Fewer than 40 software engineers work across the entire US metals supply industry. Not 40 per company. 40 total. The industry generates roughly $300B in annual revenue and has not meaningfully changed in decades: 6,300 companies, 98% of operations processes are not automated, fewer than 10% offering online quoting, and emails dominating 99.9% of transactions.
Today, Nox Metals announced an $11.5M Seed round led by Hyperion, with participation from OpCo, YC, Palmer Luckey, Jared Friedman, DTX, RoboStrategy and others, to build the first metal service center designed from the ground up to run like a software company.
The Company
Nox Metals is a vertically-integrated metals service center that runs like a software company. They buy standard aluminum plate from rolling mills, cut it to the exact specifications each customer needs, and ship it fast with full traceability documentation. Their customers are CNC shops, metal fabricators, aerospace OEMs, and defense contractors who care about three things: getting the right dimensions, getting them fast, and knowing exactly where the material came from.
What separates Nox from the 6,300 other companies doing some version of this is WAYNE, a proprietary AI engine that evaluates thousands to millions of possible cut layouts per plate in 30 seconds, batches multiple customer orders onto shared plates to reduce scrap, and delivers instant quotes through a customer portal called GONDOR. The result is that Nox can process and deliver orders faster than some competitors can provide quotes. Since launching production only seven months ago, they have shipped metal to hundreds of American factories.
Why You Should Pay Attention
The largest players in this market run on monolithic ERP systems where replicating what Nox has built would require a multi-year, eight-figure replatform. No board will greenlight that project while existing orders are still processing.
Meanwhile, the demand side is changing fast. America is pulling manufacturing back home. Defense and infrastructure spending is at generational highs. A new generation of advanced factories - Anduril, Atomic Industries, Hadrian, SpaceX - are coming online, and they need suppliers built to match their pace and certification requirements. Legacy service centers cannot keep up. SpaceX heard about them through social media, became a customer, and reported that Nox finished their order before any competitor could even submit a purchase order.
The Details
The margin story in metals comes down to one thing: material yield. Traditional service centers lose 30-40% of every plate to scrap. WAYNE attacks that problem from every angle at once.
For a single order, WAYNE selects the optimal layout from thousands to millions of candidates evaluated in seconds. When multiple orders come in, it batches them across shared plates so remnants from one customer become useful material for another. Leftover drops get scored against live demand and sold rather than written off. And because every completed job adds a training record, the models get better as order volume grows. A competitor starting today is at least 12 to 18 months behind on training data, and that gap widens rather than closes.
The full platform, called NOX NEST, handles everything from quote intake to shipping: instant algorithmic pricing, AI-parsed material lists, automated work orders, four-point quality control checklists with dual signatures, real-time order tracking, and self-service certificate delivery.
Why We're Invested
Founder-market fit here is as strong as we see. Zane Hengsperger grew up on his father's machine shop floor, watched software transform their quoting speed in 2018, and spent years thinking about what that meant for the rest of the industry. Before starting Nox, he acquired and operated a 30-person fabrication facility and doubled its valuation in 12 months. He did not stumble into this market - he mapped it carefully, talked to 30+ manufacturers, and concluded that metals supply was the single biggest leverage point in US reindustrialization.
The team around him has the same depth. COO Vince Mazzei spent 21 years at Alro Steel, a $4B competitor, and left because he saw what Nox's software could do to the business model he had operated his whole career. CRO Kelly Gibb has 15+ years selling to exactly the customers Nox serves. Founding engineer Inan Syed built WAYNE from scratch, and the platform attracted 500+ engineering applicants in its first year.
Nox fits squarely in our focus on AI-forward companies transforming industries that have resisted modernization. The software moat widens with every order. The demand is documented and real and the team has operated this industry at scale.
What's Next
This raise funds the build-out of a 30,000 square foot facility in Detroit and expansion to Los Angeles early next year. The longer-term vision is a national network of highly automated factories supplying cut metal to every company rebuilding American industrial capacity.
To learn more about Nox Metals or to explore becoming a customer, visit noxmetals.com.
