April 8th, 2025
Today, we launched Amca with $76.5 million in funding and a vision to renew the spirit of the aerospace and defense industry’s golden age. Our launch funding was led by Caffeinated Capital with major participation from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and other world-class investors. In our first five months, we’ve built our initial team, acquired Electro-Mech Components (based in El Monte, California), begun prototyping new mission-critical products, and count Boeing and Lockheed Martin among our customers. We’re proud of the start, but we have a long way to go to match the excellence that came before us.
In the world of business, legacy is often a dirty word, implying inertia and an inability to adapt. But the legacy of American aerospace and defense is special—far brighter than the industry’s current state. In 1970, First Lady Pat Nixon christened the first 747 as it entered commercial service, just four years after development began. The primes today that cannot deliver aircraft with decades-old designs on time and on budget are a far cry from this Boeing of half a century ago.
The sheer force of will of the engineers who made the 747 program possible is matched only by the thousands of founders who—through blood, sweat, and generational dedication—built and nurtured the supplier businesses that also made it possible. Their stories have rarely been told. These men and women, with children at home and livelihoods on the line, took on a level of risk unimaginable to most startup founders today. There is no better example than Wally Trumbull and his son Terry. In 1963, Wally started Electro-Mech Components while raising six children. Over the years, Wally and Terry built a company whose switches met standards few thought achievable at the time. Alongside them, employees like Diana Marquez gave decades of their lives to the work—and to one another.
Today, the backbone of the industry rests on hundreds of specialized small and mid-sized suppliers like Electro-Mech. These companies quietly design and produce the products every system depends on, from transducers to flight control computers. For decades, they have applied deep mechanical, electrical, and even ergonomic expertise to build critical hardware. But their legacies are vanishing, just as their work is needed most to support a new wave of multi-decade programs. While most new aerospace and defense startups focus on designing new systems or automating parts manufacturing, the thousands of products that fall in between are being left behind. Without greater supply and performance of these products, future aircraft and systems will fall short of their missions.
The next chapter of American aerospace and defense won’t be defined by new software, flashy designs, or billion-dollar government contracts alone. It will be decided by whether we can still make the products that make those systems real, and take them to the next level of performance, scale, and efficiency. That future doesn’t start completely from scratch. It begins by inheriting the knowledge, products, and spirit that make those systems possible today. It also demands complementing and building on that foundation: equipping it with new talent, exceptional engineering, and radically close collaboration with customers. Doing both means throwing out the conventional playbook.
It’s natural, then, that Amca is a new kind of company: a legacy business, built for the future. Far from being a relic, Amca intensely values the technical depth and cultures that came before us and turns them into a force multiplier for what comes next. We are rapidly developing and acquiring a foundation of critical products that will power the next fifty years of aerospace and defense. Some will mistake us for another aerospace startup, chasing novelty for its own sake. Others will compare us to private equity, hunting other suppliers for piecemeal IRR. But Amca is neither. Each of these models fails in predictable ways; they treat engineering and production excellence either as an expensive curiosity or as something to be optimized and outsourced.
Much of what we rely on today in aerospace and defense exists because someone once risked everything to create it. The path forward isn’t to discard what thousands of Americans sacrificed to build, but to advance it. In doing so, we will honor the people in this industry who came before us by attempting exactly what they did: creating something bold against the odds, an embodiment of a new American legacy to inspire generations to come.
