How humans alloy metals is essentially the same today as it was in the Bronze Age: Melt some different metals in a pot and mix them until they form a new, better metal.
An early-stage startup, Foundation Alloy, has developed a new alloying technique that beats the ingredients instead of melting them.
“We’re actually smashing metal powder particles together instead of melting them,” Jake Guglin, co-founder and CEO of Foundation Alloy, told TechCrunch. “We can create properties that other people can’t.”
So far, the startup has been selling its bespoke metals in small batches, but Guglin said his company is “constrained by our ability to make stuff, not by the people that want to take it.”
Judging by the types of industries Foundation Alloy is selling into, it seems everyone wants better existing metals or entirely new ones. Guglin said that the startup is running pilots with companies in the automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, and defense industries, along with others that make chef’s knives and luxury watches.
“We can save them tons of money and tons of tons of waste,” he said.
To scale up production to several tons per week by 2027, Foundation Alloy has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Voyager Ventures, the startup exclusive told TechCrunch. Also participating in the round were Trust Ventures, Yamaha Motors, America’s Frontier Fund, Overlap Holdings, Material Impact, Engine Ventures, El Cap, and Kanematsu Corporation, which will also distribute the startup’s metals in Japan and Southeast Asia.
Foundation Alloy’s technology emerged from scientific research conducted over the last 20 years. Tim Rupert and Chris Schuh led efforts to understand what happened to metals at the nanometer scale, which formed the basis of Foundation Alloy’s technology. Schuh is no stranger to the startup game, having previously co-founded Desktop Metal and Xtalic.
Where nearly all alloys used commercially today are made by melting different metals, Foundation Alloy uses a special type of mill that repeatedly smashes different metal powders together until they become one new metal. By eschewing melting, Guglin said his company’s solid-state process uses around an order of magnitude less energy.
The goal of any alloying process is to create a molecular-scale crystalline structure that blends two or more metallic elements. A perfect alloy would be completely homogeneous — that is, every crystal pattern would be replicated consistently across the entire material.
Traditional alloying does a reasonably good job of achieving this, but it’s not perfect, leaving voids that can reduce the performance of an alloy, making it more brittle or more susceptible to heat. The traditional method also doesn’t work for metals with vastly different melting points, meaning that there have been entire classes of metal alloys with potentially beneficial properties that we haven’t been able to make.
The solid-state alloying process allows Foundation Alloy to make materials that solve some age-old tradeoffs. Traditionally, metals are tailored to withstand heat or mechanical stress, since trying to do both usually results in a metal that’s not good at either. Metals used in furnaces tend to be brittle, while stronger ones used in tooling to make things like car parts tend to break down faster when exposed to heat.
But Foundation Alloy has been able to solve that problem, making metals that can take the heat and take a beating. Some of its first products have been tooling parts for automakers as well as aerospace and defense companies, Guglin said. Within defense, one early market is parts for drones, where some of the supply chains were originally designed for F-35 fighter jets.
“They think about making 100 perfect parts per year,” Guglin said, whereas drones need more like 10,000 per month.
Alloying is akin to cooking, Guglin said. Two different chefs might use the same ingredients but produce dishes that taste differently, for better or worse, if they don’t follow the same procedural steps.
“The quality of the output of a dish is not just based on the ingredients, it’s how you cook it” he said. “We have a new way to cook.”