The manufacturing marketplace for people who build hardware

Before OpenSpindle, Tom Petrini founded and ran Evive, a hardware startup that created a new category of sustainable hydration: automated stations that clean reusable bottles inside and out, then refill them with filtered or flavored water. Evive deployed across universities, hospitals, and fitness centers nationwide, used more than a million times at 99.9% uptime, and built on $10M+ he raised and patents he still holds.

To build it, Tom had to source the entire bill of materials: dozens of components across dozens of vendors. He coordinated suppliers across multiple countries and traveled throughout Asia to vet production partners in person. Even then, he hit the walls every hardware company knows, supply-chain delays, inconsistent quality, and communication gaps. Finding manufacturers he could actually trust was slow, opaque, and almost entirely on him.

Later, Tom returned to manufacturing from the other side. He founded a custom home-building company in Austin and launched Siena Built, a CNC and millwork shop for high-end residential work. For over a decade he lived the shop-floor reality: machines, schedules, skilled labor, sourcing, quality, and demand.

As Siena Built grew, he hit the constraint every shop eventually does: capacity. When his own machines were maxed out, he started building a trusted network of outside manufacturing partners to take on the overflow. That was the unlock. Instead of being capped by the equipment under his own roof, he could grow by connecting customers with manufacturers he trusted.

Seeing both sides made the bigger problem obvious. Manufacturers everywhere sit on unused capacity but have little visibility into the right projects, while the companies that need parts struggle to find shops with the right machines, capabilities, and availability. It's a connectivity problem.

Finding a manufacturer you can trust, on quality, price, and whether they'll actually deliver, is slow, opaque, and almost entirely on you.

Tom had been shaping this vision for nearly five years when he met Bryan Petro, who had spent his career building marketplaces at scale. As the first employee and eventually CEO of Getmyboat, Bryan grew it into the world's largest boat rental and charter marketplace, connecting millions of boaters to hundreds of thousands of boats across 184 countries, before selling the company in 2022. OpenSpindle is his fourth marketplace, and he knows how to build a two-sided business that earns trust and scales to millions.

For Bryan, the pattern was familiar. The manufacturing world he was now looking at, thousands of capable shops with no easy way for buyers to find and trust them, opaque on price and availability, was the same shape as the boating market he had spent a decade untangling back in 2012. He had seen how the right marketplace could bring order to exactly that kind of fragmentation.

They aligned around one idea: connect the world's manufacturing capacity with the companies that need it, so sourcing your entire bill of materials stops being a second job.

OpenSpindle was born.