Somewhere between “AI strategy” and “actually shipping something that works,” most enterprise initiatives disappear into a Bermuda Triangle of pilot purgatory, internal PowerPoint rituals, and stakeholder séances. It’s a miracle anything makes it out alive. But then along comes Blank Metal, a Minneapolis-based AI-native engineering crew with a 90-day production guarantee, and the scars to prove they don’t bluff.
This isn’t a squad of theory peddlers or self-congratulatory consultants billing by the brainstorm. This is a team of GoKart Labs vets who saw enough “innovation theater” to last a lifetime. After watching too many great ideas die in committee, they built Blank Metal to do one thing with surgical precision: turn enterprise AI from abstract promise into real production, fast. Think time-boxed strategy in days, not quarters. Senior teams who ship weekly, not “circle back” monthly. And a delivery model with less than 5% overhead because no one should pay premium prices just to meet someone’s junior associate.
Founders Matt Johnson (CEO), Mark Hines (COO), and Eric Johnson (CTO) know the terrain cold. They’ve built, exited, and rebuilt again, earning every lesson in the mud. Elli Rader (Chief Growth Officer), Teresa Marchek (Head of Product), and Missy Bemm (Head of Partnership Ops) round out a leadership table with the kind of real-world muscle most slideshows can only pretend to have. And yes, Justin Kaufenberg, Managing Director at Rally Ventures and former SportsEngine CEO, is both investor and co-founder, a rare alignment of capital and conviction.
Blank Metal just raised $3 million in seed funding, with Rally Ventures, Traction Capital, and Pure Play Partners all getting in early. This isn’t a tourist round, it’s strategic capital backing a team that already delivered a 20% revenue bump for a national insurer in six weeks and 30% productivity gains via a GenAI platform deployed across an enterprise workforce. You don’t raise on theory when your results speak like this.
Let’s also appreciate the irony. They named it Blank Metal, not because it’s empty, but because it’s pure raw material. No polish. No pitch deck perfume. Just forged, tested, and production-grade. And in an industry where 88% of AI projects never make it out of pilot mode, this team has become the antidote.
The $3M round will fuel headcount, proprietary AI acceleration tools, and scale the 90-day guarantee to more clients who are done lighting budgets on fire just to stay “innovative.”
Blank Metal’s not here to disrupt. They’re here to deploy. And when the rest of the industry is still in the ideation phase, they’ve already shipped V1, run the metrics, and started optimizing V2.
