A few weeks ago, I was in New Bern, at the Craven County convention center for a military-related trade show. The event was being held by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, and its purpose was to showcase companies that want to do business with Fleet Readiness Center East, the mammoth Navy aviation overhaul facility on Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, and with the Navy and Marine Corps in general. Cherry Point is in Havelock, another Craven County town, an 18-mile drive down U.S. 70 from the convention center.
FRC East is the largest industrial employer east of Interstate 95, and its 4,000 folks perform major overhauls on Navy and Marine aircraft.
Josh Cooper, CEO of CN-Seamless
At lunch, I was sitting with a handful of people I didn’t know, and I struck up a conversation with the fellow to my right, who turned out to be Josh Cooper, 25, from Raleigh. His small company was a couple of years old and getting traction. He had come to demonstrate his innovative technology, a portable device that cuts metal very precisely, a CNC robot you can carry around in a case. Cutting things precisely is important to people at FRC East, who fix the beat-up components of jets, helicopters and Ospreys, and who work within exceedingly tight tolerances.
Cooper is an NC State mechanical engineering graduate and CEO of CN-Seamless. We spent a couple of hours talking in New Bern, where he had a demo set up in the parking lot. Then I visited his company in one of those anonymous office-flex complexes just off the Beltline in northeast Raleigh, where small businesses live side by side, some well-established and some, like CN-Seamless, on their way.
CN-Seamless has actual revenue, and customers and has gotten interest and some funding from the Air Force. It has a team of three smart young founders, Josh, Sam and Dario.
They met in an entrepreneurship class at the NC State College of Engineering, and CN-Seamless is exactly what was supposed to happen: State trains up a bunch of young engineers in technical skills and — crucially — entrepreneurship, and they start a business and create jobs.
The class required students to form teams and come up with an idea they could develop into a marketable product. The crucial first step was forming the team. The students had to upload their resumes to the class website. Cooper knew Sam Marcom from a previous class, saw his resume and was impressed with his software skills. He didn’t know Dario Muller, but Cooper’s twin sister, Kayla, who was a chemical engineering student, did. Muller, she said, was the smartest person she had ever met “and he knows pretty much everything about electronics.” So they had their team. Now they needed their idea.
The steel mill
Marcom had worked a summer job at a steel mill in Virginia that melted down scrap to make new steel. He recalled that when they dropped a mess of scrap into the furnace from 75 feet, sometimes they would be off by a few feet, and the equipment would get damaged and need repairs. He watched employees using torches to cut new parts. Getting precise cuts with an oxyacetylene torch wasn’t easy, and it was time-consuming.
The class had taught them that business pain points are business opportunities in disguise. What if this particular pain point could be automated, Marcom suggested, by inventing a portable, robotic version of a cutting torch, a CNC-ish torch that could be packed up and carried to where it was needed, attached to the metal it needed to cut, and programmed to deliver the exact cut with an easy-to-use tablet interface. That would be something small shops could afford and it wouldn’t require nearly as much skill. And so they went to work on that.
It helped that Marcom had a garage at the place that he rented; there’s always a garage in these stories. He had plenty of tools and welding equipment. “I love working on stuff,” he says. By the end of the second semester, they had finished the project and had a working prototype of the Mach 1.
They were graduating in May 2022, and they all had full-time jobs lined up. Muller was going out to California to work for Apple. Cooper had a job with Collins Aerospace in Winston-Salem, and Marcom was going to work for a Durham startup, Botbuilt, which uses robots to make housing construction components.
But they decided to see if they could turn their invention into a business. “We all went out to dinner,” says Cooper, “and just kind of sat down and had a serious conversation of, are we going to actually do this or not?” They agreed to keep working at it, nights and weekends, to develop a version they could sell.
Sam Marcom
“We all kind of were doing this part time and just trying to take our terrible college prototype and turn it into something somebody might buy,” says Cooper. He was the team’s expert on mechanical design — he was doing CAD all day long in his job — Marcom was writing the machine’s software and Muller was designing the custom circuit boards. They started building out their supply chain and making contact with potential customers, using every contact they could wrangle. In the fall of 2023, they made their first sales.
“Like the week that we sold our first machines, I realized that we were going to have to have somebody on call at all times and actually go selling them,” says Cooper. He left his job at Collins and started working at CN-Seamless full time.
Out of the garage
The operation moved out of Marcom’s garage to a small office where they could do assembly. Today, they are in larger, still-modest quarters. Cooper’s office is rigged up with cameras and one of the machines so he can do demonstrations to prospects anywhere. But he also travels. He has been to Pearl Harbor and RAF Lakenheath in the UK, and — closer to home — Pope Army Airfield on Fort Bragg and Maryland, to talk with the Air National Guard. The company’s machines are now being used by BAE and Daimler and dozens of other customers across the country.
The Air Force was intrigued enough by their machine that CN-Seamless was awarded a Small Business Innovation Research contract of around $75,000 last year, to develop ideas for other functionalities for the device.
“We have a whole bunch of other tools that we can make, different software and different patches for,” says Cooper. “So it can do more than just cutting. It can do 3-D printing. It can do welding.”
The day I was there, they had a group of employees in the back, assembling machines. The shop was lined with shelves, organized by parts and components.
They source their materials from domestic and overseas suppliers. That is the nature of a cost-conscious manufacturing startup. You can email a CAD file halfway across the world to get something for the right price. The Mach 1 retails for around $14,500 and takes six or seven man-hours to put together. It runs off of a tablet and is lightweight. The key attribute, says Cooper, is that it is “easy to use. That’s the main thing.”
“We’re not reinventing oxy-fuel and plasma cutting,” he says. What they’ve done is make it portable and more precise than a hand torch.
“We all fabricate stuff,” says Cooper. “So we all know how hard it is to actually get good at using a torch.”
What has helped their marketing has been a growing fan base on social media. “We have like, over hundred-something-thousand followers on Facebook and Instagram.”
CN-Seamless is mostly self-funded. It has gotten some friends and family money and angel investor support. “We are very lean, and we don’t make real crazy, irresponsible decisions. We haven’t had to take out a loan. Our business plan is build machines, sell machines. We’re completely fine on cash flow at this point,” says Cooper.
My takeaway
The reason I like to talk to companies at this stage is that you get an idea of the steps that they took to get off the ground. The details are still fresh. Every business has a different version of this, but there are some similarities.
One of the most important things is to come up with a product that solves a problem or can save customers money or time. It is easier to come up with this product if you have been working somewhere and can see these problems up close. In this case, it was Sam Marcom working in a steel mill.
The other important thing is to have a team. It is hard to start a company by yourself. It is easier if you have a group of people who bring different skills to the enterprise. In this case, it was a team of three — Cooper, Marcom and Muller — who had actually been working for their entire senior year on this project, and had different skills — programming, circuit boards, CAD. Their senior year was actually CN-Seamless’ research and development phase. It was also where they bonded and formed an effective team.
That is one important point that I tell young people interested in entrepreneurship. Their years in college and in their first jobs are the time they should be making the connections to build the team they will need to start a business. Always be looking for potential teammates.
