Kentucky’s natural advantage

Three air cargo hubs and a one-day drive to two-thirds of the US

Kentucky is the only state with three major air cargo hubs — UPS Worldport in Louisville, the DHL Americas hub, and Amazon’s $1.5B Air Global Hub — and Worldport alone moves 416,000 packages an hour across 155 miles of conveyor. Two-thirds of the US population sits within a one-day truck drive, which is why more than 1,300 logistics companies already employ about 84,000 people here. That density is the advantage: software built on top of it is tested against real freight volume from the first week. We are most interested in the intelligence layer sitting above Worldport — customs automation, freight pricing, trade compliance — and in the river, where barge-to-rail transloading and autonomous monitoring on the Ohio remain largely unbuilt.

6,000+ plants, 250,000+ workers and a veteran technical workforce

More than 6,000 manufacturing facilities employ over 250,000 workers here, with roughly $28B of capital investment announced in five years. Toyota Georgetown is Toyota’s largest assembly plant in the world, with 350+ suppliers around it; aerospace adds 100+ facilities and about $19B in exports. Fort Knox, Fort Campbell and Blue Grass Army Depot push roughly 5,000 technically trained veterans into the civilian workforce every year. That means a company can pilot on a live production floor and hire the people who ran it. We fund predictive maintenance, computer-vision quality control, robotics workflow integration and digital twin simulation proven on a real floor rather than in a lab — dual-use preferred on the defense side.

Humana, Atria and Waystar headquartered against a rural care gap

Humana, Atria Senior Living and Waystar are all headquartered in Louisville, with Atria alone managing 200+ communities and roughly 35,000 residents. By 2023 the state counted 806,757 residents aged 65 and over, while 43 of Kentucky’s 120 counties are primary-care shortage areas. The Louisville Healthcare CEO Council turns that into direct pilot access inside Humana, Norton Healthcare and BrightSpring, so a product meets payer and provider reality early instead of after the raise. We are looking for care infrastructure and the system of record — home health deployment, closed-loop pharmacy logistics, care labour matching at scale — plus the payer-provider trust layer: prior-auth automation and AI-native revenue cycle for post-acute care.

$10B+ of battery investment and the cheapest industrial power

More than $10B has been committed to EV battery manufacturing here, including the $5.8B BlueOval SK project, and industrial energy rates are among the lowest in the country. That is why the state hosts 180+ aluminium and copper facilities employing over 21,000 people, holds the largest primary aluminium capacity in the United States, and has drawn roughly $2.7B of new metals investment since 2017. Cheap power next to heavy industry means a product can be deployed at industrial scale rather than demonstrated at pilot scale. We fund grid-scale battery intelligence for data centre and utility applications, aluminium and critical materials process optimisation, and industrial energy procurement AI.