A new platform for developing advanced metals at scale

Companies building next-generation products and breakthrough technologies are often limited by the physical constraints of traditional materials. In aerospace, defense, energy, and industrial tooling, pushing those constraints introduces possible failure points into the system, but companies don’t have better options, given that producing new materials at scale involves multiyear timelines and huge expenses.

Foundation Alloy wants to break the mold. The company, founded by a team from MIT, is capable of producing a new class of ultra-high-performance metal alloys using a novel production process that doesn’t rely on melting raw materials. The company’s solid-state metallurgy technology, which simplifies development and manufacturing of next-generation alloys, was developed over many years of research by Chris Schuh, former professor and department head in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), and collaborators.

“This is an entirely new approach to making metals,” says CEO Jake Guglin MBA ’19, who co-founded Foundation Alloy with Schuh and DMSE alumni Jasper Lienhard ’15, PhD ’22 and Tim Rupert PhD ’11. “It gives us a broad set of rules on the materials engineering side that allows us to design a lot of different compositions with previously unattainable properties. We use that to make products that work better for advanced industrial applications.”

Foundation Alloy says its metal alloys can be made twice as strong as traditional metals, with 10 times faster product development, allowing companies to test, iterate, and deploy new metals into products in months instead of years.

The company is already designing metals and shipping demonstration parts to companies manufacturing components for things like planes, bikes, and cars. It’s also making test parts for partners in industries with longer development cycles, such as defense and aerospace.

Moving forward, the company believes its approach enables companies to build higher-performing, more reliable systems, from rockets to cars, nuclear fusion reactors, and artificial intelligence chips.

“For advanced systems like rocket and jet engines, if you can run them hotter, you can get more efficient use of fuel and a more powerful system,” Guglin says. “The limiting factor is whether or not you have structural integrity at those higher temperatures, and that is fundamentally a materials problem. Right now, we’re also doing a lot of work in advanced manufacturing and tooling, which is the unsexy but super critical backbone of the industrial world, where being able to push properties up without multiplying costs can unlock efficiencies in operations, performance, and capacity, all in a way that’s only possible with different materials.”

From MIT to the world

Schuh joined MIT’s faculty in 2002 to study the processing, structure, and properties of metal and other materials. He was named head of DMSE in 2011 before becoming dean of engineering at Northwestern University in 2023, after more than 20 years at MIT.

“Chris wanted to look at metals from different perspectives and make things more economically efficient and higher performance than what’s possible with traditional processes,” Guglin says. “It wasn’t just for academic papers — it was about making new methods that would be valuable for the industrial world.”

Rupert and Lienhard conducted their PhDs in Schuh’s lab, and Rupert invented complementary technologies to the solid-state processes developed by Schuh and his collaborators as a professor at the University of California at Irvine.

Guglin came to MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 2017 eager to work with high-impact technologies.

“I wanted to go somewhere where I could find the types of fundamental technological breakthroughs that create asymmetric value — the types of things where if they didn’t happen here, they weren’t going to happen anywhere else,” Guglin recalls.

In one of his classes, a PhD student in Schuh’s lab practiced his thesis defense by describing his research on a new way to create metal alloys.

“I didn’t understand any of it — I have a philosophy background,” Guglin says. “But I heard ‘stronger metals’ and I saw the potential of this incredible platform Chris’ lab was working on, and it tied into exactly why I wanted to come to MIT.”

Guglin connected with Schuh, and the pair stayed in touch over the next several years as Guglin graduated and went to work for aerospace companies SpaceX and Blue Origin, where he saw firsthand the problems being caused by the metal parts supply chain.

In 2022, the pair finally decided to launch a company, adding Rupert and Lienhard and licensing technology from MIT and UC Irvine.

The founders’ first challenge was scaling up the technology.

“There’s a lot of process engineering to go from doing something once at 5 grams to doing it 100 times a week at 100 kilograms per batch,” Guglin says.

Today, Foundation Alloys starts with its customers’ material requirements and decides on a precise mixture of the powdered raw materials that every metal starts out as. From there, it uses a specialized industrial mixer — Guglin calls it an industrial KitchenAid blender — to create a metal powder that is homogenous down to the atomic level.

“In our process, from raw material all the way through to the final part, we never melt the metal,” Guglin says. “That is uncommon if not unknown in traditional metal manufacturing.

From there, the company’s material can be solidified using traditional methods like metal injection molding, pressing, or 3D printing. The final step is sintering in a furnace.

“We also do a lot of work around how the metal reacts in the sintering furnace,” Guglin says. “Our materials are specifically designed to sinter at relatively low temperatures, relatively quickly, and all the way to full density.”

The advanced sintering process uses an order of magnitude less heat, saving on costs while allowing the company to forego secondary processes for quality control. It also gives Foundation Alloy more control over the microstructure of the final parts.

“That’s where we get a lot of our performance boost from,” Guglin says. “And by not needing those secondary processing steps, we’re saving days if not weeks in addition to the costs and energy savings.”

A foundation for industry

Foundation Alloy is currently piloting their metals across the industrial base and has also received grants to develop parts for critical components of nuclear fusion reactors.

“The name Foundation Alloy in a lot of ways came from wanting to be the foundation for the next generation of industry,” Guglin says.

Unlike in traditional metals manufacturing, where new alloys require huge investments to scale, Guglin says the company’s process for developing new alloys is nearly the same as its production processes, allowing it to scale new materials production far more quickly.

“At the core of our approach is looking at problems like material scientists with a new technology,” Guglin says. “We’re not beholden to the idea that this type of steel must solve this type of problem. We try to understand why that steel is failing and then use our technology to solve the problem in a way that produces not a 10 percent improvement, but a two- or five-times improvement in terms of performance.”