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Gaurab Chakrabarti

@Gaurab • 42,106 subscribers

CEO @Solugen | MD/PhD building the modern chemical industry | Making molecules that power humanity | Takes on manufacturing, energy, molecules, and biology

Shorts

King Slide, a Taiwanese maker of kitchen drawer slides, owns 70-90% of the market for high-end AI server rails. On Oct 30 it approved more than $600 million for what it plans as the world’s largest rail factory. If you were building a King Slide competitor, you could buy the steel and the steel balls. You would have to build the molds, the stamping and plating lines and the assembly machines yourself. You would also have to design around its roughly 3,750 patents. A server rail works like a drawer slide: three steel strips nest on steel balls. The two rails on either side of an AI server are 6.1 mm thick and hold a chassis of more than 40 kg. Each rail has more than 100 parts, and none can be off by more than 0.02 mm. Pulled all the way out, the rail holds the server from one end, and Nvidia’s next racks are heavier while the rails have to get thinner because liquid-cooling pipes take up the space. Nan Juen, another Taiwanese furniture-slide maker, had made server rails since 2002. When it went after cloud servers in 2012, it found no major customer for six years because the brands had already picked their rail suppliers. It reached Nvidia’s GB200 rack in 2024. A rail sells for under $100 and protects a rack that costs millions. In the second quarter King Slide’s gross margin was 87.4%. It still sells kitchen drawer slides.

King Slide, a Taiwanese maker of kitchen drawer slides, owns 70-90% of the market for high-end AI server rails. On Oct 30 it approved more than $600 million for what it plans as the world’s largest rail factory. If you were building a King Slide competitor, you could buy the steel and the steel balls. You would have to build the molds, the stamping and plating lines and the assembly machines yourself. You would also have to design around its roughly 3,750 patents. A server rail works like a drawer slide: three steel strips nest on steel balls. The two rails on either side of an AI server are 6.1 mm thick and hold a chassis of more than 40 kg. Each rail has more than 100 parts, and none can be off by more than 0.02 mm. Pulled all the way out, the rail holds the server from one end, and Nvidia’s next racks are heavier while the rails have to get thinner because liquid-cooling pipes take up the space. Nan Juen, another Taiwanese furniture-slide maker, had made server rails since 2002. When it went after cloud servers in 2012, it found no major customer for six years because the brands had already picked their rail suppliers. It reached Nvidia’s GB200 rack in 2024. A rail sells for under $100 and protects a rack that costs millions. In the second quarter King Slide’s gross margin was 87.4%. It still sells kitchen drawer slides.

235,788 次观看

The US used nearly two-thirds of its Patriot missiles against Iran. Now the $58.6B plan to replace them is screwed. Making Patriot missiles requires precision ball screws, and buying one can take years. Only a handful of US shops make the military grade. Demand is up as much as 50 percent since 2020. Most of those shops are already running at full capacity, and adding more means buying new grinding machines and hiring experienced machinists to run them. A ball screw converts a motor's spin into a straight push. Steel balls roll in a spiral groove, so about 90 percent of the motor's effort becomes push, against 20 to 40 percent for a plain screw. With the best grade, C0, the nut can travel 30 centimeters and end up within only 4 microns of where it should be, one twentieth of a hair. Cold-forming the thread inside a ball screw nut 13 mm in diameter takes about 3 seconds. Grinding the same thread takes about 6 minutes. Aerospace screws are hardened to 60 HRC first, which warps the bar, and then ground in a room held at 20°C. If you warm a 30-centimeter steel screw by one degree, it grows 3.6 microns. That alone uses up almost all of the 4 microns the best grade allows. Umbragroup's plant in Saginaw, Michigan, grinds aerospace ball screws. In the early 1940s it built the first ball screw used on the B-29 bomber. Eight decades later, 173 people work there.

The US used nearly two-thirds of its Patriot missiles against Iran. Now the $58.6B plan to replace them is screwed. Making Patriot missiles requires precision ball screws, and buying one can take years. Only a handful of US shops make the military grade. Demand is up as much as 50 percent since 2020. Most of those shops are already running at full capacity, and adding more means buying new grinding machines and hiring experienced machinists to run them. A ball screw converts a motor's spin into a straight push. Steel balls roll in a spiral groove, so about 90 percent of the motor's effort becomes push, against 20 to 40 percent for a plain screw. With the best grade, C0, the nut can travel 30 centimeters and end up within only 4 microns of where it should be, one twentieth of a hair. Cold-forming the thread inside a ball screw nut 13 mm in diameter takes about 3 seconds. Grinding the same thread takes about 6 minutes. Aerospace screws are hardened to 60 HRC first, which warps the bar, and then ground in a room held at 20°C. If you warm a 30-centimeter steel screw by one degree, it grows 3.6 microns. That alone uses up almost all of the 4 microns the best grade allows. Umbragroup's plant in Saginaw, Michigan, grinds aerospace ball screws. In the early 1940s it built the first ball screw used on the B-29 bomber. Eight decades later, 173 people work there.

