Nox Metals builds tech-enabled metal service centers to re-industrialize U.S. supply chain

been waiting for. You all been waiting. Will they bring a massive block of metal onto the stream? The answer is yes. Great to see you. The answer to dude, you uh got a little workout on the way in. Look at this. How many pounds is that? No clue. No clue. A lot. I borrowed it from Astronis. Okay.

Wait, did you sell it to them and then you brought borrowed it back or is this just theirs? This is theirs. They wanted to help the cause. Yeah, it's illustrated. So, yeah. Why Why is this sitting here? What do you do? Introduce yourself. Who are you? Yes. My name is Zane.

I'm the founder of Knox Metals and we cut metal. So, we're trying to build the most efficient metal service centers in America to empower every factory in America to work with better margins to move faster. Okay. There's a lot of ways. He's doing the meme. He's doing the meme. He's doing the meme.

The reason he's re-industrializing also also to be clear, this is Zayn uh from X. You probably if you're if you're on the Everything app, you've seen him before. Uh he's been on the show via his post many times before. So, it's great to finally I've been printed a few times. Yeah, you're a printer.

Yeah, that was that was fun. I remember one time I was watching TVN and I was like for some reason it was like I had to go somewhere and I was like I just skipped to the print section. You guys would print the best tweets and I was like who they got today? Who is you? That's fantastic.

Okay, so there's a lot of ways to cut metal. Adrian's doing a bunch of CNC machines. Uh there there's other people that are doing additive stuff. We've talked to 3D printing guys who build the metal structures up. Uh what is your specific like like put it in like Lego terms for me?

like a how are we actually cutting this metal? Okay, so to be clear, we would sell this to Hadri. Yeah. To someone like a Hadrien. Okay. Um what we do is we buy big billets, usually the size of an F-150. Okay. Put it on our saw, which is about the size of four F-150s. Wow.

And then we band saw cut it and then we sell like and then it can go into a CNC machine, fits into a CNC. If you want to make an F-18 part, a component for your washing machine, you name it. This is incredibly deep in the stack. I love it. Yeah. So like the operation is really simple. complex operations of the factory.

Like I'm sure you guys want to hear why just pure metal. This is insane. So so many challenge. So it's not local. It seems like obviously like it's not easy to just cut through metal, but it seems like that's relatively solved. Yeah.

What you're trying to solve is like the efficiency in the factory because even if you you make this block then how do you get it? How do you store it? How do you trans? You know you nailed it. So like the metal service industries is like $300 billion these guys do a year.

Like if you're a metal service center that's the total of the market. Yeah. We we strongly believe that they are Yeah. John lift the lift. Actually it's going to destroy No, it's going to destroy his suit. We need it for tomorrow. Interesting. I can I can figure it out.

We basically strongly believe that they have a ton of overhead and lack all the technology in the world that puts a tax on every metal sold in America. That's why you're seeing more metal bought from the USA or bought from China. Like I worked in like like a small PE shop.

Like everyone I talked to they're like, "Hey, how do we get stuff in from China? " So like we want to re PE shop like private equity. Yeah. Okay. We want to like re-industrialize the metal service later. Okay. Yeah. So, so how much of the value is just there's going to be a bigger by by American wave.

There might be more regulations, more tariffs, and so it makes more sense now to do this work in America versus you think that you could long-term go toe-to-toe against a Chinese metal shop and just with better better workers, better automation, better technology, you will just have a better product even in a completely level economic playing field.

Exactly. And like the key thing you said there is product and what is product? The factory, right? So everything that goes into it, procurement, inventory management, like you said, estimating. So how do we get blocks? Uh the cheapest block to any factory in America next day. Yep. That's the goal. Got it.

Uh we have a lightning round that we've been doing. Uh first question, uh who's your favorite entrepreneur? Alex Karp. Of all time, Alex Karp. We've had him on the show last week. I think that's a great pick. Second, uh how did you make your first dollar online or in business?

Uh, my dad had a machine shop and he made me scrub the floor. I was 14 years old. No way. Family business,000 foot facility. One man success. Sounds incredible. Wait, how how's how's the fund raise gone? Oh, I'm going to try and lift this. It's good.

Uh, we closed like Yeah, we had like an initial goal and we closed that, but Oh, it's so heavy. There we go. Let's go. Come on. Yeah. Just break this. It's liftable. It's liftable. I I would put that at over 100 pounds. Yeah. And it's such an awkward My guess was My guess was 97. 97. Okay. No, fun is going well.

We like had an initial goal. We We got there and now seeing some more interest. So, thinking about raising some more just to have a bit more runway and move faster. Count me in, Chad. Count me in. I'm riding with you. Thanks so much for coming. I know. I should have brought my physical checkbook.

Such a missed opportunity. Great to see you, dude. You're a legend. Good luck with that. What a terrible prop. Anyway, okay, that was fun. I think I broke a sweat. This was not the right move. Let's see. Yeah, I was trying to warn you. Thank you so much for coming on the