defense-manufacturing
(11)
Kevin Czinger and the factory that refuses to stand still
He grew up building hot rods in Cleveland, took a detour through Yale and Wall Street, and returned to the factory floor. With his son Lukas, Kevin Czinger is trying to give manufacturing the freedom to change its mind.
Foundry Lab puts the waiting room out of work
A backyard microwave experiment became a way to make real cast metal parts without waiting for hard tooling. Foundry Lab’s wager: the most useful thing to print is the mold.
Chris Power’s Bet on the Factory Before the Order
The Australian software operator arrived in America with a theory about industrial decline. Six years later, his factories are built around a more unnerving idea: in manufacturing, belief must become capacity before the customer signs.
John Stewart Finds the Future of the Factory in What It Cannot Afford to Miss
The Navy veteran and veteran inspector has spent his career looking for flaws that ordinary eyes miss. His larger project is harder: turning shop-floor knowledge into systems, and overlooked people into the next generation of aerospace talent.
Andrew Kreitz Is Turning the Spreadsheet Into a Factory
Castelion’s co-founder began by bolting hardware together in the desert. Now he is financing a wager that missiles can be built with the cadence, cost discipline, and iterative habits of modern manufacturing.
Ronen Lebi and the Factory That Forgets Its Tools
From Waze's early maps to metal shaped by robots, Machina Labs' chief business officer has built a career around turning clever technology into useful, repeatable systems.
Brian Schimpf and the Art of Building Without a Reverse Gear
A student robot once drove into a wall because it could not reverse. Two decades later, the engineer behind it is running Anduril on the same essential wager: build, test, learn, and keep moving.
Allen Control Systems
Allen Control Systems (ACS) is an Austin-based defense technology company building Bullfrog, an AI-powered autonomous robotic weapon station designed to detect, track and shoot down hostile drones. Founded in 2022 by three engineer-entrepreneurs, ACS uses passive machine vision and custom fire-control software to turn standard machine guns into precision counter-drone turrets, aiming to cut the cost-per-kill of a drone from expensive missiles down to a few dollars of ammunition. The company raised a $200M Series B in 2026 at a $2.2B valuation to scale manufacturing for the U.S. military and allied forces.
Sustainment
Sustainment is an Austin-based public benefit corporation building an AI-native software platform for industrial sourcing, procurement, and supplier management. Founded in 2020 by military veterans and technology executives, it helps commercial OEMs, contract manufacturers, and Department of Defense teams find suppliers, run RFQs, manage purchase orders, and track supplier performance - with the broader mission of strengthening a resilient, domestic U.S. manufacturing base.
Dan Piemont
Dan Piemont is the co-founder and CEO of Long Wall, the Long Beach defense company formerly known as ABL Space Systems. An MIT physics and economics graduate who came to rocketry through Wall Street trading and venture capital rather than an engineering bench, he spent seven years building low-cost, containerized launch vehicles before pivoting the company in 2024-2025 toward mass-producible missile defense. Long Wall now develops the Cyclops exoatmospheric interceptor, RSX liquid boosters for threat replication, and Ironwood mobile ground systems, repurposing the hard-won technology of a launch startup that survived two failed orbital attempts into a bet on American homeland defense.
Lukas Czinger
Lukas Czinger is the co-founder and CEO of Divergent Technologies, a Torrance-based company that built an end-to-end digital manufacturing platform fusing AI-driven generative design, metal 3D printing, and automated robotic assembly. He is also co-founder of Czinger Vehicles, whose 3D-printed 21C hypercar has shattered production-car lap records at tracks like Laguna Seca. A Yale electrical engineering graduate and former investment banker, he joined his father Kevin's startup at the most junior rung and climbed to run the company, holding close to 60 personal patents while pushing the platform from supercars into aerospace and defense.