1,368,630 次观看

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In four days of the Iran war, the US and its allies fired more Tomahawks than the US builds in four years. One bottleneck is energetics production. So we built a 100% CONUS energetics supply chain with our own capital. Our modular solution makes HMX and other advanced energetics, the explosives in nearly every US missile and munition. The US builds about 85 Tomahawks a year. The Army's only plant making the explosives inside them is 84 years old, and its $1B upgrade has slipped from 2025 to 2029 or later. That plant is Holston, in Tennessee. It makes about 3% of what it made in 1944, and buyers wait one to two years for its explosives. Holston makes its chemicals and its explosives on one site, so every expansion means building both plants there. A plant like that takes billions of dollars and about a decade to build. Permitting this in the US is a nightmare, because you’re taking on the risk of a chemical plant and an explosives plant at once. What could possibly go wrong. We separated the two. Terraforge 1, Solugen’s Houston plant, is tied into Houston's petrochemical infrastructure and makes inert precursors: white powders about as flammable as sugar. They can ship via FedEx or UPS, and sit in an ordinary warehouse. Discreet. Odin Energetics, our joint venture with Kraken Kinetics, turns them into explosives in shipping container reactors called Nitroforges. It took us six months to build the first one, and they can be set up where the weapons are needed. On-demand energetics. That means no stockpiles or concentrated first-strike targets. Kraken builds the warheads, so every step from chemical to warhead happens in the US. Together we stood up the entire chain from raw chemical to finished warhead. Odin can already make close to a tenth of what Holston makes in a year. To make more, we’re building several factories at the same time.

In four days of the Iran war, the US and its allies fired more Tomahawks than the US builds in four years. One bottleneck is energetics production. So we built a 100% CONUS energetics supply chain with our own capital. Our modular solution makes HMX and other advanced energetics, the explosives in nearly every US missile and munition. The US builds about 85 Tomahawks a year. The Army's only plant making the explosives inside them is 84 years old, and its $1B upgrade has slipped from 2025 to 2029 or later. That plant is Holston, in Tennessee. It makes about 3% of what it made in 1944, and buyers wait one to two years for its explosives. Holston makes its chemicals and its explosives on one site, so every expansion means building both plants there. A plant like that takes billions of dollars and about a decade to build. Permitting this in the US is a nightmare, because you’re taking on the risk of a chemical plant and an explosives plant at once. What could possibly go wrong. We separated the two. Terraforge 1, Solugen’s Houston plant, is tied into Houston's petrochemical infrastructure and makes inert precursors: white powders about as flammable as sugar. They can ship via FedEx or UPS, and sit in an ordinary warehouse. Discreet. Odin Energetics, our joint venture with Kraken Kinetics, turns them into explosives in shipping container reactors called Nitroforges. It took us six months to build the first one, and they can be set up where the weapons are needed. On-demand energetics. That means no stockpiles or concentrated first-strike targets. Kraken builds the warheads, so every step from chemical to warhead happens in the US. Together we stood up the entire chain from raw chemical to finished warhead. Odin can already make close to a tenth of what Holston makes in a year. To make more, we’re building several factories at the same time.

Gaurab Chakrabarti

197,119 次观看 • 13 天前

We spent $15,000 on billboards targeting one person: the guy controlling all the chemical spend at a saltwater disposal company in Texas. We mapped his commute and bought every billboard between his house and the oil field. When we finally called, he said "I see your billboards everywhere." That landed us our first oil field contract. At the time our entire operation was a $10,000 reactor built from PVC pipes from Home Depot, turning corn sugar into industrial chemicals. People keep trying to throw it away. It still works. That leaking reactor started a multibillion-dollar company. Y Combinator visited our plant in Houston. The original PVC reactor is still on the floor next to the Bioforge.

We spent $15,000 on billboards targeting one person: the guy controlling all the chemical spend at a saltwater disposal company in Texas. We mapped his commute and bought every billboard between his house and the oil field. When we finally called, he said "I see your billboards everywhere." That landed us our first oil field contract. At the time our entire operation was a $10,000 reactor built from PVC pipes from Home Depot, turning corn sugar into industrial chemicals. People keep trying to throw it away. It still works. That leaking reactor started a multibillion-dollar company. Y Combinator visited our plant in Houston. The original PVC reactor is still on the floor next to the Bioforge.

