Why Dispo co-founders have made their leap from social media to steel manufacturing

Daniel Liss, co-founder of Social Network Dispo and The Dating App Teaser AI, is sure he will be in Steelmaking, the next big thing.

It all began with discordant harmony with some Op-Eds I wrote for TechCrunch about anti-trust enforcement on social media.

The commentary appears to have caught the attention of some people in Washington, DC, Squirrel told TechCrunch and was invited to the Guest Judgent Judge Dutgent Duction Capstone Exercise in the spring of 2023. The war match was very courant, running a scenario in which the US and China fought for hegemony over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

liss ‘Want to leave exercise? “The core supply chain of democratic weapons – the ship my grandfather fought – we don’t have the capacity to build a ship. If so, we don’t have the steel to make it,” he said.

At that point, Lis said he was “really interested, even and even” in the steel supply chain. “It was truly the birth of the nemo industry.”

The basic pitch of Nemo Industries’ Liss’ latest startup looks like it was drawn from two very American insecurities: Steelmaking and AI Venn diagrams. The company had previously operated in stealth, but Squirrel took a behind-the-scenes peek at TechCrunch.

First, the obvious part: Nemo uses AI to optimize pig iron production and modernizes the industry that squirrels say is terribly outdated. “These plants are running on spreadsheets at best. At worst, clipboard technology,” he said. He added that the people who do them have “incredible expertise,” but that doesn’t expand well.

However, Liss is not selling Nemo as just another industrial software. Rather, Nemo plans to build its own furnace. The decision was driven by Liss’ conviction that companies using AI from INCEPTION have a “20% to 30% margin advantage” than their competitors.

At steel mills, such beliefs are not cheap. The Hyundai Motor Group said it could not be too expensive as it will focus on Pig Iron, an intermediate product that its operations use to make a wide range of alloys to supply the plant to NEMO plants in the US.

Nemo fires furnaces using natural gas that releases less carbon dioxide than coal commonly used in the iron and steel industries. Squirrel said the company is considering capturing carbon contamination in the furnace. He said the tax incentives introduced under the Inflation Reduction Act remain largely intact and benefited NEMO’s efforts.

Nemo’s Liss partner is Michael Dubose, an investor who previously worked for natural gas company Cheniere Energy. “He built billions of dollars on LNG infrastructure,” Lis said.

Startups need that scale to succeed. According to Pitchbook, Nemo has previously raised $28.2 million and is currently in discussions with existing investors and raising a $100 million Series A with existing investors. The company has also received more than $1 billion incentive offers from two southern states if it can build three plants over the course of 15 years, the person said.

It’s a high order that everyone is going to tackle, but Squirrel said that such ambition is necessary if the steel industry provides the kind of returns venture capitalists want. He added that basic industries like Steel have historically provided great victory for investors.

“If you look at the history of our country, many of the greatest companies that produced the results that would occur for the first investors were in these categories,” Lis said. “In the end, what were the flicks that Rockefeller, Carnegie, Melon and Flick are investing in? In these categories, the dollar amount was very large.”