Dispo Co-Founder Launches AI-Driven Steelmaking Venture

In a surprising pivot from social media to heavy industry, Daniel Liss, co-founder of Dispo and Teaser AI, is now targeting steelmaking with his stealth-mode startup, Nemo Industries. A guest judge at a National War College war game, Liss realized the United States lacks the steel capacity to build its own ships — inspiring him to modernize an essential supply chain.

From Social Apps to Steel

Liss’s background writing on antitrust in social media led to an invitation to judge a scenario where the U.S. and China battled over Taiwan and the South China Sea. The exercise revealed a glaring gap: even if the U.S. built shipyards overnight, it lacks the raw steel to supply them.

AI Meets the Blast Furnace

Nemo’s edge is artificial intelligence. While traditional pig iron plants still run on Excel or clipboards, Nemo plans to build furnaces embedded with AI models that optimize every phase of production. The goal is a 20–30% margin advantage over legacy operations that depend on manual expertise.

• Fragmented data streams across blast furnaces
• Inefficient fuel usage and high emissions
• Scalable expertise that can’t keep pace with demand

By applying predictive analytics and machine learning to furnace sensors, Nemo aims to reduce fuel consumption, fine-tune alloy composition, and forecast maintenance needs before failures occur.

Unlike industrial software vendors, Nemo will own its own furnaces. This vertical approach ensures AI models are deeply integrated from day one, delivering the operational edge that Liss believes venture-backed industrials need to deliver outsized returns.

Nemo’s natural gas-fired furnaces emit less CO₂ than coal, and the company is exploring carbon capture supported by tax incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act. With backing from LNG veteran Michael DuBose, Nemo has already raised $28.2 million and is in talks for a $100 million Series A.

Why It Matters

Steel has powered America’s industrial rise and remains critical for defense, infrastructure, and manufacturing. By injecting AI into the furnace, Nemo could reshape margins and carbon footprints in a sector often overlooked by tech investors.

As global tensions put supply chains under scrutiny, AI-driven metal production is more than an efficiency play — it’s a strategic imperative. QuarkyByte’s data analytics approach helps organizations map risk, optimize asset performance, and secure critical supply lines in the age of AI.