Startup Intalus raised an $11 million seed round to expand production of ceramic-infused metals, the company exclusively told Semafor. Intalus has been making these materials for years, using waveform energy (think: lasers) to change the internal structure of metals and make them more resistant to heat and corrosion.
Metal is great for a lot of things, but it melts and warps when it gets hot, and water can corrode it. Ceramic doesn’t mind water and it’s very heat-resistant (which is why it’s used to protect SpaceX rockets reentering Earth’s atmosphere). But it isn’t as strong as metal. You can sandwich metal and ceramics together, but fusing them into one material is even better.
Companies like Intalus don’t get a ton of attention, despite the fact that more than half of the teams in Formula 1 are using its materials, its CEO told Semafor. So are the US military and NASA. This is the kind of invention that is going to become increasingly important in an economy that is asking more of the physical world. We need new ways of producing energy, and building chips and manufacturing novel new product categories like robotic actuators and data centers destined for space.
There is, of course, an AI tie-in. Intalus couldn’t have created this product without machine learning, and materials science is on the verge of a boom, thanks to new datasets, algorithms, and massive compute resources.