Foundation Alloy has just raised $22 million in Series A financing. The alloy company is trying to create a platform that will enable the solid state manufacturing of alloys. In the UK, the Fray-Farthing-Chen (FFC) Cambridge process has led to a revolutionary new approach to alloy manufacturing. That process is used by Metalysis to make alloys. Now, Foundation wants to do a similar process in the US, but for molybdenum, which I hope never becomes popular since I still can’t pronounce it properly (the secret is to say it like a bored teenager, “moh-lib-den-um,” but steer away from emphasizing the “lib-den” part for fear of confusing the British). Molybdenum may seem very niche but…and this is going to shock you…the high-temperature refractory has potential for defense applications. Molybdenum is an alloying agent, and can be used in missiles, space, armor, hypersonics, and nuclear engineering. In Refractory Complex Concentrated Alloys (RCCAs), molybdenum is a key material. RCCAs are key to the rapid development of specific high alloy families, and you can read more about this here in our Goldilocks Flywheel article. The material is potentially scarce, but it is mined in the US, though the country will have to export it from places like Mexico, Peru, and Chile if it wants a lot of it.
So Foundation’s fundraising and its focus on this material is very well timed indeed. At the same time, Foundation can have high performance in powder and quick iteration into new materials if it masters its variant of the FFC process. Foundation calls its process MetalsFIRST. The company says that it is a “solid-state platform encompassing composition design, mechanical alloying, shape forming, and sintering, that produces engineered alloys without ever entering the molten state.”
So far investors, are interested with the $22 million in Series A being raised through Trust Ventures, Yamaha Motor Ventures, America’s Frontier Fund, Overlap Holdings, Material Impact, Engine Ventures, and El Cap. The company has also gotten Kanematsu Corporation to distribute its materials in Asia. Foundation is manufacturing in the US, and hopes to use its platform to sell material worldwide. For now, it has a 36,000 sq ft plant in Massachusetts, and an additional location in New Hampshire at Re:Build Manufacturing.
Foundation CEO Jake Guglin said,
“Metals made through our platform are being used by customers today in commercial pilots with Japanese industrials, in production trials across North America and Europe, and in forging demonstrations with LIFT in Detroit.This Series A funds the factory, not the lab. Our new Massachusetts facility and modular production cell are set to grow capacity from pilot-scale today to tons per week by 2027—a 100x increase, built on a modular equipment platform that deploys and scales 10x faster than traditional metals manufacturing. We’re hiring across production, engineering, and comm
Foundation Alloy has just raised $22 million in Series A financing. The alloy company is trying to create a platform that will enable the solid state manufacturing of alloys. In the UK, the Fray-Farthing-Chen (FFC) Cambridge process has led to a revolutionary new approach to alloy manufacturing. That process is used by Metalysis to make alloys. Now, Foundation wants to do a similar process in the US, but for molybdenum, which I hope never becomes popular since I still can’t pronounce it properly (the secret is to say it like a bored teenager, “moh-lib-den-um,” but steer away from emphasizing the “lib-den” part for fear of confusing the British). Molybdenum may seem very niche but…and this is going to shock you…the high-temperature refractory has potential for defense applications. Molybdenum is an alloying agent, and can be used in missiles, space, armor, hypersonics, and nuclear engineering. In Refractory Complex Concentrated Alloys (RCCAs), molybdenum is a key material. RCCAs are key to the rapid development of specific high alloy families, and you can read more about this here in our Goldilocks Flywheel article. The material is potentially scarce, but it is mined in the US, though the country will have to export it from places like Mexico, Peru, and Chile if it wants a lot of it.
So Foundation’s fundraising and its focus on this material is very well timed indeed. At the same time, Foundation can have high performance in powder and quick iteration into new materials if it masters its variant of the FFC process. Foundation calls its process MetalsFIRST. The company says that it is a “solid-state platform encompassing composition design, mechanical alloying, shape forming, and sintering, that produces engineered alloys without ever entering the molten state.”
So far investors, are interested with the $22 million in Series A being raised through Trust Ventures, Yamaha Motor Ventures, America’s Frontier Fund, Overlap Holdings, Material Impact, Engine Ventures, and El Cap. The company has also gotten Kanematsu Corporation to distribute its materials in Asia. Foundation is manufacturing in the US, and hopes to use its platform to sell material worldwide. For now, it has a 36,000 sq ft plant in Massachusetts, and an additional location in New Hampshire at Re:Build Manufacturing.
Foundation CEO Jake Guglin said,
“Metals made through our platform are being used by customers today in commercial pilots with Japanese industrials, in production trials across North America and Europe, and in forging demonstrations with LIFT in Detroit.This Series A funds the factory, not the lab. Our new Massachusetts facility and modular production cell are set to grow capacity from pilot-scale today to tons per week by 2027—a 100x increase, built on a modular equipment platform that deploys and scales 10x faster than traditional metals manufacturing. We’re hiring across production, engineering, and comm