Re:Build Manufacturing has a generational vision to re-energize American manufacturing with high tech design and engineering capabilities across our critical industrial sectors, including aerospace, healthcare, defense, and cleantech. Core to its mission is creating enduring jobs while strengthening vulnerable supply chains. General Catalyst is investing $120MM to help support Re:Build’s vision.
At General Catalyst, we are drawn to visionary founders leading ambitious teams that challenge the status quo and have the potential to transform society in positive ways. Re:Build’s founders and business embody our global resilience thesis, which calls for modernizing our most critical sectors, and perhaps nowhere is this more important than in rebuilding our physical production capabilities.
The revitalization of the U.S. industrial base is more than an economic opportunity. As we outlined in our industrial resilience piece, it’s become a strategic imperative. From 1980 to 2024, manufacturing jobs in America dropped from over 19 million to about 12.5 million. For years, corporations shifted their CapEx to a diverse network of external suppliers, frequently located overseas. While the strategy has historically been rewarded for its efficiency, it also set into motion unintended consequences in that skilled workers, proprietary knowledge, and domain expertise inevitably joined the outflow as well. The view of businesses through a labor cost savings lens begs a larger question: What is the total cost of ownership that accrues with offshoring production overseas? This pursuit of short-term profit at all costs inadvertently erodes U.S. competitiveness, limiting supplier diversity, depleting specialized skills, and forcing a dependency on potential adversaries for critical components and materials.
Today, the true potential for U.S. manufacturing remains obscured by antiquated perceptions of industrial labor, manual assembly lines, and sluggish growth. For those builders and innovators actively choosing to work on specialized production, they are met with an alternate reality: their skill sets today are valued at a premium, and modern factories are the nexus of physical and digital innovation, converging advances in connectivity, robotics, sensors, and AI into core processes. For the AI revolution to realize its full potential, we need a renewed focus on the physical world.
Innovating in these markets is not easy and requires understanding multiple distinct market domains. As long as the U.S. and our allies are engaged in a prolonged, strategic power competition, there will be efforts to build more diversified and resilient supplier bases at home, increase production capacity, sustain deeptech development, reduce foreign dependence on raw materials, and improve our specialized workforces. In order to do so, this will require further investment in R&D, talent, technology, and access to various types of capital.
The Re:Build Story
The Re:Build story started decades ago when the developing degradation of the U.S. industrial base inspired Jeff Wilke and Miles Arnone to enroll in MIT’s “Leaders for Manufacturing” graduate program. Their paths diverged when Jeff built the consumer business at Amazon, effectively reinventing direct-to-consumer distribution. Meanwhile, Miles became the president of several emerging U.S.-based machine tool companies and managed manufacturing-focused private equity firms. In 2020, their paths converged once again, and Re:Build was founded to bring back high-quality, cost-competitive manufacturing to U.S. soil.
Re:Build offers a renewed vision of American industry in the image of a Japanese keiretsu — an alliance of generationally-run advanced engineering businesses that collaborate to provide customers with the capabilities to design, manufacture and produce their products in the U.S. Re:Build works locally with aerospace & defense, automotive, healthcare and cleantech customers, deploying their wide-range of capabilities and engineering acumen. The company has grown rapidly since its founding, both organically and through acquisition. Today, Re:Build comprises 13 businesses across multiple engineering disciplines.
Transformation Through Radical Collaboration
Small and medium-sized manufacturers represent about 98% of the U.S. manufacturing base. They contribute nearly half of our output yet are hamstrung by a lack of access to capital to invest in adequate technology and incentivize talent. The responsible distribution of technological advancement requires radical ecosystem collaboration from capital providers to academia, policymakers and the workforce.
Re:Build embodies this spirit of radical collaboration. In 2023, Re:Build partnered with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, the Regional Industrial Development Corporation (RIDC), and Pennsylvania leaders to invest in a new manufacturing facility in Westmoreland County. Once operational, the 175,000 sqft. facility is set to create at least 300 new jobs in the county.
A resilient industrial base relies heavily on education and workforce development. Recognizing this, Re:Build has committed resources to nurturing the next generation of manufacturing talent through vocational training and apprenticeships. Today, these apprenticeship programs emphasize critical trades — electrical and pipefitting, equipment assembly, and welding.
In line with Responsible Innovation, Re:Build operates under the guidance of the Re:Build Way, a framework of 16 core values that steers both leadership and employees to build with transparency and intention.
We are thrilled to announce our investment and to partner with Jeff, Miles, and the entire Re:Build team in this next chapter.
