Why Dispo’s co-founder made the leap from social media to steelmaking

Daniel Liss, co-founder of the social network Dispo and the dating app Teaser AI, is convinced he’s onto the next big thing: steelmaking.

It all started, incongruously, with a few op-eds he wrote for TechCrunch about anti-trust enforcement in social media.

The commentaries apparently caught the attention of some folks in Washington D.C., Liss told TechCrunch, and resulted in him being invited to guest judge a war game capstone exercise in spring 2023 hosted by the National War College. The war game was very au courant, running a scenario in which the U.S. and China fought for supremacy over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Liss’s take away from the exercise? “Our core supply chain of the arsenal of democracy — literally, the ships that my grandfather fought in — we don’t have the ship-building capacity. If we did, we don’t have the steel to make it,” he said.

At that point, Liss said he became “really interested — obsessed, even” with the steel supply chain. “That was really the birth of Nemo Industries.”

The basic pitch for Nemo Industries, Liss’s latest startup, appears as though it were drawn from a Venn diagram of two very American anxieties, steelmaking and AI. The company, until now, has been operating in stealth, but Liss gave TechCrunch a peek behind the scenes.

First, the obvious part: Nemo will use AI to optimize the production of pig iron, modernizing an industry that Liss said is woefully outdated. “These plants are run on, at best, Excel spreadsheets. At worst, clipboard technology,” he said. The people who run them have “unbelievable expertise,” he added, but that’s the sort of thing that doesn’t scale well.

But Liss isn’t pitching Nemo as just another piece of industrial software. Rather, Nemo is planning to build its own furnaces. The decision was driven by Liss’s conviction that companies which use AI from inception will have a “20% to 30% margin advantage” over competitors.

In steelmaking, such conviction doesn’t come cheap. Hyundai Motor Group said in March that it would build a $6 billion steel plant in Louisiana to supply its factories in the U.S. Nemo’s plant may not cost that much since its operations will be focused on pig iron, an intermediate product which steelmakers use to make a range of different alloys.

Nemo will fire its furnaces using natural gas, which releases less carbon dioxide than coal, which is commonly used in the iron and steel industry. Liss said the company is considering capturing the furnaces’ carbon pollution; tax incentives introduced under the Inflation Reduction Act remain largely intact, and they make the endeavor profitable for Nemo, he said.

Liss’s partner in Nemo is Michael DuBose, an investor who previously worked at Cheniere Energy, a natural gas company. “He’s built billions of dollars in LNG infrastructure,” Liss said.

The startup will need that sort of scale if it’s to succeed. Nemo previously raised $28.2 million, according to PitchBook, and it is currently in talks with existing investors to raise a $100 million Series A with existing investors, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The company also has received offers for over $1 billion in incentives from two southern states if the company can build three plants over the course of 15 years, the person said.

It’s a tall order for anyone to tackle, but Liss said that sort of ambition is required if the steel industry is going to deliver the sort of returns desired by venture capitalists. And, he added, basic industries like steel have historically delivered big wins for investors.

“When you look at the history of our country, many of the greatest companies that created outsize outcomes for their initial investors were in these categories,” Liss said. “Ultimately, what were the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the Melons and the Fricks investing in? The dollar amounts are so big in these categories.”