industrial
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The Land Nobody Wanted in 1991 Is Now a 1.8-Gigawatt Bet
Leon Backes started Provident by buying land nobody wanted from failed savings-and-loans. Thirty-plus years and $7.5 billion later, the same patient-money playbook is building a 5,000-acre town and one of Texas's largest data center campuses.
The Firm That Buys Small Manufacturers and Refuses to Flip Them
A Connecticut investor has spent three decades buying gearboxes, powder coating and barcode labels - using its own capital, and one unfashionable rule: hold for decades, not quarters.
The Denver Firm That Buys Companies Nobody Else Wants to Fix
It writes checks of $25 to $75 million for lower-middle-market companies most investors find too complicated, then spends its time on the operational grind others skip. Its own pitch: 'Profitability Not Required.'
The 133-Year-Old Company That Broke Itself Apart to Chase Jet Engines
General Electric spent a century as America's everything-company. In 2024 it broke itself into three and kept only the part that flies - and Wall Street decided the pieces were worth more than the whole ever was.
MacLean-Fogg
MacLean-Fogg is a fourth-generation, family-owned American manufacturer founded in 1925 that grew from a single railroad lock nut into a global maker of fasteners, engineered components, plastics, and additive-manufacturing tooling. Headquartered in Mundelein, Illinois, the roughly $1.2 billion-a-year enterprise supplies the automotive, heavy-truck, electric utility, telecom, and industrial markets from dozens of plants across North America, Europe, and Asia. In 2025 it marked its 100th anniversary still owned and led by the MacLean family.
Atomiton
Atomiton builds an immersive intelligence platform that ties operational activity to energy, water and carbon performance, helping data centers, manufacturers and building operators cut costs and hit sustainability targets in real time.
RIIICO
RIIICO is a Düsseldorf-based deeptech startup turning LiDAR scans of real factories into intelligent, editable 3D models. Its AI segments and classifies every object on the shop floor, exports it as OpenUSD, and plugs into NVIDIA Omniverse and Siemens Tecnomatix so planners can redesign brownfield plants in a fraction of the usual time.
Axion Ray
Axion Ray (operating as Axion) builds an AI 'observability command center' that helps the world's largest manufacturers catch product quality and safety problems months before they turn into recalls. Founded in 2021 by former McKinsey AI strategist Daniel First, the company fuses fragmented, unstructured field data - service tickets, dealership notes, call-center transcripts, sensor telemetry - into early-warning intelligence for engineering teams. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, RTX Ventures, Amplo and Inspired Capital with $25M raised, Axion works with manufacturers across aerospace, automotive, medtech and consumer goods.
MaintainX
MaintainX is a mobile-first, AI-powered maintenance and asset management platform (CMMS/EAM) used by frontline industrial teams to replace paper work orders, prevent equipment downtime, and run safer, more predictable operations. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, it serves 11,000+ companies and manages over 11 million assets across manufacturing, facilities, food & beverage and distribution.
ARRIS Composites
ARRIS Composites is a Berkeley-based advanced manufacturing company that invented Additive Molding, a patented process for mass-producing continuous-fiber thermoplastic composite parts. The technology lets brands replace metal and plastic with lighter, stronger, more sustainable parts - and do it at consumer-electronics volumes.