01
Manufacturing
Seed
2018
Acquired ’24
Quench
Heat-treat process control for tier-two auto suppliers.
Founded in
Dayton, Ohio
Founders
Ruth Adeyemi
Sector
Manufacturing
First check
Seed
Year
2018
Status
Acquired
Quench sold process control to the people who harden steel for car parts. A heat-treat furnace has a recipe: a temperature, a time and an atmosphere. Get it wrong by a few degrees and a batch of axle components comes out soft, and nobody finds out until a customer’s press does.
Ruth Adeyemi spent eleven years running a heat-treat line before she founded the company. The product read the signals each furnace already produced, matched them against the recipe, and flagged a drifting batch before it left the building. It installed beside the furnace in an afternoon and never touched the controller.
At the time of its acquisition in 2024, Quench was running on 63 furnaces at nine suppliers in Ohio, Michigan and Ontario. Scrap rates at its early customers fell by about a third. It was our first investment, and the one we point to when founders ask what a boring company looks like.
Why we invested
Every other investor asked Ruth about her market. Teo asked about her scrap rate, and she knew it to the decimal. We wrote the check eight days after the first call.