Manufacturing

The hardest part of scaling a defense-hardware company isn't the hardware

Investors stopped paying for prototypes and started paying for throughput. Most defense-hardware teams have a shop floor and a group chat — not a coordination layer.

The money moved from prototypes to throughput. The teams that win the ramp are the ones that build the coordination layer above the factory floor — with applied AI applied where judgment is expensive, and a human in the loop where being wrong is costly.