Earlier this month, alloy design and manufacturing company Foundation Alloy raised $22 million in a Series A financing round.
At a high level, it will enable a scale-up of Foundation Alloy's business, with a second facility coming online later this year, existing partnerships evolving, and pilot programmes becoming production projects.
Shortly after Foundation Alloy announced the news, CEO Jake Guglin [JG] jumped on a call with TCT Group Content Manager Sam Davies to get into the details of what the fundraising will mean for the company.
TCT: Jake, Foundation Alloy has just completed a round of funding amounting to $22 million. How will this capital be leveraged?
JG: It is going towards this deployment motion. We often say that metals make an impact once they're actually out in the field and once they're at scale. And that is what the focus is here. We have several different materials being piloted across several different industries by a bunch of different customers and the data coming back there is really clear and exciting. Now we get to go take that next step and actually scale into production and put things out into the world. And so there's lots of future product development to happen, obviously some of which will happen in this phase, but the majority of the focus is going into production and actually making real production sales and commercialising new materials.
TCT: The official announcement centred on a scale-up and the launch of a new facility, so how much will new product development be a focus in this next phase of the company’s growth?
JG: Product development will always be a part of what we do. There's a lot of action right now in the world of autonomous lab and discovery, and they're going very horizontal, ‘let's go try to find a thousand new things.’ We take a different approach, which is to find something that is commercially ready, scale it and put it into the market and keep growing that market while then bringing the next thing through. And so, the production pipeline we referred to in the past as a barrel, and once we build that barrel, we can keep pumping things through it and sending it out to the world. So, there will definitely be some product development in this phase.
We actually have several new materials that are being actively pulled by customers into reality, which is how we like to do it. It's not discovery for its own sake. It's development towards a known opportunity. That is ongoing, and some of the families that we're already working with, especially steels in particular, right now, huge supply constraint in the United States, huge issues being created by the tungsten log jam, currently with China not only holding back, but also buying up tungsten scrap in the US, and so we have a bunch of customers asking us for especially steels that get to that same performance without using tungsten, and also in the nickel super alloy space for things like drones.
