Mason Rathe

The CEO job is changing fast. ChatCEO is built for what comes next. Sign up today. Happy Sunday! When Texas officially kicked off Manufacturing Week on Friday, we were already off to a head start. In the previous few days, Austin-based Saronic broke ground on its $3 billion-plus Port Alpha shipyard in Brownsville, while down in Conroe, Hertha Metals raised $133.65 million to scale production of high-purity iron and steel. If US manufacturing is over, nobody told Texas.

Texas Power Stack: Branch Energy, Mazama Energy & Licube Three tangentially related financings tied to Texas this week ($33M, $135M, and roughly $8.55M sold) land on three different rungs of the same ladder: generation, bridge storage, and materials. Investors are making three separate bets on the same premise: that AI-driven electricity demand is outrunning grid buildout faster than new supply, storage, or materials capacity can be added.

Happy Sunday! Texas has long been the biggest energy producer in the U.S…. but that’s not stopping us from producing more. Two of this week’s biggest raises went to Texas companies in the power business. Frisco’s Mazama Energy raised $135 million to scale its superhot-rock geothermal technology, which aims to tap much hotter underground resources for round-the-clock power.