🤠 Happy Hump Day, folks. IPOs and other capital market shenanigans on the brain this week. But first: next week marks one year of Per Aspera. We’re planning a special edition and now’s your chance to make the cut: Tell us what you got done in the last year, what you want our tribe — the ones who give a damn — to achieve in the next year, the hardest problem you’ve ever solved, or a provocation worth chewing on (don’t hold out on us here, spicy take slingers!) Finally, one we’ll take anonymously: What’s your most important, deranged hard tech truth take that very few people agree with you on?
IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:
📋 The IPO long tail
🏗️ America's Shenzhen? (V2)
🛗 Elevators, plumbers, toilets
🏎️ Czinger × Goodyear
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The Connecticut machine shop now known as PCX Aerosystems is older than powered flight. It opened in 1900 as Fenn Manufacturing and has supplied Sikorsky with helicopter rotorheads and transmissions since the Korean War. Last December, Greenbriar Equity combined it with Applied Aerospace, a composites shop out of Stockton, CA in business since 1954. The result: a 1,300-person, 1.3M-sqft. manufacturer of fuselage panels, flight control surfaces, solid rocket motor cases, and engine shafts for Northrop, RTX, Lockheed, BAE, Anduril, Boeing, and GE Aerospace. The business grew ~25% in 2025: four-fifths government, the rest commercial.
On Friday, the combined company — Applied Aerospace & Defense — filed for an IPO under the ticker $AADX on the NYSE.
Precisely the kind of deep-tech, dual-use supplier we keep saying needs more public-market oxygen!
So let’s talk about the long tail…
Mega-primes, LSIs, multi-$B reshoring projects, and chip darlings are great — we love them! — but we can’t forget the smaller shops, suppliers, picks-and-shovels operators, and non-prime product companies. This is “the long tail” supplying, machining, integrating, qualifying, and delivering the industrial substrate that helps underwrite American hard pursuits, deterrence, and prosperity.
And something is happening out there.
Applied Aerospace & Defense will join a wave of newly public industrials and hard tech companies clamoring to go public. AI chipmaker Cerebras, who re-filed in April, has a monster (+ massively oversubscribed) debut expected any day now. HawkEye 360 (RF geolocation from orbit) just went out last week. AEVEX, Arxis, Elmet Group, and Swarmer (the Erik Prince-affiliated Ukrainian drone AI developer) all listed within the last two months.
The new trade
We like Josh Brown’s coinage for this phenomenon: HALO — Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence. Capital is rotating back into sectors with hard-to-replicate physical capacity and real-world moats. We call this: overdue!
Of course, we can’t talk about hard-tech IPOs without the big daddy, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. SpaceX is the platform company of platform companies, the single biggest outcome of the distribution, and an event that will set the tone for capital markets and our community (🫵 Per Aspera-pilled people, with obsessive drive and endless psyche to pursue hard things). More on that another time, because SpaceX is the head and this is about the tail: the suppliers, integrators, and assemblers making their way to public markets more quietly.
Why going public matters
Three good reasons:
More capitalization strategies: Six months ago, we wrote that a specialty manufacturer with $150-250M in revenue, critical process know-how, and a dual-use customer base “should have the IPO path available to them.” (AADX fits this description almost too perfectly.) The venture-to-prime route is too narrow a channel for the breadth of companies the industrial base needs; IPOs could help build a wider bench of small/mid-cap industrials.
More selective exposure: More IPOs mean investors can own specific slices of the industrial stack — not just the glossy end products or finished systems that capture the narrative premium. In the last few weeks alone, the menu has expanded to include drone subassemblies, orbital RF intelligence, and refractory metals.
The civic, capitalist, and populist case: Microsoft IPO'd in 1986 with $140M in revenue. Amazon in 1997 with $15.7M. Almost all the wealth those companies created, they created in public — and any teacher, machinist, retiree, or 401(k) holder could ride it for thirty years. A generation of perpetual private rounds has changed that, confining wealth creation in America’s most dynamic companies to a smaller cohort of insiders, crossovers, and accredited LPs. An industrial renaissance financed entirely that way is not really one that the country owns. If the companies building America’s 21st-century MFG, compute, energy, defense, and space base are going to define the next several decades of GDP and national power, ordinary Americans ought to be able to own them!
The good news: it seems that this will soon change, with the most defining companies of our time — SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI — as well as more of the long tail beside them. Progress!
What do you think? Agree/disagree? Reply and let us know.
