Grant Brown is a principal at 8090 Industries, an early-stage industrial deep tech venture firm backing the next generation of industrialists.
What is 8090 Industries and what’s your background?
I work on the investment team at 8090 Industries as a principal. We’re an early-stage industrial deep tech firm. Our investor base includes strategic industrial partners globally. These are the industrialists of our day looking to bring innovation and participate in Industry 2.0, 3.0, 4.0.
I started my career nontraditionally in oil and gas as a pipeline engineer. I worked in South Texas, West Texas, Louisiana, and onshore and offshore on projects from Pennsylvania to Florida. I started with a hard hat and steel-toe boots on the ground, touching and feeling infrastructure, understanding what it takes to run both domestic and international commodities trade.
My last engineering role was in southwest Louisiana managing two gas plants that fed about half the gas to the LNG export terminals. At the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, we were moving lots of gas to Europe and Asia. We got hit with back-to-back hurricanes and had to rebuild those facilities twice in two months. Construction projects normally take 18 months; we brought the first facility up in 17 days.
That experience piqued my interest in the macroeconomic forces at play, so I made a career pivot to commercial operations and commodity trading. Eventually I joined Williams’ new energies team working on their net-zero strategy, which led to building four business units: carbon capture, hydrogen, renewable power, and renewable natural gas. When we realized technology was the missing gap, we set up a corporate venture arm that I ran for about two years before joining 8090.
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8090 was doing industrial deep tech “before it was cool.” What makes you unique compared to newer funds?
I love that there’s more attention on the space. It’s massively important. The role of venture investors is to infuse private capital and bring experience to help founders build their vision. I’m not one of those that “hates the tourists”. I’m super excited. Reindustrialization is a full court press and will require an all hands on deck effort.
I see the mission very clearly. The industrial world has been forgotten for the last three plus decades when it comes to innovation. You see equipment and processes from the post-World War II era still implemented today. We fundamentally reject the idea that we peaked technologically in 1965. 8090 is an expression of the history of America. We’ve been doing industrial deep tech before it was cool.
Our unique advantage is that we’re rooted in industrial deep tech and hardware. We’re not legacy software investors, so we look at industrial tech with a fresh perspective that’s needed when scaling hardware versus software. We’re unencumbered by the pattern matching that comes from having been in software and having to change gears.
Across our team, we come from industry including Williams Companies, Marathon Petroleum, Reliance Industries, GE, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada Corporation. This is critical when implementing similar frameworks into alternative industries. We touch everything from energy to manufacturing to defense to aerospace, typically at pre-seed and seed. Some notable portfolio companies include Oklo, the small modular nuclear reactor company that went public last year; Armada, which spun out of SpaceX doing modular edge computing; and Exawatt, which does modular solar thermal power generation for data centers and industrial customers.
What are the key indicators of reindustrialization actually happening?
The entrepreneurial spirit is deeply rooted in the American story. Koch Industries, Duke Energy, and Exxon-Mobil at one point had to start somewhere. Reindustrialization is just a remanifest of who we are as Americans. The task ahead is steep, but I have the utmost confidence that we’re in the right place with the right people to find solutions. This country has always risen to the task.
When it comes to identifying pre-seed founders who can go the distance in industrial deep tech, this is different from software. In the early days, you’re more of a collaborator with entrenched incumbents. You have to navigate that through time. If you’re building nuclear reactors or power generation solutions, you’ll have entrenched players on both sides of you, as upstream suppliers and downstream utilities. You need to operate within industry confines to build your wedge, then scale within that industry and widen it over time.
What we look for in pre-seed founders: resilience and immense belief in what they’re doing, but also the ability to translate the grand, multi-decade vision to monthly tactical execution. We also see that domain expertise no longer requires a decade of experience. In the information age, young people can get up to speed on complex topics very quickly. We’re seeing founders in their early and mid-20s with not only immense talent but deep understanding of the industries they’re penetrating.
What concerns do you have about the reindustrialization movement?
