◢◣MaterialsDFW
A founding pitch — Olimjon → Luke

The supply chain for the physical world is about to get redrawn.
We should be the ones who draw it.

MaterialsDFW is the operating system for sourcing the metals and minerals America is about to need — starting with iron ore, built for the procurers buying it and the miners finding it.

Read the ask →Why now

The thesis, in one breath

Offshoring built a brittle, China-dependent industrial base. A war, a reshoring mandate, and an AI-native moment are converging. The next Cargill, McMaster-Carr, or Palantir of materials gets built in the next 36 months. We should be it.

Why now — three forces, one window

The big three.

None of these alone justifies a company. All three at once is a once-in-a-generation opening.

01

The Iran war ends — and the global supply chain gets redrawn.

When the conflict resolves, every nation re-evaluates who they buy from, who they ship through, and which chokepoints they'll never trust again. Strait of Hormuz. Bab-el-Mandeb. Suez. Every re-routed lane is a re-negotiated contract. Every re-negotiated contract is a search query that doesn't have a good answer today.

Whoever owns the index of who can deliver what, from where, by when, at what spec at the moment the music stops, owns the rebuild.

02

The supply chain is absurdly fragile — and everyone knows it now.

  • 2020 COVID — global container traffic seized; lead times went from weeks to quarters.
  • 2021 Ever Given — one ship, sideways, $9.6B/day in trade frozen.
  • 2022Russia — overnight, half of Europe's energy and a third of global wheat re-priced.
  • 2024 Houthis — Red Sea transits collapsed 70%+, rerouting added 4,000 miles per shipment.
  • 2025 Panama — drought-driven transit caps shaved daily crossings nearly in half.

Every CFO buying steel, copper, or rare earths got burned at least twice in five years. They are actively shoppingfor a tool that gives them a second source before the first one fails. That tool doesn't exist. It should be ours.

03

America is going raw-material independent — by mandate.

CHIPS, IRA, the Defense Production Act, friend-shoring, AUKUS minerals, the rare-earth executive orders — every signal points the same way: we will not buy our steel from China. Not for shipyards, not for transformers, not for skyscrapers, not for tanks.

We had Pittsburgh. We had a football team named after the industry. We melted the Carnegie furnaces and shipped the know-how to Hebei. Now we have to bring it back — and the builders pulling the contracts have no software for sourcing what they need.

Steel is the wedge. Concrete is the expansion. You cannot have a renaissance of mega-structures — fabs, ports, reactors, bridges, bases — without owning both.

Interactive — the redraw clock

When the war ends, the rebuild starts. When do we have to be ready?

Drag the scenario. The window for becoming a default doesn't reopen.

  1. +1 yr

    Ceasefire / resolution

    Markets stop hedging the worst case. Procurement teams unfreeze plans they've been sitting on for months.

  2. +1y 2m

    RFP wave

    Every Tier-1 issues new sourcing RFPs. The supplier list is the question. We need to be the answer that auto-fills it.

  3. +1y 6m

    Multi-year contracts get signed

    5–10 year offtake agreements lock in. Whoever isn't on the shortlist now is locked out for a decade.

  4. +2y 2m

    New domestic mines get permitted

    Every mining co. is hunting for the next Mesabi-grade deposit. Our reserve-discovery model becomes the hottest data product in the industry.

  5. +3 yr

    One platform becomes the default

    Like Bloomberg in finance, McMaster in MRO, ICE in commodities — one name wins materials. After that, displacement is impossible.

~27 mo
window to default-status
~9 mo
to MVP + first 50 logos
EXTREME
urgency to start

The product — two surfaces, one graph

What we're actually building.

One database of every reserve, processor, mill, port, and lane. Two SaaS surfaces sit on top of it.

For procurers — the buyer surface

Pick a material. See the world that can deliver it.

Type "iron ore, 62% Fe, 50k tons, FOB Houston, May." Get a ranked list of every supplier on Earth that can do it — ETA, landed cost, spec sheet, port-of-origin risk score, and a one-click RFQ.

  • Every spec, port, and lead time normalized.
  • Real-time risk scores tied to chokepoints, sanctions, weather.
  • Customers: ABC Supply scale → mom-and-pop fabricators.
For miners & processors — the discovery surface

An AI geologist that never sleeps.

Fuse satellite imagery, magnetic and gravimetric surveys, USGS historical data, topology, hydrology, and prior-drill outcomes. Output: a probability map of where the next economic-grade deposit actually is. Sold by the seat to the explorers and miners chasing it.

  • Inputs: Sentinel-2, Landsat, USGS, state survey archives, drill logs.
  • Output: ranked targets, with confidence and modeled tonnage.
  • Sold as a data subscription + per-target unlock to mining cos.

The buyer side tells us what the market actually wants. The miner side tells us where to look. The two flywheels feed each other. Nobody else has both.

The beachhead

Iron ore → steel → concrete. In that order.

Two materials build everything that matters. We earn the right to both.

  1. 01

    Iron ore

    The narrowest, most-priced, most-tracked input. Easiest to index, easiest to win trust on. The wedge.

  2. 02

    Steel — long & flat

    Once the ore graph is real, the mill graph is one degree away. HRC, rebar, plate, structural shapes.

  3. 03

    Concrete & aggregates

    Cement, fly ash, aggregate, ready-mix. The other half of every megastructure. A natural cross-sell to every steel customer.

  4. 04

    Strategic metals

    Copper, nickel, lithium, rare earths. The friend-shoring portfolio. By then, we are the index.

Who pays us

National distributorsABC Supply-scale buyers running multi-state procurement.
Regional fabricatorsMom-and-pop shops who survive on getting one quote 20% better.
EPCs & GCsAnyone fulfilling DoD, DOE, or chip-fab build-out contracts.
Miners & explorersJunior miners hunting domestic deposits; majors testing extensions.

Why us, why DFW

The right city for the rebuild.

Dallas-Fort Worth is the logistics gravity well of the new industrial map: BNSF and UP both terminate here, three of the top inland ports in the country, the largest concentration of steel fabricators outside the Midwest, and a state government that signs reshoring incentives the same week they're proposed.

Pittsburgh built the last industrial era. DFW will route the next one. We're already here.

$1.4TU.S. reshoring announcements since 2022
70%of global steel still produced in China
0good software tools for sourcing it
2founders who can fix that

The ask

Luke — build this with me.

Olimjon Nematov
OlimjonProduct, AI, the buyer surface.
Luke
LukeOperations, GTM, the supplier & mining surface.

I'm not pitching you on a startup idea. I'm pitching you on a window — one that opened because of a war we didn't start, in a country we offshored to, and that the next four years of policy will keep open barely long enough for two people to walk through.

The companies that win materials sourcing in this cycle will get written about the way Carnegie and Cargill and Ingram are written about now. There is a real shot we are two of those people.

Six months heads-down. Iron ore. DFW. You and me.If you're in, the next thing we do is pick a Saturday and spec the v0.

I'm in →I have questions