Metal Cross: Reimagining Precision Manufacturing

Earlier last year, Steve Cohen patiently explained to a group of police officers what wasn’t sitting on his El Segundo patio.

“No, it’s not a weapon, not a bomb, and it certainly isn’t a threat,” he said over a cacophony of sirens, gesturing toward his X-ray machine. “It’s for my precision manufacturing company.”

Reassured that the idyllic El Segundo street would wake to see another day, the officers drove off.

Months later, when Steve pitched Metal Cross to our team at OddBird, we realized his statement wasn’t entirely true. The machine was a threat—one capable of upending the $8 billion precision inspection market, long dominated by an oligopoly of incumbents like Zeiss ($2.8B), Hexagon ($2.3B), and Keyence ($1.3B). Despite their scale, precision manufacturing at these firms still lags far behind the pace of broader technological innovation.

Metal Cross

Industries capable of commercial space travel and autonomous surgical systems still rely on manual inspection processes performed with costly probes, clipboards, and human judgment. This slow, labor-intensive bottleneck continues to constrain critical industries as the U.S. pursues manufacturing self-reliance. While image-based inspection systems do exist, they lack the precision required for complex applications, forcing manufacturers to trade speed for accuracy.

By integrating high-powered industrial radiation with advanced 3D inspection software, Metal Cross reduces inspection times from hours to minutes while fully automating reporting from scan to compliance. For manufacturers such as Boeing and Raytheon, where inspection updates are often buried in fragmented email chains, Metal Cross provides real-time visibility into subcontractor progress, including insights into unforeseen delays. This capability is especially critical in industries where manufacturers spend tens of millions forecasting risk, detecting defects early, and managing supplier disruptions.

Beyond visibility and speed, Metal Cross technology converts operational gains into measurable financial upside. Metal Cross enables manufacturers to ship parts faster in markets where customers are often willing to pay up to 3 times more for speed. Reduced inspection times increase total factory capacity by 50–100%, unlocking critical margin expansion.

At the heart of this transformative company are three trailblazing founders:

Steve Cohen

Steve Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of Metal Cross. Although he initially planned to pursue a career in medicine, Steve left medical school to build and successfully exit a search engine that analyzed millions of medical research papers for the pharmaceutical industry. He later became a principal engineer at aerospace manufacturer Hadrian, where he developed software to filter and qualify parts for large-scale manufacturing.

William Carroll

William Carroll is the co-founder and lead software engineer at Metal Cross. Previously, he served as a founding quality software engineer at Hadrian, where he led teams that inspected thousands of aerospace parts. Earlier in his career, William worked as a site reliability engineer at Google.

Gilles Merckx

Before joining Metal Cross as its founding hardware engineer, Gilles Merckx worked alongside Steve and William at Hadrian as the company’s founding controls engineer, where he automated fleets of machines producing tens of thousands of parts. Earlier in his career, Gilles worked as an aerospace quality inspector, grounding his expertise in the real-world demands of manufacturing inspection.