at a $4 billion valuation and is building its own battery factory in Austin to scale nationally.
Pegasus Solar
Pegasus Solar is a Richmond, California manufacturer of rooftop solar mounting and racking systems designed to make installation faster, cheaper, and more watertight for residential and commercial solar installers. Founded in 2012 by Kai Stephan, the company sells a full catalog of mounts, rails, flashings, and rail-free systems - including its SkipRail and InstaFlash lines - through a distributor and installer network across the U.S. Pegasus emphasizes American manufacturing, durable design, and reducing labor time on the roof, with millions of units shipped and a track record it markets around zero reported roof leaks.
ACT-ion Battery Technologies
ACT-ion Battery Technologies is a Dallas-based advanced materials startup building a cleaner, faster way to make cathode active materials (CAM) - the single most expensive ingredient in a lithium-ion battery. Spun out of Hunt Energy Enterprises in 2019 and led by CEO/CTO Jin-Myoung Lim, ACT-ion uses a continuous, chemistry-agnostic manufacturing process to produce surface-engineered single crystal cathode powders in a fraction of the time and cost of incumbents, with less energy, water and waste. The company is scaling its process at a pilot plant in Carrollton, Texas, with the goal of anchoring a domestic battery-materials supply chain.
Foundry Robotics
Foundry Robotics is a San Francisco startup building 'The Everything Factory' - an AI-first, assembly-focused contract manufacturer that uses Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models to run flexible robotic assembly cells. Instead of retooling a line for every new product, Foundry aims to let general-purpose robots switch between building drones, robot dogs, battery packs and satellite components on demand. Founded in 2025 by ex-Ghost Robotics and Scale AI robotics lead Adarsh Kulkarni, the company positions itself as a dual-use manufacturer serving both commercial customers and the U.S. Department of Defense, backed by a seed round led by Khosla Ventures and Garuda Ventures.
Jamie Serota
Jamie Serota (Jamie Niu Serota) is the co-founder and CEO of Podium Automation, a Brooklyn-based company rebuilding the way industrial control panels are designed and manufactured. After leading commercial strategy and business operations at Tesla, Blue Origin, and Bowery Farming, she and co-founder Jacob Buser started Podium in 2024 to become the supplier they always wished they had. Podium ships UL 508A control panels in under four weeks - roughly a third of the industry's standard lead time - by replacing hand-drawn schematics with software. In June 2026 the company raised an $18M Series A led by Construct Capital, bringing total funding past $23M.
Jin Lim
Jin-Myoung Lim is the co-founder, CEO, and CTO of ACT-ion Battery Technologies, a Dallas-based deep-tech startup reinventing how cathode active materials (CAM) are made for lithium-ion batteries. A PhD mechanical engineer from Seoul National University with 2,272+ research citations and an h-index of 27, Lim spun ACT-ion out of Hunt Energy Enterprises in 2019 with a bold thesis: that the biggest bottleneck in the battery supply chain isn't the chemistry - it's the manufacturing process. His Hydro4Crystal platform produces coated single-crystal CAMs continuously, with lower energy, cost, and emissions than any incumbent method, and it works across chemistries from LFP to NMC. In 2024, the technology won an R&D 100 Award. By late 2025, ACT-ion had raised $11.5 million from BASF Venture Capital, LG Technology Ventures, Mirae Asset Capital, and Korean institutional investors, and was breaking ground on a pilot plant in Carrollton, Texas.
Naweed Tahmas
Naweed Tahmas is the founder and CEO of Aeon (Aeon Industrial), an Austin-area defense startup building Zeus, a software-defined, 3D-printed modular guided missile priced around $50,000 - a fraction of legacy tactical munitions. Before defense, he was a Special Assistant to the President and Associate Director in the Trump White House, coordinating policy and personnel across 15 federal agencies. Years earlier he was the combative vice president of the Berkeley College Republicans at the height of the 2017 campus free-speech battles, a fight he carried all the way to a DOJ-backed lawsuit. He has since traded the campus quad for a Cedar Park factory floor, where Aeon aims to turn out more than 10,000 missiles a year.
Adarsh Kulkarni
Adarsh Kulkarni is the founder and CEO of Foundry Robotics, a San Francisco startup building what it calls the 'Everything Factory' - an AI-and-robotics-first, assembly-focused, dual-use contract manufacturer aimed at rebuilding American manufacturing capacity. A Penn GRASP Lab robotics engineer, he cut his teeth deploying legged robots underground for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, was an early autonomy engineer at Ghost Robotics (acquired for $400M), built ML infrastructure at self-driving truck company TuSimple, and rose to Head of Robotics at Scale AI before striking out on his own. Foundry uses Vision-Language-Action foundation models to let a single factory assemble many different products without traditional retooling, and raised a seed round in early 2026 backed by Garuda Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
Sami Senapathy
Sami (Sahitya) Senapathy is the solo founder and CEO of Endeavor AI, a San Francisco startup applying generative AI agents to the back-office and front-office grind of American factories and distributors. He started coding as a kid, built a FEMA disaster-response app in sixth grade, worked at the Air Force Research Lab at 16, interned at AWS, and shipped Palantir's first commercialized generative AI product in 2023 before launching Endeavor from his University of Pennsylvania dorm room and raising a $7M seed led by Craft Ventures.
Form Energy
Form Energy is an American energy-storage company building iron-air batteries that store electricity for 100 hours - multiple days - at roughly one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion. Founded in 2017 by a group of storage veterans, the company uses 'reversible rusting' of cheap, abundant iron to let renewable grids stay reliable through long stretches of low wind and sun. Its first high-volume factory, Form Factory 1, sits on the site of the former Weirton Steel mill in West Virginia, and its batteries are now being deployed with utilities including Great River Energy, Xcel Energy, Georgia Power and Dominion Energy.