The show goes on. Last week we asked y’all where America’s Shenzhen will be built, but we tucked the question deep in the back half of an issue our man Dan was running away with. To the 0.5% of you who have already voted — thank you! we love you! — but we’re going to run it back. We won’t stop until we get 2% of you to weigh in. Please, for the sake of community and non-scientific pollsters everywhere, before you read any further, answer us this:
Where Will America's Shenzhen Be Built?
(For anyone out of the loop: Shenzhen is the Pearl River Delta city that went from fishing village to the densest hardware-manufacturing cluster on Earth in under 30 years. Home to DJI, Tencent, Huawei, and the BoM for your favorite humanoid company. The case for an American one has been building for years and, by this point, has reached a fever pitch.)
ELEVATORS & TOILETS, OF ALL THINGS… Everyone talks about the same supercycle stories: hyperscalers continuously revising capex up and to the right, semi stocks gapping up 5-10% almost every day, and turbine reservations and transformer lead times exploding. Like Robert Frost, we prefer the road less traveled, hence our running beat on “the supercycle’s second-order winners” (see: #025, #029, #037). The rules, for management, are simple: zero credit if you say ‘we’re an AI stock/story/play now’ (looking at you Allbirds). Instead, we’re on the hunt for ‘unsexy’ players who are non-obvious, capable, and materially benefitting from the buildout. Four new ones to tell you about:
001 // The Elevator Company. Farmington, CT-based Otis — the world’s largest elevator maker — launched Otis Robust in April: a heavy-duty line built specifically for multi-story datacenters (DCs). Weeks later, CEO Judy Marks touted the global DC opportunity on her earnings call. While the product is brand new, demand is already showing up on the books, with Americas new-equipment orders up 20% (offsetting a >20% China sales decline). Say it with us: elevators are critical AI infrastructure!
002 // The HVAC Guy. Houston-based Comfort Systems USA installs and services the ductwork, chillers, and piping that go inside the AI token factories. CEO Brian Lane — who himself has used the phrase "industrial supercycle" — reported a quarter that would make his AI-pilled customers blush: revenue +56%, backlog at a record ~$12.5B, and tech/DC work going from a third of their business to nearly half in a single year.
003 // The Plumber’s Plumber. If Comfort Systems is the MEP contractor, Watts Water Technologies is the OEM supplying the valves, pressure regulators, and heat exchangers those contractors install. They also put on a clinic in supercycle shovel-selling in Q1: net sales up 21% to $677M and 23% Americas growth on the back of DC-related projects. Not too shabby for a 152-year-old plumbing company.
004 // The Japanese Toilet Company. Toto — yes, Toto, the toilet company — has been mass-producing electrostatic chucks (the ceramic parts that hold silicon wafers flat inside semiconductor etch tools) since 1988, using the same advanced-ceramics craft it honed on high-end sanitaryware. The Ceramics segment’s operating margin is now ~41% (vs. 7% company-wide), and throws off ~55% of group operating profit. The toilets are the side hustle now…
A couple of weeks ago, a BlackSky Gen-3 optical satellite captured this unbelievable image of a Falcon Heavy rocket, 38 seconds after launch, as it was traveling more than 400 MPH.
How can you see this and not be bullish on Team Space? As we said in #045, What. A. Time. To. Be. Alive!
Czinger Vehicles and Goodyear have released the Fast in Us campaign, ft. the sexy Czinger 21C 🥹 and some 🇺🇸🦅🌌 hero shots. Czinger, for those who don’t know, is sister company to PA founding sponsor Divergent, and the disruptive designer/manufacturer of ultra-high-performance, Made-in-USA supercars.
128 years ago, Frank Seiberling bought two empty factories in Akron, OH, and started turning out horseshoe pads, poker chips, and bicycle tires. He named his company after Charles Goodyear — the self-taught chemist who'd discovered vulcanized rubber in 1839. Within a few years, Seiberling was supplying Henry Ford. Today, Goodyear is NASCAR's sole tire supplier, the winningest brand in F1 history, and the last independent tire manufacturer standing in America.
Kevin Czinger, the supercar company’s namesake, is also an Ohio kid. His brothers taught him how to fix cars. He’s the son of a WWII vet, a Marine Reserve rifleman, Yale Law grad, PA reader … the list goes on! He’s spent the last eight years at Divergent and Czinger Vehicles using AI to design metal structures and 3D printing to build them, producing parts lighter and stronger than what you can get from conventional manufacturing. And the proof’s in the pudding: The 21C took the production-car lap record at Laguna Seca in December.
That should get you feeling fired up as we sign off. We’ll see you back here next week for the 1YR bday.
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