How people alloy metals is essentially the same today as it was in the Bronze Age: Melt a few different metals in a pot and mix them until they form a new, better metal.
An early stage startup, Foundation alloyhas developed a new alloying technique that batters the ingredients instead of melting them.
“We’re actually crushing 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 is selling its specialty metals in small batches, but Guglin said his company is “limited by our ability to make things, not by the people who want to get them.”
Judging by the types of industries Foundation Alloy sells to, it seems everyone wants better existing metals or entirely new ones. Guglin said the startup is piloting with companies in the automotive, aerospace, semiconductor and defense industries, along with others that make chef knives and luxury watches.
“We can save them tons of money and tons of waste,” he said.
To scale production to several tons per week by 2027, Foundation Alloy has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Voyager Ventures, the startup told TechCrunch exclusively. 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 technology has emerged from scientific research conducted over the past 20 years. Tim Rupert and Chris Schuch led efforts to understand what happened to metals at the nanometer scale, which formed the basis of Foundation Alloy technology. Schuh is no stranger to the startup game, having previously co-founded Desktop Metal and Xtalic.
Where almost all alloys in commercial use today are made by melting different metals together, Foundation Alloy uses a special type of mill that repeatedly crushes different metal powders together until they become a new metal. By avoiding melting, Guglin said his company’s solid-state process uses about an order of magnitude less energy.
The goal of any alloying process is to create a molecular-scale crystal structure that blends two or more metallic elements. A perfect alloy would be completely homogeneous—that is, each crystal pattern would be consistently replicated throughout the material.
Traditional alloying does a pretty good job of achieving this, but it’s not perfect, leaving voids that can reduce an alloy’s performance, making it more brittle or more sensitive to heat. The traditional method also doesn’t work for metals with very different melting points, meaning there were whole classes of metal alloys with potentially beneficial properties that we couldn’t make.
The solid state alloying process allows Foundation Alloy to make materials that solve some old trade-offs. Traditionally, metals are tailored to withstand heat or mechanical stress, as trying to do both usually results in a metal that is good at neither. Metals used in furnaces tend to be brittle, while the stronger ones used in tooling to make auto parts tend to break down more quickly when exposed to heat.
But Foundation Alloy was able to solve this problem by making metals that can withstand heat and impact. Some of its first products were tooling parts for automakers as well as aerospace and defense companies, Guglin said. In defense, an early market is parts for drones, where some of the supply chains were originally designed for F-35 fighter jets.
“They’re looking at making 100 perfect parts a year,” Guglin said, while drones need more than 10,000 a month.
Alloying is similar to cooking, Guglin said. Two different chefs can use the same ingredients but produce dishes that taste different, for better or worse, if they don’t follow the same procedural steps.
“The quality of the production of a dish is not only based on the ingredients, but on the way you cook it,” he said. “We have a new way of cooking.”
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