Rebuild Manufacturing raises $2.1B from JPMorgan and General Catalyst to reverse US deindustrialization

Rebuild Manufacturing raises $2.1B to rebuild US industrial capacity

Miles Arnone, co-founder and CEO of Rebuild Manufacturing, spent fifteen to twenty years doing industrial turnarounds in private equity before founding Rebuild in 2020. What he saw repeatedly was the downstream consequence of offshoring: companies would capture short-term margin, then quickly lose the design capability to iterate on their products, and often watch their Chinese contract manufacturers use the same intellectual property to build competing goods. Rebuild is his attempt to reverse that at scale.

The company now employs 2,000 people across 15 facilities, with capabilities spanning metallics, composites, electronic systems, large-scale assemblies, drones, batteries, aerospace, and robotics. It grew through a combination of acquiring 13 businesses to build out a broad engineering base and incubating new companies internally.

The $2.1B raise

The round was co-led by JPMorgan Chase and General Catalyst. Arnone frames both as long-horizon investors, which matters for a business whose thesis — rebuilding US industrial capacity — doesn't resolve in a typical fund cycle.

“Rebuild was founded in 2020 to try and help reverse the extensive deindustrialization that's gone on in this country for the last forty years... We're about 2,000 people now across 15 facilities that can engineer and build complex products with startups typically or more established companies that have a new kind of hard tech and bring them to market and build them here. This fundraise, which was $2,100,000,000, was led by both JPMorgan Chase and General Catalyst.”

Drones and the cost gap

The drone supply chain is where the competitive math is hardest. A group one quadcopter from DJI lands in the US for under $2,000. A comparable US-made product runs $5,000 to $8,000. In a military context where affordable mass is the objective, that spread is prohibitive.

Rebuild's answer is a "drone core" platform — a configurable base that buyers can attach different payloads to — targeting a US wholesale price of roughly $1,600. The path to that price isn't just domestic sourcing; it's redesigning the production system alongside the product. A traditional drone design might involve 100-plus fasteners, each requiring labor or automation to install. Eliminate those fasteners through design, and the unit economics follow. Rare earth magnets remain the hardest unsolved input — domestic motor winding has scaled faster than expected, but magnet supply is still predominantly offshore.

Robots vs. lean manufacturing

Arnone is skeptical of robotics as the primary lever for cost competitiveness. Robots attack direct labor, which is a relatively small slice of total production cost. Most of the waste — and therefore most of the opportunity — sits in the surrounding process steps. Arnone argues the Toyota lean production model, which grinds out a quarter or half a percent of cost each week through incremental waste elimination, outperforms large capital investments in automation over time. US manufacturers tend toward the latter because it's more legible as a bet, not because it's more effective.

Slate Auto

Slate started inside Rebuild and has since spun out as an independently funded company. It's developing a sub-$25,000 electric pickup truck at a time when the average new US vehicle has crossed $50,000. The product logic mirrors Rebuild's drone approach: strip the vehicle to minimum viable function, build a single-SKU plant optimized for one product, then allow downstream customization. Each truck ships in slate gray; full wraps cost around $500, and modular kits let buyers convert to an SUV-style configuration. Rebuild supplies components to Slate today as a vendor.

Arnone describes the Slate model as a template for how Rebuild engages with hard-tech startups more broadly — either incubating companies internally or helping externally founded ones reach manufacturing scale.