The manufacturing hype continues. On Tuesday, serial entrepreneur Jai Malik and former SpaceX engineering lead Eli Giovanetti launched The Advanced Manufacturing Company of America, or Amca, which they say will better build the “human-machine interface products.”
Those are things like sensors, power units, and flight-control computers that enable a person to run something like an F-35.
The company raised an initial $76.5M from some of the biggest names in the game—Caffeinated Capital, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz among them. Not too shabby.
Build, baby, build: Amca won’t be building factories from the ground up. It looks more like they’ll be scooping up legacy, mom-and-pop component producers into their manufacturing network. The company:
- Has already acquired its first supplier, Electro-Mech Components, which produces switches for aircraft and military vehicles.
- Is working with Boeing to supply components.
- Is actively looking for more suppliers to join its network.
This approach is similar to the one taken by private equity firms, primes, and even Anduril in recent years: buy up suppliers to speed up and improve manufacturing to build more cutting-edge tech.
(Though Amca insists they’re not a startup or PE shop.)
Speed it up: The company says it’s launching because “the aerospace supplier base has become a convoluted behemoth that blocks our ability to move fast and deliver.”
- Weapons production timelines have indeed slowed drastically in recent decades, and the supply chain is a Byzantine network of legacy suppliers selling into a few large primes.
- Companies from Hadrian to Re:Build to Anduril to Castelion have all honed in on this issue—revamping US defense will require a rethought defense manufacturing system.
- By bringing suppliers with decades of technical expertise into their network, Amca says it will help build the industrial infrastructure necessary to building cutting-edge systems.
“The next chapter of American aerospace and defense won’t be defined by new software, flashy designs, or billion-dollar contracts alone,” founder Jai Malik wrote in a post on LinkedIn, “It will be decided by whether we can still make the products that make those systems real.”