Koch Makes Things. Koch Moves Things.
By: Navin Maharaj and Nate Purdum
If you follow the news, you’ve likely heard how AI is transforming white‑collar work - speeding up analysis, drafting content, and automating routine tasks.
What gets far less attention is what’s changing in the physical economy, on factory floors, in warehouses, across rail yards, and along freight corridors. That’s where labor shortages, rising costs, aging systems, and constant disruption show up every day. This is where the next wave of transformation is taking shape.
Most investors observe that shift from the outside.
Koch does not.
Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), the venture capital and growth equity investment business of Koch, operates with a fundamentally different vantage point. Koch is one of the largest private companies in the world, with more than $125 billion in annual revenues and operations spanning 50+ countries. What differentiates Koch, and by extension KDT, is straightforward: Koch makes things, and Koch moves things.
That isn’t a tagline. It’s how the business operates.
The Essential Scale of Making
Koch operates approximately 500 manufacturing and production facilities worldwide, supported by more than 9,000 engineers and roughly 200 million square feet of industrial space. Through businesses such as Georgia‑Pacific, Molex, Guardian Industries, INVISTA, Flint Hills Resources, and Koch Engineered Solutions, Koch works across materials, components, chemicals, and engineered technologies that are part of everyday life.
Inside those plants, and across those businesses, complexity is abundant. Operations run around the clock. Skilled labor is harder to find. Downtime is costly. Quality expectations continue to rise. We’re facing many of the same real‑world challenges seen across the industry, challenges that operators are navigating daily and that entrepreneurs are actively working to solve.
The Scale of Moving
Koch doesn’t just make products. It moves them at scale, across transportation networks and continents.
KBX Logistics™, a Koch company, is among the top ten third‑party logistics providers in the United States, managing more than 8,000 domestic shipments per day across 2,000+ trade lanes and 80+ countries, overseeing approximately $2.5 billion in freight under management annually. Koch also operates an extensive physical network, including roughly 16,000 rail cars, thousands of warehouses, and more than 4,000 miles of pipeline.
Then there’s Infor. As a Koch company and a leading cloud enterprise software provider, Infor offers a platform that supports manufacturers, distributors, and logistics providers globally. Its Infor Nexus platform connects supply‑chain partners end-to-end, enabling visibility, coordination, and execution across organizations.
Together with KDT’s investment approach, these capabilities create something rare in the investment world: a real-world context for how goods are designed, produced, shipped, and delivered.
Most investors analyze supply chains.
Koch runs them.
Why This Matters Now
Manufacturing and logistics are being reshaped by three forces that are changing how goods are made and moved.
Autonomy and Automation. Labor shortages across manufacturing, warehousing, and transportation are persistent and difficult to solve. In response, companies are increasingly turning to automation.
Robotics, automated material handling, and autonomous vehicles are moving from pilot programs into day‑to‑day operations. Autonomous forklifts that load and unload trailers, robotic systems that pick and pack orders, and autonomous trucks that move freight between facilities are becoming essential tools for maintaining service levels in a labor-constrained world.
AI‑Driven Decision Making. Supply chains generate enormous volumes of data, but value comes from acting on it in real time. AI‑driven systems are increasingly making operational decisions from routing freight, balancing inventory, to responding dynamically to disruptions.
These systems aren’t dashboards. They are operational decision engines embedded in operations, and that distinction matters.
End‑to‑End Connectivity. For decades, manufacturing and logistics have operated in silos. Plants, warehouses, carriers, and customers often functioned independently, with limited coordination.
Today, platforms that connect these touchpoints in real time are enabling more coordinated execution. Importantly, this is not about replacing people; it’s about better equipping them. Operators, planners, and frontline teams gain the visibility and insight needed to move from reactive firefighting to more coordinated, end‑to‑end execution.
KDT at the Tip of the Spear
KDT has invested more than $300 million in supply chain and manufacturing technology companies. What differentiates our approach isn’t just capital, it’s real-world context.
When KDT evaluates an autonomous yard truck company, we begin by understanding how many yard moves occur in a day within Koch operations and what failure costs look like in practice. When assessing procurement AI, we work directly with sourcing teams inside Koch companies such as Georgia‑Pacific and Molex. When evaluating robotics software, we deploy it inside active warehouses and measure performance under real operating conditions.
Koch Labs®, KDT’s strategic capability, connects portfolio companies with Koch operating businesses, enabling technologies to be tested, refined, and scaled in real-world environments. This is direct access, not third‑party exposure, and it creates a feedback loop between operators and innovators that shapes what actually works at scale.
Equally important, KDT brings more than capital. Our investment approach, combined with deep operational engagement and a broader partner ecosystem, enables companies to work with Koch businesses in ways that complement and extend traditional venture models.
What’s Ahead
This perspective is part of a broader set of observations from within manufacturing and supply chain operations, where we continue to see meaningful change taking shape.
At KDT, we believe the companies that win in this space will be those solving real problems for real operators. Koch’s operational scale gives us a front‑row seat to those challenges and the credibility to help the teams addressing them.
If you’re building technology that helps make things better or move them smarter, we’d like to hear from you. You can reach us on LinkedIn.
