Massachusetts-Based Manufacturing Accelerator Re:Build Closes $2.1B Funding Round to Supercharge U.S. Domestic Industrial Revitalization

Re:Build, the hard tech manufacturing accelerator rooted in Massachusetts that spun out electric vehicle startup Slate Auto in 2023, announced a landmark $2.1 billion capital raise on Tuesday.

The firm confirmed it will deploy the new funding to scale Re:Build’s end-to-end domestic hard tech production capacity and launch a new cohort of specialized industrial startups, with the stated goal of ensuring the world’s most innovative physical products can be manufactured entirely on U.S. soil for generations to come.

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The round was co-led by General Catalyst and JPMorgan Chase’s Strategic Investment Group, with no additional participating investors publicly disclosed at this time.

This massive capital injection lands amid a rapidly growing market and policy push to onshore U.S. manufacturing and build out localized, resilient domestic supply chains, a strategic shift widely framed as a hedge against longstanding overreliance on overseas production, particularly in China.

“Re:Build was born out of the clear reality that decades of American deindustrialization is both a catastrophic economic failure and an urgent national security risk,” Re:Build co-founder Jeff Wilke shared in an official statement. Wilke previously served as Amazon’s global commercial CEO, and has long advocated for rebuilding U.S. hardware production capacity. “This capital lets us move far faster and pursue far more ambitious goals than we ever could have otherwise, to build a world-class manufacturing enterprise and a platform that anchors American industrial leadership for the long term. The products and new companies already emerging from our ecosystem are concrete proof that we can restore America’s industrial might.”

General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja echoed that framing in his own statement, noting his firm has prioritized industrial revitalization for years: “Rebuilding U.S. domestic industrial capacity is one of the single most important economic and national security imperatives of our time. To compete on even footing with China, reindustrialize the American heartland, and revive the small towns and working class communities left behind when production moved overseas, we can’t rely on scattered small startups alone. We need platform operators that can operate at genuine national scale — and we need the entire U.S. innovation ecosystem to re-learn how to build hardware, not just software, at home.”

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Officially founded in 2020, Re:Build positions itself publicly as “America’s answer to Shenzhen”, and carries deep ties to Amazon’s senior leadership circle. Beyond Wilke, Re:Build’s chief digital and product officer is Wei Gao, a long-serving Amazon vice president and former technical advisor to Jeff Bezos, with dozens of other senior executives across the firm also hailing from the e-commerce giant’s core operations team.

Across its six years of combined operational history, Re:Build claims to have launched hundreds of distinct products and custom end-to-end production systems. It operates via two core models: it forms deep partnerships with legacy industrial firms to support full-cycle design, engineering and large-scale manufacturing across high-stakes verticals including aerospace and defense, and it incubates standalone startups targeting critical, historically underserved industrial markets. As of today, Re:Build’s full portfolio of connected firms employs more than 2,100 people across the U.S., and controls over 2.4 million square feet of dedicated domestic manufacturing floor space.

One of its highest-profile spinouts to date is Slate Auto: Wilke and co-founder Miles Arnone first developed the core concept for the low-cost EV maker in 2022, and chose to spin it out as an independent entity the following year to help the startup unlock larger, targeted pools of growth capital. Slate Auto has since raised no less than $1.4 billion in total funding — including backing from Jeff Bezos’ personal family office — to develop its line of ultra-low-cost, modular bare-bones pickup trucks that can be fully customized to individual customer preferences.