Gaurab Chakrabarti

949,309 次观看 • 7 个月前

20 of Germany's 50 richest people were born in 1965 or later. All 20 inherited their money (Forbes). In the US top 50, 10 of the 13 born in 1965 or later built their own companies. Twelve of the 20 Germans are Boehringer heirs. The family owns Boehringer Ingelheim, a drugmaker founded in 1885 that sold €27.8B of medicine last year. Most of the chemicals industry looks like this. BASF is 161 years old, Dow 129, and DuPont 224. They were founded when the basic reactions were discovered. In the 1930s, a job at DuPont was what a job at Google is today. Peter Thiel says chemical engineering hasn't been a field worth studying since the 1980s. In 2017, investors told us chemicals manufacturing was boring. YC partners said "do not expect to raise any meaningful money. No one understands what peroxide is." Sean Hunt and I built our first reactor from Home Depot parts. Our first sale was one gallon of peroxide in the back of Sean's Subaru. The companies founded in the 1800s were built on the first wave of chemistry. The second wave is here.

20 of Germany's 50 richest people were born in 1965 or later. All 20 inherited their money (Forbes). In the US top 50, 10 of the 13 born in 1965 or later built their own companies. Twelve of the 20 Germans are Boehringer heirs. The family owns Boehringer Ingelheim, a drugmaker founded in 1885 that sold €27.8B of medicine last year. Most of the chemicals industry looks like this. BASF is 161 years old, Dow 129, and DuPont 224. They were founded when the basic reactions were discovered. In the 1930s, a job at DuPont was what a job at Google is today. Peter Thiel says chemical engineering hasn't been a field worth studying since the 1980s. In 2017, investors told us chemicals manufacturing was boring. YC partners said "do not expect to raise any meaningful money. No one understands what peroxide is." Sean Hunt and I built our first reactor from Home Depot parts. Our first sale was one gallon of peroxide in the back of Sean's Subaru. The companies founded in the 1800s were built on the first wave of chemistry. The second wave is here.

Gaurab Chakrabarti

35,405 次观看 • 1 个月前

Our first reactor? Sean Hunt and I built it from Home Depot parts in three weeks. Rented a lab behind Dallas Love Field, had to rip out the ceiling panels to fit it. That machine started a multibillion-dollar company. People keep trying to throw it away. It still works. A year earlier I was 26, doing my MD/PhD, studying how pancreatic cancer hides from the immune system using chemistry. The mechanism? Cancer cells were producing hydrogen peroxide to blind immune cells. But the enzyme doing it? It was more efficient than anything in industrial chemistry. Cancer was outperforming a $6 trillion industry. A few months later, I was at a poker game in med school. Got seated next to Sean, an MIT chemical engineering PhD. He was studying hydrogen peroxide production at massive industrial scales. I told him his approach was techno-economically insane. Traditional chemical engineering: heat, pressure, heterogeneous catalysis. The whole industry operates at 20% yield and considers that acceptable. I'd just watched cancer cells hit 90%+. I was a cancer biologist. He was a chemical engineer. What if we married our two worlds? Six months later we pitched enzyme-based chemical production at MIT's 100K. We lost, taking second place for $10,000. I thought: "Either this works or I go be a doctor." So we drove Sean's Subaru to Home Depot and bought the biggest PVC pipe that we could find. They cut it so it would fit in the trunk. Three weeks later we had a leaking prototype, held together with zip ties, producing chemicals at 4x the industry average yield. That prototype made us the peroxide kings of Dallas. Two float spa owners saw our MIT pitch and shared it in their Facebook group. Suddenly we were supplying an entire niche we didn't know existed. We spent the next months driving around Houston, hand-delivering product. Made $10,000 a month from that PVC reactor. We had profitably miniaturized the chemicals industry. Same thing Nucor did for steel: decentralized production. That was 2016. Today: - Bioforges in Houston, Texas - Shipped 150M lbs of chemicals last year - DoD contracts for critical chemical precursors - Shipping container reactors deploying internationally - DOE Loan Programs Office funding (same program that backed Tesla) - Almost $1 billion raised from Founders Fund, Blackrock, Temasek, GIC, Baillie Gifford People have no idea how huge the chemical industry is. One of our customers: An 80-person water treatment company in rural America, quietly doing $250M annual revenue, with $150M spent just on chemicals. And there are thousands more like them. This is why it's a $6T market. And the supply chains are fragile. America has zero domestic TNT production until 2028. We import dozens of critical chemicals needed for semiconductor manufacturing. COVID and tariffs made it obvious: We don't make the chemicals we need to make the things we need. Much is learned in the making of things. You can read all the papers, draft business plans, theorize. But you don't know if it works until you're tearing out ceiling panels to fit a reactor and hand-delivering product to float spas at 6 AM. The gap between theoretically possible and actually manufacturable is where companies live or die. I keep finding that the hardest problems in one industry have already been solved in another, or by nature. Cancer biology solved industrial chemistry for us. Nucor proved the business model. Materials science is what unlocks Kardashev. Energy abundance needs materials breakthroughs. Defense needs domestic supply chains. AI scaling needs physical infrastructure. Physical bottlenecks determine whether we can actually build the future we're betting on. It all comes back to atoms. Here I share what I learn: the cross-industry connections, the weird market dynamics, the supply chain vulnerabilities nobody's talking about, and the (sometimes) boring technology that makes it happen. If you're building in the world of atoms, I want to hear from you. You can just do things.

