Why the co-founder of Dispo made the jump of social media in steel

Daniel Liss, co-founder of The Social Network available and the Teaser AI meeting application, is convinced that he is on the next great thing: Steelmaking.

It all started, incongrument, with Some spurs He wrote for Techcrunch on the antitrust application in social media.

The comments apparently attracted the attention of some people to Washington, DC, said Liss to Techcrunch, and led him to be invited to judge a Capstone Game exercise in the spring of 2023 organized by the National War College. The war game was very awareDirecting a scenario in which the United States and China fought for supremacy on Taiwan and the Southern China Sea.

Liss’ removes from the exercise? “Our main supply chain of the arsenal of democracy-literally, the ships in which my grandfather fought-we do not have the capacity to build ships. If we did, we did not have steel to do so,” he said.

At this stage, Liss said that he had become “really interested, obsessed, even” by the steel supply chain. “It was really the birth of Nemo Industries.”

The basic field for Nemo IndustriesThe latest startup of Liss seems to be drawn from a Venn diagram of two very American anxieties, steel and AI. The company, so far, operated in stealth, but Liss has given a look at Techcrunch behind the scenes.

First, the obvious part: Nemo will use AI to optimize the production of melting, modernizing an industry which, according to Liss, is terribly exceeded. “These plants are executed, at best, Excel spreadsheets. At worst, clipboard technology,” he said. The people who direct them have “incredible expertise”, he added, but it is the kind of thing that does not evolve well.

But Liss does not launch Nemo as another element of industrial software. Nemo rather plans to build his own ovens. The decision has been motivated by Liss’s conviction that companies that use AI since creation will have a “margin advantage of 20% to 30%” compared to competitors.

In steel, such a conviction is not cheap. Hyundai Motor Group said in March that it built a steel factory of $ 6 billion in Louisiana to provide its factories in the Nemo factory in the United States may not cost as much, because its operations will be focused on cast iron, an intermediate product that Steellerieurs use to make a range of different alloys.

Nemo will draw its ovens using natural gas, which releases less carbon dioxide than coal, which is commonly used in the iron and steel industry. Liss said that the company was planning to capture carbon ovens pollution; The tax incentives introduced into the law on the reduction of inflation remain largely intact, and they make the efforts profitable for Nemo, he said.

Liss’s partner in Nemo is Michael Dubose, an investor who previously worked at Cheniere Energy, a natural gas company. “He built billions of dollars in LNG infrastructure,” said Liss.

The startup will need this kind of scale if it wants to succeed. Nemo previously raised $ 28.2 million, according to Pitchbook, and he is currently in talks with existing investors to lift a series A of $ 100 million with existing investors, a person familiar with Techcrunch told Techcrunch. The company has also received offers for more than a billion dollars in incentives from two southern states if the company can build three factories in 15 years, the person said.

This is a major challenge for anyone who is attacking, but Liss said that this type of ambition was necessary if the steel industry would provide the type of yields desired by venture capital. And, he added, basic industries like Steel have historically won large victories for investors.

“When you look at the history of our country, many of the largest companies that have created disproportionate results for their initial investors were in these categories,” said Liss. “In the end, what were the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the Melons and the Fricks in which the amounts in dollars are so important in these categories.”