This startup’s supermetals could soon be in military drones, luxury watches, and chef knives

The way humans make metals is the same today as it was in the Bronze Age: melt a few different metals in a bowl and mix them until they form a new, better metal.

early start, Base alloysdeveloped a new alloying technique that bypasses the components rather than melting them.

“We’re actually smashing the metal powder particles together instead of melting them,” Jake Goglin, co-founder and CEO of Foundation Alloy, told TechCrunch. “We can create properties that others can’t.”

Until now, the startup has been selling its custom-made metals in small batches, but Goglin said his company is “constrained by our ability to make things, not by the people who want to get them.”

Judging by the types of industries base alloys are sold in, everyone seems to want better existing metals or completely new metals. The startup runs pilots with companies in the automotive, aerospace, semiconductor and defense industries, along with other companies that make chef knives and luxury watches, Goglin said.

“We can save them tons of money and tons of waste,” he said.

To increase production to several tons per week by 2027, Foundation Alloy has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Voyager Ventures, the startup exclusively 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 minerals in Japan and Southeast Asia.

Foundation Alloy technology grew out of scientific research conducted over the past 20 years. Tim Robert and Chris Schuh He led efforts to understand what happens to metals at the nanometer scale, which formed the basis of base alloy technology. Schuh is no stranger to the startup scene, having co-founded Desktop Metal and Xtalic.

While almost all alloys used commercially today are made by melting different metals, base alloys use a special type of mill that repeatedly crushes different metal powders together until they become a new metal. By avoiding melting, Goglin said his company’s solid-state process uses significantly less energy.

The goal of any alloying process is to create a crystal structure at the molecular level that combines two or more metal elements. An ideal alloy will be completely homogeneous, meaning that each crystal pattern will be repeated consistently throughout the entire material.

Conventional alloying does a reasonably good job of achieving this, but it is not perfect, leaving voids that can reduce the performance of the alloy, making it more brittle or more susceptible to heat. The traditional method also doesn’t work with metals with vastly different melting points, which means there were entire classes of metal alloys with potentially useful properties that we couldn’t make.

Foundation Alloy’s solid-state alloying process allows it to manufacture materials that solve some age-old trade-offs. Traditionally, metals are designed to withstand heat or mechanical stress, since trying to do both usually results in a metal that is no good at either. Metals used in furnaces tend to be brittle, while stronger metals used in tools to make things like car parts tend to break down faster when exposed to heat.

But base alloys were able to solve this problem, creating metals that could withstand heat and beating. Some of its first products served as tool parts for automakers as well as aerospace and defense companies, Goglin said. In defence, one early market was drone parts, with some supply chains originally designed for F-35 fighter jets.

“They think about making 100 perfect parts a year,” while drones need more than 10,000 parts a month, Goglin said.

Bullion making is similar to cooking, Goglin said. Two different chefs may use the same ingredients but produce dishes that taste different, for better or worse, if they do not follow the same procedural steps.

“The quality of a dish’s outcome depends not only on the ingredients, but on how it is cooked,” he said. “We have a new way of cooking.”