Our first reactor? Sean Hunt and I built it from Home Depot parts in three weeks. Rented a lab behind Dallas Love Field, had to rip out the ceiling panels to fit it. That machine started a multibillion-dollar company. People keep trying to throw it away. It still works. A year earlier I was 26, doing my MD/PhD, studying how pancreatic cancer hides from the immune system using chemistry. The mechanism? Cancer cells were producing hydrogen peroxide to blind immune cells. But the enzyme doing it? It was more efficient than anything in industrial chemistry. Cancer was outperforming a $6 trillion industry. A few months later, I was at a poker game in med school. Got seated next to Sean, an MIT chemical engineering PhD. He was studying hydrogen peroxide production at massive industrial scales. I told him his approach was techno-economically insane. Traditional chemical engineering: heat, pressure, heterogeneous catalysis. The whole industry operates at 20% yield and considers that acceptable. I'd just watched cancer cells hit 90%+. I was a cancer biologist. He was a chemical engineer. What if we married our two worlds? Six months later we pitched enzyme-based chemical production at MIT's 100K. We lost, taking second place for $10,000. I thought: "Either this works or I go be a doctor." So we drove Sean's Subaru to Home Depot and bought the biggest PVC pipe that we could find. They cut it so it would fit in the trunk. Three weeks later we had a leaking prototype, held together with zip ties, producing chemicals at 4x the industry average yield. That prototype made us the peroxide kings of Dallas. Two float spa owners saw our MIT pitch and shared it in their Facebook group. Suddenly we were supplying an entire niche we didn't know existed. We spent the next months driving around Houston, hand-delivering product. Made $10,000 a month from that PVC reactor. We had profitably miniaturized the chemicals industry. Same thing Nucor did for steel: decentralized production. That was 2016. Today: - Bioforges in Houston, Texas - Shipped 150M lbs of chemicals last year - DoD contracts for critical chemical precursors - Shipping container reactors deploying internationally - DOE Loan Programs Office funding (same program that backed Tesla) - Almost $1 billion raised from Founders Fund, Blackrock, Temasek, GIC, Baillie Gifford People have no idea how huge the chemical industry is. One of our customers: An 80-person water treatment company in rural America, quietly doing $250M annual revenue, with $150M spent just on chemicals. And there are thousands more like them. This is why it's a $6T market. And the supply chains are fragile. America has zero domestic TNT production until 2028. We import dozens of critical chemicals needed for semiconductor manufacturing. COVID and tariffs made it obvious: We don't make the chemicals we need to make the things we need. Much is learned in the making of things. You can read all the papers, draft business plans, theorize. But you don't know if it works until you're tearing out ceiling panels to fit a reactor and hand-delivering product to float spas at 6 AM. The gap between theoretically possible and actually manufacturable is where companies live or die. I keep finding that the hardest problems in one industry have already been solved in another, or by nature. Cancer biology solved industrial chemistry for us. Nucor proved the business model. Materials science is what unlocks Kardashev. Energy abundance needs materials breakthroughs. Defense needs domestic supply chains. AI scaling needs physical infrastructure. Physical bottlenecks determine whether we can actually build the future we're betting on. It all comes back to atoms. Here I share what I learn: the cross-industry connections, the weird market dynamics, the supply chain vulnerabilities nobody's talking about, and the (sometimes) boring technology that makes it happen. If you're building in the world of atoms, I want to hear from you. You can just do things.

Gaurab Chakrabarti

173,417 次观看 • 9 个月前

SpaceX mastered full-flow staged combustion - the most challenging engine cycle ever flown. Every propellant drop runs through turbopumps before reaching the combustion chamber. The catch? Parts face 600 bar pressures and extreme temperatures. This demanded a new approach...

SpaceX mastered full-flow staged combustion - the most challenging engine cycle ever flown. Every propellant drop runs through turbopumps before reaching the combustion chamber. The catch? Parts face 600 bar pressures and extreme temperatures. This demanded a new approach...

Gaurab Chakrabarti

183,695 次观看 • 1 年前

We built a chemical plant next to a church. Permitted in under a month:

We built a chemical plant next to a church. Permitted in under a month:

Gaurab Chakrabarti

19,205 次观看 • 11 个月前

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