Most billion-dollar companies do not begin with a guy who could not get anyone to cut him a small piece of metal.
In the mid-2010s, Jim Belosic, a Reno native, was restoring cars and motorcycles in his spare time. He kept needing small custom metal parts, and the industrial shops he called did not want the work. One-off orders were not worth their time. So in 2018 he and a collaborator, Jacob Graham, bought a plasma cutting table (a Torchmate 2x2, reportedly on credit for around $30,000) and set it up in the back of a small Reno warehouse. They started cutting parts for hobbyist friends around Reno and Sparks. In the earliest days, the story goes, some of them paid in six-packs of beer.
Belosic was not a first-time founder. He had already built and exited ShortStack, a Reno software company, and was known online as the "pancake guy" behind a viral blog and a book of elaborate pancake art. What he and Graham brought to the metal shop was not metalworking. It was software. They wrote a program that takes incoming orders from many different customers and automatically arranges, or "nests," all of those parts onto shared sheets of material, packing them tightly to waste as little as possible. That one idea is the whole business. It is what lets a factory profitably make a single bracket for a hobbyist at a price that pencils out, because that bracket is sharing a sheet with a hundred other people's parts.
Belosic had been building things to sell since he was a kid mowing lawns in rural Nevada, and he taught himself to code after high school. ShortStack, the social software company he ran before this, had taught him that the hard part of a business is rarely the obvious part. In a metal shop, everyone could see the machines. Almost nobody was treating the scheduling and the sheet-packing as a software problem worth solving. That was the opening.
From plasma table to platform
SendCutSend turned that into an online instant-quote platform. You upload a design file, the site prices it in seconds, and the part ships, typically in one to three business days. What began as laser cutting grew into a full digital manufacturing menu: fiber and CO2 lasers, waterjet, CNC routing, bending and forming, powder coating, anodizing, plating, tapped hardware. The maker community gave it nicknames that stuck. The "Etsy of steel." More recently, the "Amazon of manufacturing." Belosic has his own framing, a "Home Depot" model, a SendCutSend within reach of every major metro.
The scale is no longer a side project. By the end of 2025 the company says it had produced more than 30 million custom parts for over 300,000 customers. It runs factories in Reno, in Arlington, Texas, and in Paris, Kentucky. According to reporting by The Hustle, something like 60 percent of the Fortune 500 and nine of ten private rocket-launch companies have used SendCutSend at some point. It now makes the steel racks that house servers in the AI data-center buildout, and flight hardware for commercial space.
Those factories, in Reno, in Arlington, and in Paris, run around the clock. Belosic's stated ambition is geographic: a "Home Depot" model, a SendCutSend close enough to every major metro that a part ordered today can arrive almost immediately. And the customer base is wider than the maker-tool reputation suggests, spanning hobbyists and hardware startups and large companies across aerospace, defense, robotics, transportation, marine, and agriculture.
"I'm a big fan of focusing on things that are within my control. This is about real actions we can take."
The eight-year overnight success
For roughly eight years, SendCutSend grew the unfashionable way: bootstrapped, on reinvested profit, a small early friends-and-family round, credit, and patience. Belosic has been candid that he held off on venture capital on purpose, waiting for investors who understood that hardware is hard. The company crossed $100 million in revenue in October 2025, growing around 80 percent year over year.
Then, in May 2026, it took its first big institutional round: $110 million, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Paradigm, with the Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison joining in. The reported valuation was about a billion dollars, which makes SendCutSend a Reno unicorn. Alongside the raise, the company pledged a five-year, billion-dollar commitment to U.S. manufacturing jobs and domestically produced materials, and started talking about building what it calls "anything factories." It has appeared on the Inc. 5000 (around #339 in 2023 and #511 in 2024) and Deloitte's Technology Fast 500.
The reason the round was news is that Belosic spent years turning money down. He has been blunt that he did not want investors who treated hardware like software, and he waited until what he calls the "reindustrialize" moment arrived and brought partners who understood that atoms are harder than bits. The billion-dollar commitment attached to the raise is pitched at exactly that: rebuilding the American muscle to make physical things quickly, in small batches, the slice of manufacturing the country mostly sent overseas.
A single bracket, priced as if it is sharing a sheet with a hundred other people's parts. That is the whole trick.
Why it matters that this happened in Reno
SendCutSend is the kind of company economic-development officials usually have to recruit from somewhere else. This one grew up here. Its headquarters sits on Longley Lane in Reno, running banks of fiber lasers that cost more than a million dollars apiece, and as of mid-2026 it employed more than 500 people. In June 2026 it announced a fourth Reno facility and on-site hiring events for roughly 200 new roles in production, finishing, shipping, and quality, at quoted wages of $24 to $42 an hour. Those are exactly the diversified, advanced-manufacturing jobs the Reno-Sparks region has spent two decades trying to build beyond logistics and gaming.
The Reno operation is capital-heavy in a way a software unicorn never is. The company runs on the order of a dozen fiber laser cutters, each costing well over a million dollars, alongside robotic milling and finishing lines, and it has grown its local team from a few hundred people to several hundred in a couple of years. Regional economic developers point to it, alongside names like Tesla, Switch, and Redwood Materials, as proof that the Reno-Sparks corridor can grow its own advanced manufacturing rather than only import it.
There is a through-line from SendCutSend to the rest of what we cover here. A company like this needs people who can afford to live near the work, which is the whole case for building more housing. It needs an industrial corridor, fast permitting, and a state that makes it easy to expand. The optimistic version of Nevada's next decade is not one big bet. It is a hundred companies like this, started by people who could not find anyone to cut them a piece of metal, and decided to do it themselves.
Reporting drawn from Inc., The Hustle, the Northern Nevada Business Weekly, Nevada Business Magazine, The Fabricator, and TBPN, among others. A few figures vary across sources and are reported here with that in mind: revenue is given as the confirmed $100 million milestone (October 2025) rather than the less consistent annual or cumulative framings, headcount as the most recent company-wide figure, and valuation as the widely reported ~$1 billion (one outlier headline citing a higher number appears to be an error). Direct quotation reflects Jim Belosic's public posts on X. We will update as the company confirms specifics.