As industries like artificial intelligence, energy storage, and aerospace expand, the need for scarce, geopolitically concentrated critical minerals like lithium, platinum group metals and rare earths is growing. And the mismatch between demand growth from those industries and the physical availability of those metals is starting to show.
The global supply chain for rare earth elements in particular is in the midst of a high-stakes transition; Western players are racing to establish independence from China, which has dominated for decades. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. is leveraging an aggressive industrial policy that includes everything from direct federal grants targeting hard-to-scale waste recovery and urban mining, to strategic stockpiling and the implementation of price floors.
Against this backdrop of mining upheaval, there’s no shortage of companies promising better or more efficient ways to find or process the mined materials. But Milvus, a startup with roots in Oxford University, is attempting to circumvent the mine entirely.
Milvus, founded by inorganic chemistry researcher Assia Kasdi, designs materials that mimic rare earth metals, creating entirely new metals and alloys rather than trying to gain traction in existing supply chains. It’s a process she describes as “modern-day alchemy.”
“The periodic table is nice, but it actually locked us into the idea that we need [a specific] type of metal to do a specific reaction,” Kasdi said. In reality, she added, it’s the property of the metal, not the metal itself, that matters for the end-use technology.
Milvus’ process relies on metal salts made from abundant metals like copper, iron, and nickel. They dissolve those salts in water and add a reducing agent that turns the dissolved metal ions into solid metal. This all takes place inside a low-temperature, water-based reactor, as opposed to the high-heat blast furnace used in traditional smelting or rare earth refining.
The company’s key IP, Kasdi explained, is how they control the way the end-stage metals come together. By tightly controlling which metals are combined and what shape they take at the nanoscale, the company can make those alloys behave like scarce critical minerals.
To date, Kasdi said Milvus has created substitutes for platinum, which is used in the green hydrogen sector for electrolysis; and indium, used in touch screen displays and some semiconductors.
The company raised a nearly $7 million seed round late last year, led by London-based Hoxton Ventures. That round will kickstart Milvus’ plans to expand across the pond: Kasdi said Milvus plans to build its first demonstration plant in the U.S. in the next five years — even despite the policy uncertainty brought on by the Trump administration.
As far as Kasdi is concerned, pivoting into the U.S. market as early as possible is critical to Milvus’ success. While Europe excels at lab-scale innovation, the U.S. is a hub for engineers and managers who have experience scaling an industrial process.
Critical mineral supply chains were first given high priority under the Biden administration, including via the 30D tax credit for electric vehicles that source minerals domestically. The second Trump administration eliminated that tax credit as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill last summer, and spent the better part of the year dismantling federal funding and support structures for clean energy-adjacent industries.
But while those Trump moves have made some manufacturing startups and investors wary of the U.S. market, Kasdi sees mostly upside. She pointed to critical mineral incentives like strategic stockpiling, price floors, and funding doled out to rare earths startups. By basing operations in the U.S., Milvus is poised to gain access not only to talent and incentives, but to a market that is desperate to decouple from China.
The company is already scouting for possible locations that can support a large-scale chemical manufacturing plant. Physical space is crucial, Kasdi said, because Milvus’ water-based reactors require massive industrial silos to house the synthesis process.
The long road to scale
The biggest hurdle for Milvus, according to Kasdi, is scale. Their inputs are plentiful, so the company doesn’t anticipate any bottlenecks on that front. To date, the company has scaled production of its rare earth substitutes from 0.1 grams to 100 grams per batch. And in its current pilot stage it can produce around 250 kilograms a year — roughly the weight limit of a small residential elevator — in what Kasdi calls a “mini plant.”
But to make even a small dent in the massive demand for something like indium — of which 70% of global reserves are in China — Milvus will need to scale rapidly. The U.S. expansion will first be focused on building plants that can handle 100-kilogram batches., and produce 10 tons in a year. In the next five years, Kasdi said the goal is to scale up to batches of 10 tons and above.
Getting there will be tricky. It will involve taking a delicate, precision-engineered chemical reaction from a controlled laboratory to industrial-scale reactors, all while preserving performance. At tiny scales, it’s easy to keep temperature and concentration uniform. When you move to a massive tank, however, gravity, heat gradients, and fluid dynamics change, and it becomes harder to predict the outcome.
And because Milvus’ current business model maintains production in-house rather than licensing out the IP, the scale-up itself will be extremely expensive, Kasdi said, in part because each jump in volume requires re-learning the mineral’s chemical recipe. But despite the challenges, she’s confident Milvus’ approach will still be faster than developing new mines.
For now, having proven its first few materials in-house, Milvus needs partners to validate them in real devices. They’ve started with the green hydrogen industry, which relies heavily on iridium and platinum for electrolysis. “We are working with partners that will enable us to implement these materials into their devices, and then work on the product together,” Kasdi said.
“The good thing now is that everyone is aware that there is a need for a substitute [for rare earth metals],” she added. “If we don’t have alternatives, we can’t, no matter how sophisticated we are, transition, develop and grow.”
