Manufacturing is, like, hotter than hot right now.
This morning, the Advanced Manufacturing Company of America, better known as Amca, raked in some serious reindustrialize-flavored cash, announcing a $300M Series B at an over $1B valuation. Caffeinated Capital led the round, with Lightspeed, a16z, Lux Capital, and Construct Capital participating.
- The raise comes about a year after Amca’s $76.5M Series A, also led by Caffeinated Capital.
- The 18-month-old company also revealed the acquisition of BC Systems, a power electronics supplier “supporting multiple growing classified defense programs.” Mysterious indeed.
Networking: A lot of new-age manufacturing companies are focused on building futuristic robot-filled factories from the ground up. That isn’t Amca’s game. Instead, the company’s more designed around acquiring legacy and often single-source mom and pop critical component suppliers, bringing them into their manufacturing network, and, with their software platform, into the 21st century.
They’re not opposed to building their own factories “wherever we feel that we need to do a net new build, or we feel that the existing manufacturers are not best suited for what we think the industry needs,” Amca CEO and serial entrepreneur Jai Malik told Tectonic and other reporters this week. That includes a recently opened advanced prototyping and testing facility in El Segundo (because where else).
Ramping up: The company now operates six critical component factories—in addition to the Gundo facility—with a combined 123,000 square feet of online production capacity in California, Iowa, and New York, where the newest member of the Amca fam, BC Systems, is based. Those facilities churn out critical components like hydraulics, power electronics, avionics, and more.
- That includes an “electromechanical component that’s going to be used on the F-35 very shortly,” Malik said.
- They also work with a range of other primes, including Boeing, Bombardier, Embraer, GE Aerospace, Airbus, Honeywell, and others.
According to Amca, bringing modern software—particularly their flagship product development platform RAPID—to legacy critical component manufacturing reduces the time “required to move production-grade hardware from development into deployment by over 67% compared to industry-standard lead times.”
- RAPID covers the whole component manufacturing lifecycle from design to prototyping, qualification, and manufacturing.
- “It allows our team to go from an initial concept and blueprint of what the design of a component needs to be to its final qualified design and a producible workflow within weeks,” Malik said.
That’s clearly been a hit with customers and investors alike. Malik couldn’t provide any financial deets, but said that “the company, compared to last year’s book of revenue, has 10X-ed in terms of its top line, and in the 12 months since we announced the last round, we’ve stood up six more factories; we were just one last year.”
Component cash: With a fresh $300M in pocket change, Amca is focused on expanding RAPID, creating or acquiring “additional factories nationwide for the mission-critical production that we’re doing,” and delivering “the components that we’re designing and qualifying most essential to national readiness faster.”
The jump in valuation into unicorn territory since the Series A was also “closer to five to seven times, as opposed to one to two times, I’ll put it that way,” he added.
Are you feeling the reindustrialize vibes yet?