12.29.30 - I'm excited to announce that New Founding has invested in Armanet, an ad tech platform focused on the firearms and firearms-adjacent spaces. Armanet serves an enormous customer base that includes both advertisers and publishers in this sector who have been blacklisted by existing digital advertising cartels.

Bootstrapped and launched in March 2023, Armanet has created the largest endemic advertising coverage for the firearms industry of any ad network, all while delivering industry-leading performance across standard advertising metrics. This pre-seed round was their first raise. Notable co-investors include Chuck Rossi (ex-Facebook, founder of Open Source Defense), Kareem Shaya (co-founder of Open Source Defense, early Stripe), and Brian and Laurel Reese (founders, Served With Honor Foundation).

Speaking of the investment, Nate Fischer, founder and CEO of New Founding, published the following on X:

"One of our movement’s great needs is reliable infrastructure to serve companies censored by the left. As owner of an ammo company, I saw firsthand how directly these blacklists hit the firearms space. I am thus thrilled for the opportunity to join Armanet’s pre-seed round. As an ad tech platform focused on the firearms space, they are providing a critical service to both publishers and sellers in this large and important sector. Armanet’s founding team has already built an excellent product—one thing that stood out during DD was the strength of reviews from both publishers and advertisers—and they have a clear vision for both product and market expansion. We are excited for their continued growth, and for the impact they can have on this movement."
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Armanet is representative of broader trends we're seeing:

• extremely competent talent eager to build outside of bureaucratic & ideologically-captured norms
• massive but disenfranchised market & customer base (US firearms industry is $20b TAM)
• existing hostile monopolies create the ideal conditions for new & disruptive category leaders ($GOOG own 70% of the paid ads space but do not allow firearms or firearms-related ads)

This means there’s an open opportunity for Armanet to build a dominant new platform that emerges as the category leader for industries looking to spend significant amounts of advertising capital outside of traditional channels.

This kind of disruption opportunity isn't unique to the firearms space: increasing global disruption, bureaucratic stagnation, and political alienation have created disruption opportunities across all industries.

Our fund focuses on three themes in response to those threats—themes which Armanet resonates with:

Both Armanet and New Founding immediately recognized the value of a partnership, given Armanet’s plans to become the dominant platform for this industry and expand into adjacent verticals and New Founding’s aligned networks and market knowledge.

You can visit Armanet's site below. Additionally, we're always interested to chat with founders and potential investors who resonate with our themes and ideas.