Sustainment and the Future of US Manufacturing

Unless proudly announces our lead of a $12M Series A investment in Sustainment, the Austin-based company that’s jump-starting American manufacturing by connecting small- and medium-sized shops into a hyper-connected digital ecosystem. The simple explanations for our investment are an experienced and inspiring founding team, a growing business with a massive market opportunity, and a great product that customers can’t get enough of. And a deeper dive reveals deep connections between Sustainment and the mission of Unless: to catalyze a new industrial revolution to mitigate climate change, boost the efficiency and resiliency of supply chains, and enable equitable work.

Sustainment, led by Army veteran CEO Bret Boyd, is an online software platform that efficiently connects manufacturing suppliers and customers to jump start American manufacturing. Sustainment’s platform reduces sourcing time and costs by an estimated 30-40% per year while also providing better asset utilization for domestic manufacturers. Sustainment offers a secure, transparent, traceable, domestic solution to manufacturing – a notable contrast to online prototype solutions that offer parts "black box" from unknown foreign sources.?

Moreover, new companies in aerospace, energy, mobility, and robotics frequently need to stand up entirely new supply chains for their innovative products. Those who can do so quickly and efficiently will be the winners, and Sustainment will help them win. “Here we are working to solve the world’s energy problems,” a founder of a new energy company told me recently, “and what’s limiting us is access to welders.” I immediately connected them to Bret and the Sustainment team.?

Even before the pandemic, weakness in domestic manufacturing was crimping US economic growth, with dire economic, social, and political implications. Every dollar of US manufacturing adds almost four dollars to the economy, with a similar ratio for job creation. Demographic labor shortages, the need for decarbonization, climate-induced disruptions, and national security concerns are a few of the factors that have led to a bipartisan consensus to revitalize US manufacturing systems, with significant federal support from stimulus bills, the infrastructure bill, and the Chips and Science and climate bills that became law this summer. Despite economic uncertainty, the winds are propelling Sustainment forward.?

Even economists are beginning to recognize that manufacturing, far from being a low-value sub-industry to export, is key to a vital and innovative economy. While the US has excelled at product innovation, it has lagged in process innovation, and in the twenty-first century the two are deeply intertwined. Few expect a wholesale backing off of globalization, but onshoring for protecting critical supply chains (e.g. defense, semiconductors, PPE, aerospace, mobility, medical) is already underway and will continue for the foreseeable future – forces that directly benefit Sustainment.?

Sustainment’s goal is to support and revitalize bedrock American manufacturers. Small and medium-sized enterprises (less than 500 people) make up more than 98% of US firms and employ almost half the total workers. These shops are deep repositories of skill and expertise, distributed throughout the landscape, and serve as vital economic lifelines for their communities as well as key suppliers for larger manufacturers. In other countries, such business are part of thriving ecosystems of support, apprenticeship, and information. But in the US, small manufacturers are, to use the words of my MIT colleague Susanne Berger, “home alone,” lacking connectivity to larger ecosystems. They often have only the most basic digital presence (simple websites), lack capital to invest in new equipment, and suffer from generational change as owner-founders retire. Sustainment directly addresses these problems by offering easy access to a connected ecosystem, to an extensive network of state-level manufacturing support organizations and, most important, to large, well-funded customers.??

The team at Sustainment has military roots, and they began by addressing the massive manufacturing ecosystem surrounding the US Air Force. In today’s Silicon-valley focused world, it may not be obvious why a group of West Point graduates, Special Forces veterans and Military Academy instructors is an ideal fit for US manufacturing (though they all have successful startup experience too). But West Point was the first engineering school in America, the Army Ordnance Department led the development of interchangeable parts that enabled assembly-line mass production, and the US Air Force sponsored numerically-controlled machine tools that are the foundation of today’s advanced machining. Logistics, supply, – and yes, sustainment – are embedded in military leaders’ core operating principles. Today, the Department of Defense is the largest customer of machined parts in the country. Manufacturing is a form of national service.?

Manufacturing is the lifeblood of industrial societies. It is a noble enterprise, humbly engaged with the complex material realities of the world.? It is hopeful, creating the things that human being needs for survival and happiness. It is dynamic, in constant response to the myriad unpredictable changes of the world. And, as anyone who makes things knows, manufacturing benefits from close relationships between product innovation and process innovation. We will lead the future by inventing, but also by making what we need. Congratulations to Sustainment for this major step on that journey; we at Unless could not be more excited to share it with you.?