Lightspeed is doubling down on Amca’s $300M Series B, valued at over $1B, alongside Caffeinated Capital.
Here’s why.
We believe the pursuit of AI is noble, but American innovation runs deeper than just the digital world. It’s the planes, trains, ships, and automobiles that once filled factories across every corner of the USA. We fought and won world wars on the back of a highly skilled and proficient domestic manufacturing base. Core to that industrial skill set was the “unsexy stuff” — the engineered parts and complex subsystems, machined and forged by certified domestic suppliers.
Unfortunately, we believe that base has been quietly atrophying for decades.
It’s hard to field new aircraft or new defense systems on a supply chain that depends on a handful of legacy single-source vendors. Amca exists to help rebuild that base.
Jai Malik and Eli Giovanetti are doing it by innovating on the hardest part of the aerospace and defense supply chain: highly certified, precise, and complex engineered parts — the actuators, switches, landing gears, etc., that make aircraft like the Boeing 737 and Lockheed Martin F-35 a dependable choice for many around the world. Amca is bringing modern engineering principles and rigorous certification and design software to the thousands of critical parts and subsystems required to make our aerospace industry work. In eighteen months, that has compounded into six factories across California, Iowa, and New York, supplying engineered parts for the F-35 and major commercial aerospace widebody and narrowbody programs.
What convinced us to back Amca originally in their Series A — and to lean in here again — is that Jai and Eli are addressing the complex and essential engineered parts first. They are doing the hard stuff. Something essential to America, but also a massive part of the market. The parts Amca builds are critical to aviation safety and essential to keeping our defense systems operating to help deter war.
Jai and Eli have shown in less than two years that they are well on their way to rebuilding the structural, unglamorous layer of American industry that every aerospace and defense program ultimately rests on. That’s the work that needs doing, and almost no one is doing it at this scale.
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