There’s often questions asked like “are we in a Reindustrialize/American Dynamism Bubble?” I don’t think we’re in a bubble because the size of the task and mission is big enough to satisfy the immense amount of private capital coming into reindustrialization, manufacturing, onshoring, and defense. But we inevitably will have a wait-and-see period once private capital has been deployed to see who has continued to progress and deliver on core unit economics and sovereign capabilities.
I urge the public not to look at that as the popping of a bubble. Capital has been deployed, innovation is happening, and immense talent in the reindustrialization space will be heads down executing. There will be an inherent cooling period on deployment, which everyone should be confident about. When you bake a cake, you put the ingredients in a pan and put it in the oven for 20 to 40 minutes. We’re going to have our 20 to 40 minutes here soon, but I have utmost confidence that the cake that comes out will be delicious.
How do you see alternative capitalization schemes enabling industrial scale?
The reindustrialization movement is both hardware and software married together. There’s a playbook to build and finance infrastructure that’s not all equity financed. Historically, if you build pipeline systems or power generation, there’s flexible finance from large groups on both equity and debt sides, alongside public sponsorship to build large infrastructure projects. The reindustrialization movement is the Manhattan Project infrastructure challenge of a lifetime.
We’ve seen private capital through venture and private equity play a huge role in early reindustrialized players. But private credit and even syndicated project credit will be massively important to ensure venture investors can continue investing and have the returns they want, while infrastructure investors and private credit get the return profile they want.
States are getting involved, seeing reindustrialization as an opportunity to bring skilled labor and high-paying jobs back. Oklahoma has seen numerous deep tech, aerospace and defense companies set up operations with immense support from policymakers. You’re seeing Louisiana with Port Alpha and Saronic. Our portfolio company REGENT Craft is working closely with their home state of Rhode Island to build a manufacturing facility for commercial seagliders. The saddest part about deindustrialization was the erosion of middle America. I went to college at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, IN. I saw first hand how states like Indiana were brutalized by offshoring. Now states like Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Missouri have an opportunity to participate greatly in reindustrialization. We’re talking about factory jobs of the future that bring the best minds from robotics and manufacturing to the Rust Belt.
How does defense fit into the reindustrialization thesis?
The primes catch a lot of flak but they still play a critical long-term role in adopting and sponsoring new technology from outside into the Department of Defense (DoD). Anduril has done a great job solidifying their place as a new prime by bringing new products with the fidelity they’ve built over eight to 10 years.
With that said, commercial innovation was what underpinned the arsenal of democracy in World War II. It was our ability to produce stuff that translated to producing critical equipment for the war effort. The DoD is incentivized to take commercial off-the-shelf solutions first before paying for bespoke solutions. That’s thematically relevant for us.
We invest in the defense industrial base and defense technology, but we’re also heavily focused on dual use tech as an enduring moat for abundance that can be shifted into production for defense in time of need. Yes, we’re huge fans of Anduril, Saronic, and Castellion who are purely B2G businesses. But we also want to back the suppliers and vendors of the core capabilities and components that allow those groups to function. Companies like Atomic Industries reinventing injection molding might not be sexy to the public, but they have influence across the DoD, automotive industry, and space economy. Companies like Armada who will provide edge compute, connectivity, and operational AI for remote sites in both the private and public sectors.
How do you define deep tech?
Deep tech inherently refers to complex problems, with “deep” referring to length from maturity and moonshot ideas. But I continue to be more bullish that deep tech won’t be deep tech for very long. New talent is closing gaps quickly, and the entrepreneurial spirit is bridging the divide between vision and execution in short order.
For all the doomers who think deep tech is consistently seven to 10 years out, I hate to break it to you: it’s not. You have immense demand, leadership in Washington that are willing to trial new technologies and democratize procurement, and industrial incumbents who need to increase production and find ways to make goods in the United States. That makes them more willing to support and integrate new solutions.
I’d say the bias against deep tech is dwindling. We’ve got portfolio companies that are 18 months old that in the next 24 months will make massive waves on a global scale and change the way we look at industry. I’m so bullish on the ability for tech to meet the market very fast, both in the readiness of industry to accept it and the ability to meet needs in short order from founders and founding teams.