made-in-america
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The Racecar Driver Who Made Football's Lightest Helmet - and Landed in 30 NFL Locker Rooms
Nicholas Esayian bought a bankrupt racing-helmet business from a legend, halved the weight of a football helmet, and now has Virginia Tech calling his Apache the best-rated helmet it has ever put on a crash rig.
The Ohio Basement Where a Space Heater Beat Madison Avenue
Ben Suarez built a direct-marketing machine in North Canton, Ohio that sold more than five million space heaters - and treated every ad like a controlled experiment.
Vendra
Vendra is a San Francisco-based, YC-backed (S24) manufacturing platform that connects hardware teams with US manufacturers for custom parts. Customers submit a single RFQ; Vendra reads the CAD and drawings, matches the job to domestic suppliers with the right equipment and open capacity, gathers competitive quotes, and manages production through delivery. It is ITAR-registered and focused on aerospace, defense, and hard-tech companies, positioning itself against legacy quoting platforms like Xometry and Protolabs with real-time capacity matching.
Jackie Wu
Jackie Wu is the founder and CEO of Corvus Robotics, a company that builds fully autonomous drones that fly indoors and count warehouse inventory without beacons, GPS, Wi-Fi, or a human at the controls. A Northwestern-trained roboticist who spent time inside warehouses on four continents, he grew tired of watching people climb ladders with clipboards and barcode guns, and decided to teach a drone to do it instead. Corvus designs and manufactures its drones in California, went through Y Combinator, and raised a Series A in 2024 to push warehouses toward a lights-out future.
Skydio
Skydio is the largest U.S. drone manufacturer, building autonomous aircraft and software for public safety, defense, and critical infrastructure. Its flagship X10 platform uses AI and computer vision to fly itself in places GPS cannot reach.
Zettascale Computing Corporation
Zettascale Computing Corporation (formerly Exa Laboratories) builds polymorphic XPU chips that reconfigure their own dataflow architecture to match each AI model - delivering up to 27.6x greater energy efficiency than NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Founded by a 21-year-old Swedish dropout and a Cambridge-trained engineer, this YC S24 company is shipping prototype Grasshopper cards fully manufactured in America, with commercial release planned for 2026. Their ambition: make zettascale computing sustainable and become the hardware substrate for all future AI.