Why Dispo’s co-founder made the leap from social media to steelmaking

Summary

Daniel Liss, co-founder of the social network Dispo and the dating app Teaser AI, is convinced he’s onto the next big thing: steelmaking. It all started, incongruously, with a few op-eds he wrote for TechCrunch about anti-trust enforcement in social media. The commentaries apparently caught the attention of some folks in Washington D.C., Liss told TechCrunch, and resulted in him being invited to guest judge a war game capstone exercise in spring 2023 hosted by the National War College. The war game was very au courant, running a scenario in which the U.S. and China fought for supremacy over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Liss’s take away from the exercise? “Our core supply chain of the arsenal of democracy — literally, the ships that my grandfather fought in — we don’t have the ship-building capacity. If we did, we don’t have the steel to make it,” he said. At that point, Liss said he became “really interested — obsessed, even” with the steel supply chain. “That was really the birth of Nemo Industries.” The basic pitch for Nemo Industries, Liss’s latest startup, appears as though it were drawn from a Venn diagram of two very American anxieties, steelmaking and AI. The company, until now, has been operating in stealth, but Liss gave TechCrunch a peek behind the scenes. First, the obvious part: Nemo will use AI to optimize the production of pig iron, modernizing an industry that Liss said is woefully outdated. “These plants are run on, at best, Excel spreadsheets. At worst, clipboard technology,” he said. The people who run them have “unbelievable expertise,” he added, but that’s the sort of thing that doesn’t scale well. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 But Liss isn’t pitching Nemo as just another piece of industrial software. Rather, Nemo is planning to build its own furnaces. The decision was driven by Liss’s conviction that companies which use AI from inception will have a “20% to 30% margin advantage” over competitors. In steelmaking, such co...