Detroit — You hear a lot of talk about reindustrializing America these days. About the necessity to bring back local manufacturing of everything from raw materials to finished consumer products. You hear less about the people actually doing it.
Zane Hengsperger is one of them. His startup company NOX Metals cuts aluminum to size from a Detroit factory space with the singular goal of supplying America’s growing industrial base.
Zane isn’t your typical factory guy. Not in 2025, at least. A 2022 University of Michigan grad, his vibe is more San Francisco tech bro than Detroit metal processor. You could easily see him pitching new social media apps instead of cutting metal, dressed casually in a black long-sleeve shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a Tigers cap.
Instead, he’s the fledgling Zuckerberg of aluminum. That’s part of the appeal, and it’s not just aesthetic or incidental. Bringing modern tech into the aluminum space is the core ethos of his company, which aims to use automation to rapidly expedite the notoriously slow process of quoting, ordering, and shipping custom-cut metal.
So far, NOX has received $4.6M in pre-seed funding from groups like Y-combinator, a venture capital firm known more for its tech-world startup investments. It’s unusual for them to invest in physical processing and manufacturing. Zane’s ability to translate the language of manufacturing into the tech-speak ubiquitous in that world, however, has paid dividends.
Local investment groups too, like Detroit Venture Partners, have jumped in to fund this aluminum startup. There’s a syncretistic vibe to the whole endeavor, blending West Coast futurism with gritty Detroit industrialism.
The pitch is simple—America is reindustrializing, aluminum processing is notoriously slow and bogged down by antiquated quoting and ordering processes that take weeks, and NOX developed a system to make it all faster and more accessible to customers at any scale.
Aluminum is a lynchpin for industrial processes at every level, from tool-and-die makers to complex machining and consumer-product manufacturing. It’s a critical pressure point for American industrialization across the board, and NOX is positioning themselves to lubricate the dozens of downstream sectors.
Inside the NOX factory space, it’s a mix of cutting-edge tech (literally) and a century of American industrial history.
Meeting up with Zane, the address sent me to a sprawling factory complex near Detroit’s Mexicantown. Dating back from the 1920s, the complex now houses a variety of businesses, from heavy machining to industrial storage.
It had the feel of those old World War II documentaries, where you see rows and rows of planes lined up for assembly in factories just like this. The facilities are older now, rust tinging away at the window edges 60 feet above the floor, but you can still feel the energy.
These are places where things are made, where things happen, and aren’t just talked about. In our deindustrialized era, most Americans have never even seen the inside of factories like this, let alone worked in one.
Zane showed us his pride and joy, a giant platform with a saw mounted at the end. Clamped to its surface, a massive block of aluminum, delivered just that day from the foundry.
NOX doesn’t produce aluminum itself—it cuts raw blocks of it to size and ships them off to customers who do the more detailed machining to make parts. In a way, the business is simple: They get large blocks of metal and cut them into smaller blocks.
The reality is more complex. These massive blocks are heavy, for one. Zane demoed the motorized chain system used to carry the blocks to the platform, the blue metal chains whizzing along through the expansive space.
The saw itself cuts the blocks precisely to size, lubricating them with a cooling liquid all the while, and then they’re sent off to customers. Countless aluminum shavings drop to the floor beneath, collected for smelting and recycling later.
Zane was enthusiastic about his tools, and about his business. His Dad owned a machine shop growing up, so his first thought leaving college was making an impact in the manufacturing space. His eyes lit up showing off the aluminum cutting saw, the factory, the heavy moving equipment.
He believes in his mission and spoke widely about the importance of reindustrialization, not just for America but for the future of Western civilization more broadly. A lofty vision, but even more importantly, I could tell how simply cool he thought this all was, to be in the thick of it and building something new.
He’s originally from Windsor, Ontario, across the river, but don’t hold it against him. When asked why he chose to headquarter his business in Detroit, he said quite simply that Detroit remains an incredible hotbed of industrial manufacturing knowledge and resourcefulness.
That’s not something you usually hear in the broader zeitgeist. The narrative, by and large, has been that the factories are gone, manufacturing is all overseas. It’s dead in Michigan, only China does that now.
That’s true to an extent. Detroit’s industry has suffered immensely due to decades of offshoring. Yet, Zane spoke confidently that even a generation or two later, the nucleus remains. That there’s an incredible wealth of skill and knowledge remaining to this day in Detroit, making it the ideal place for new industrial efforts.
This contrasts with the other narrative you hear too, from a lot of Detroit politicians most notably, that while Detroit has been down on its luck for some time, it’s on the come up now, and you should buy the dip while it’s cheap.
On the contrary, Zane spoke quite simply about Detroit, that it’s the manufacturing capital of the rust belt and the ideal place for industry because of the still-present skill, knowledge, and industrial infrastructure—not someplace dead that you can buy for cheap.
Not just a positive vision for the city, but a resounding one that hearkens back to Detroit a century ago. Detroit as the city of global industrial dominance, a future city, the place where everything is made.
NOX may just be one startup, cutting big blocks of metal into smaller ones. But there’s a reason they’ve found investors, and an audience, particularly on Zane’s rapidly growing X account.
Yes, the business model and methods are compelling. But more than that, Americans, and especially Detroiters, are desperate for a vision of a future of opportunity, prosperity, and growth.
A young man building a business is as American as apple pie, and people love to see it. Especially when he’s building something real and physical, not just another awful dating app.
It’s so normal in the tech world, Zane said, for college students to do internships and job shadowing programs, but no one ever thinks of getting deeper into the manufacturing world. If you’re young and curious yourself, and the idea of getting into manufacturing appeals to you, find a local business near you and ask for a factory tour.
Maybe that’s the better answer for young people than just telling them to skip college and go into the trades, like so many conservative influencers do. That’s all well and good for some, but there’s another model here that combines actual societal productivity with the opportunity for social advancement and wealth sought by ambitious young people.
Put down the dating app and the Fortnite controller, and go buy yourself a band saw or a CNC machine. Secure some funding and rent a warehouse space with your bros. Build something crazy, not just what’s expected of you.
We can’t go back to the old days of American industrialism, but we can forge a new vision of it. One that’s tech-forward and leans into the future, instead of grasping at the past. We need young people to do it, and they need to know that’s a possibility for them, because most have never even considered it.
We need an army of new young industrialists, but we need to inspire them first. Sometimes that just takes the example of one young man.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
