While Silicon Valley chases AI unicorns, Gearbox in Nairobi is doing something far more tangible: building actual machines that build other machines. With $7.6M in revenue and 76 employees, they're not a startup—they're a scale-up with real factories and real impact.

"They're not disrupting software—they're disrupting steel, aluminum, and the entire East African manufacturing stack."

The company's social presence across Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram suggests they're not just selling machines—they're building a community of makers. Every platform serves a different stakeholder: LinkedIn for enterprise buyers, Instagram for showcasing fabricated products, YouTube for tutorials. That's a mature content strategy most hardware companies never achieve.

• Revenue-per-employee: ~$100K—healthy for African manufacturing
• Zero paid traffic mentioned; all organic dominance suggests strong word-of-mouth
• Bootstrap approach (no funding listed) means they're profitable and disciplined
• DaisyUI + Tailwind signals modern frontend thinking despite legacy jQuery dependency