‘I love taking VC dollars and turning it into jobs’: inside SendCutSend’s $2.1 billion bet on American metal

It started with a steam-powered car. 

That’s precisely what it sounds like, by the way. In 2017, Jim Belosic was building out what was once a Ford Model A—most famously produced in the late 1920s—to run on a steam engine. 

“It’s an art,” said Belosic of engineering and re-engineering classic cars. “It starts small, and at some point you’re building drag-racing cars, or a custom chassis, or a big crazy motor. I’d done a lot of that, but it had started getting boring. But saying: ‘Hey, I want to build something powered by steam and drive it around the block,’ that was problem-solving in uncharted territory.”

The result: a skeletal cyberpunk wonder that could take a head-turning swirl around the block. However, halfway through the process, Belosic ran into a problem. He wanted the throttle control to have three labeled speeds, inspired by the oxen of the computer game Oregon Trail—“steady,” “strenuous,” and “grueling.” For this to work, he needed tiny, intricate letters, and had no obvious place to get them, until a friend of a friend laser cut them. 

Laser cutting—the process by which a powerful, concentrated beam of light slices through materials like metal—was ultimately the basis for SendCutSend, the company Belosic cofounded in 2018 that turns customers’ designs into custom metal parts. The very first order was pickleball-centric. 

“We made the pickleball keychains,” said Belosic. “Then orders trickled in from there, and it kept going, and going, and going.” 

SendCutSend, based in Reno, Nev., solves a longstanding manufacturing problem: if you need custom metal parts, getting them made can be somewhere between tough and impossible (especially if the order’s small). So, customers have flocked to SendCutSend, including Zipline, Telo Trucks, Neros, Waymo, K2 Space,........

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