The Magnetic Moment

In a cavernous warehouse in Alameda, Hooman Nezhad (opens in new tab), CEO and co-founder of Solcoa, held a crowbar near a giant magnet that once powered an MRI machine. The magnet won, ripping the crowbar out of his hands and pinning it with a loud crack.

Soon, that magnet would be melted back into glowing liquid metal to recover its neodymium, the 60th element on the periodic table. Alloyed with iron and boron, neodymium forms the backbone of the most powerful permanent magnets ever made. These neodymium-iron-boron, or NdFeB, magnets enable EVs, drones, humanoid robots, wind turbines, and the precision weapons America depends on.

Few materials are more important to America's industrial future.

In 2025, Solcoa had been making this same metal a few grams at a time, by hand. The room we were standing in had been a laboratory. Now it held a production line, and the team was measuring output in kilograms and building toward tonnes.

The Step Everyone Skipped: Rare Earth Metallization

America has spent years trying to secure its supply of rare earths, and the effort has paid off in mines, refineries, and plans to build magnet factories at home. But you cannot make a magnet straight from mined or refined material. The rare earths first have to be turned into pure metal, a demanding industrial step called metallization.

Almost no one in the Western hemisphere does it, and the foundries that do use antiquated, expensive processes.

Nearly every advanced technology depends on these magnets. The IEA projects demand for magnet-grade rare earth metals will increase 4-7x by 2040 (opens in new tab). Yet China still produces most of the world's magnet-grade metal (opens in new tab), meaning even magnets assembled elsewhere usually trace back, somewhere along the chain, to Chinese processing.

Why China Still Controls Magnet-Grade Metal

That dependence has become a national security problem (opens in new tab). In 2025, China restricted rare earth and magnet exports twice (opens in new tab), and asserted authority over magnets made anywhere in the world using Chinese material or Chinese methods. Beginning January 1, 2027, U.S. defense contractors will have to certify that no stage of their magnet supply chain (opens in new tab), from mined ore to finished part, passed through China. Today, almost none of them can do that.

Washington has noticed. In June 2026, the Pentagon committed more than $1 billion in loans (opens in new tab) to rebuild exactly this missing piece of the supply chain: turning rare earth oxides into the metals and alloys that power F-35s, submarines, missiles, and countless other critical systems.

Inside Solcoa's Alameda Line

Solcoa is both capacity and chemistry: expanding America's supply while reinventing how the material is made.

At its Alameda warehouse, Solcoa makes neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr) metal directly from rare earth oxides and from scrap, like a totaled EV or those aforementioned MRI machines. A proprietary process pulls the rare earths out and turns them into magnet-grade metal at lower cost than the conventional route, and without the perfluorocarbons (opens in new tab), among the most potent greenhouse gases in manufacturing. The line running today makes 10 tonnes of metal a year. Its first commercial plant, Solcoa One, has broken ground and is built for 500 tonnes, enough metal for close to a million electric vehicles.

It’s worth noting that rare earths are not actually rare. They are spread through the earth's crust and, as should be clear, inside millions of finished products. Finding rare earths has never been that hard. Turning them into pure metal, cheaply and cleanly, on this continent, is the challenge.

That is the chemistry Hooman and his co-founder Artem Iurkovskyi (opens in new tab) have reinvented. As Hooman points out, the United States has not commercialized a new way to make a primary metal since titanium in the 1940s, and that one invention became a backbone of American industry.

Why We Invested in Solcoa

Our case for Solcoa starts with its founders, Hooman and Artem. They are absolutely consumed by this problem. Hooman has been obsessed with magnets since he was a teenager. Artem's LinkedIn bio is a single word: metal.

We invest in founders who find a problem before the world does and refuse to let it go or think about anything else. Metal. Hooman and Artem are those founders, and we shook hands to back them before we even left the lab.

We at Felicis are proud to invest in Solcoa’s seed round after co-leading a pre-seed investment. The company sits at the center of our global resilience (opens in new tab) focus area: forging the industrial capacity the United States needs to make what it depends on, rather than import it. Hooman, Artem, and the Solcoa team are building a domestic source of one of the most important materials in modern civilization; believing in them is easy.

For thirty years China has owned the rare earth value chain. Not because of geology, but because of chemistry. The processes that turn ore and scrap into separated metal were industrialized in China, and the West has mostly tried to compete by copying them. That has not worked. Solcoa's bet, and ours, is that the path back runs through invention, not imitation. It is the path Charles Hall took in 1886, when he invented the electrolytic process that broke Europe's aluminum monopoly and built Alcoa. Hooman and Artem named their company in part after it. They’re building the next great American metals company.