The Foundation for Our Industrial Revitalization
Foundation Alloy is making the future possible by reinventing how alloys are made.
Somewhere around 11,000 years ago, our ancestors began working metals into copper ornaments and tools. Since then, humans have kept turning metals into tools, and adornments while also creating ships, buildings, trains, and the inner workings of machines that would launch the industrial revolution. Today, we walk around with small computers in our pockets thanks to the development of semiconductor chips and people are taking faster planes farther into the skies. From the turbines that power clean energy to the chips that drive artificial intelligence, everything depends on advanced materials with precise performance characteristics. And we keep asking more and more - from those materials while we want more of the materials themselves. Increased demand for advanced materials is especially difficult because traditional metallurgy is slow, resource-intensive, and dependent on fragile global supply chains—leaving critical technologies vulnerable to shortages and delays.
Enter - Foundation Alloy. With a breakthrough solid-state manufacturing process, they are making it possible to create entirely new classes of metals faster, more efficiently, and without reliance on the legacy supply chains that have become bottlenecks for progress. They are the foundation for the Tough Tech future.
Breaking Free from the Supply Chain Trap
The metals that power semiconductors, clean energy, and defense systems often come from unstable or adversarial sources. The U.S. imports the vast majority of its critical materials, leaving industries exposed to geopolitical risk. China is the primary import source of twenty one critical minerals for solar panels, our cell phones and many other products that make a modern life possible. Traditionally, even when a promising new alloy is discovered, it takes decades to commercialize—by the time it reaches production, the technology it was meant to support has already moved on.
Foundation Alloy’s process cuts development time from years to weeks and enables metals to be produced without melting, dramatically reducing the energy required. Instead of relying on overseas refining and processing, Foundation Alloy’s method is scalable from small batches to mass production—all within the U.S. This isn’t just about making better materials; it’s about ensuring we can make them at home, when and where we need them.
When I started writing Solutions Factory, I did so to show why I am hopeful about the future. It’s easy to look at where our critical minerals come from and assume geography is destiny and innovation is limited to wherever minerals can be mined and large corporations who can afford to wait for their release. But thanks to Foundation Alloy, that is not the case.
Metals That Unlock Innovation
Think about the biggest technological challenges of our time—scaling up renewable energy, producing next-generation semiconductors, building hypersonic defense systems. Each of these industries is constrained by material limitations.
Clean Energy: Wind turbines, EV batteries, and fusion energy infrastructure all depend on metals that are increasingly hard to source. Foundation Alloy’s method makes it possible to create materials that are stronger, lighter, and more heat-resistant, enabling more efficient power generation and storage.
Semiconductors: Advanced chip manufacturing requires ultra-high-purity metals with precise properties. With their rapid, solid-state process, Foundation Alloy can custom-engineer metals to meet the evolving demands of semiconductor fabrication.
National Security: From jet engines to space exploration, defense and aerospace require materials that can withstand extreme conditions. Traditional manufacturing methods struggle to deliver the performance needed. Foundation Alloy’s materials achieve 2–5x better mechanical properties while using half the energy to produce.
Rebuilding American Manufacturing
The ability to make advanced metals is a matter of national competitiveness. The U.S. once led the world in metallurgy, but decades of offshoring have weakened our domestic production capabilities. Foundation Alloy can bring that expertise back—combining cutting-edge materials science with scalable, energy-efficient manufacturing to put America at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution.
The metals industry has long been the backbone of the industrial economy. By reinventing how metals are made, Foundation Alloy is ensuring that the next generation of breakthroughs isn’t held back by material limitations—but propelled forward by them.