american-manufacturing
(5)
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.