Inside Found Industries: Mining critical metals in plant that already run

The race for critical metals is mostly a race to build.

New mines, new refineries, new processing capacity, new supply chains, all on timelines measured in decades. Gallium is a good example of why the urgency is real because it sits inside advanced semiconductors and high-efficiency power electronics, and its supply chain is among the most concentrated of any material the technology industry depends on.

Large quantities of gallium are already moving through industrial facilities that exist today, in plants built and paid for years ago yet it goes unrecovered because there has never been an economical way to pull it out.

Found Industries started from a question much broader than gallium, and arrived there by following it. 

If the world wants dramatically more energy, computation and manufacturing capability, what are the physical bottlenecks that could stop it? 

Peter Godart, CEO of Found Industries kept landing on the same two bottlenecks, and the company they built is an attempt to remove them.

What makes the story really interesting, is where the answers turned out to be hiding.

The Interview: Inside Found Industries

Q: What was the moment that made this the right problem to solve?

For Peter, the company began with a question rather than a moment.

""Found started from a first-principles question: if we want a future with dramatically more energy, computation, manufacturing, and technological capability, what are the physical bottlenecks that could stop us from getting there? Energy and materials kept coming up. That led me to fuels made from aluminium, one of the most abundant metals in the Earth's crust and an extraordinarily energy-dense material, and eventually to critical metals as we started solving bottlenecks within our own supply chain."

Following that thread produced something more useful than a product roadmap, it produced a new way of looking at industry.

"What became clear is that there are enormous opportunities hiding in plain sight within the infrastructure and materials we already have. The ability to identify the physical bottlenecks standing between industry and a more abundant future has become the ethos of Found Industries and the company’s objective to remove them."

Hiding in plain sight is a claim that needs proof, and gallium is where Found has shown it.

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Q: Can you share a recent success where your technology made a tangible impact?

"One of the most exciting examples has been gallium. It is essential to advanced semiconductors and high-efficiency power electronics, but its supply chain is extraordinarily concentrated. We realised that large quantities of gallium are already flowing through existing industrial facilities around the world, but historically there have been limited economical ways to recover it."

The technical answer is electrochemical. The strategic answer is that nothing new has to be built.

"We have now demonstrated an electrochemical approach to extracting gallium directly from these existing process streams and are working with major industrial partners toward commercial deployment. What is exciting is that we do not need to discover a new ore body or recreate an entire supply chain. Instead, we turn material that is already there into a strategic resource."

That business did not exist when Found Industries started, which leads us naturally to the next question.

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‍Q: What is the biggest risk you have taken so far?

"Timing is probably the biggest risk we have taken. With industrial technology, being too early can be just as dangerous as being wrong, so we have tried to build Found Industries in a way that lets us stay in the right place long enough for the market and the technology to converge."

The second risk was recognising that an external fix was worth more than an internal fix.

"Found Metals is a good example. It began with us solving a critical-material supply problem for ourselves. We could have treated that as an internal engineering project, but we realised that the same solution addressed a much larger global bottleneck. Taking the risk to follow that discovery led us to build an entirely new business around it."

Building that business meant working inside industries with a reputation for moving slowly, and Peter found the reputation misleading.

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‍Q: What is the most unexpected lesson from working with traditional industries?

"The biggest surprise has been how much appetite there actually is for innovation. It is easy for startups to assume that incumbent industries are slow because they do not want to change, but these companies operate enormous, highly optimised assets under very real technical, economic, and safety constraints."

The constraints turn out to be the opening.

"The opportunity is to innovate within those constraints and make their existing assets more valuable. Once you approach the problem that way, you find a lot of ambitious people who want to move quickly. The world has already invested trillions of dollars in industrial infrastructure, and finding ways to give those assets a second life can be far more powerful than starting from scratch."

Give enough of those assets a second life and the effects run well past the metals themselves.

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‍Q: What are the broader ripple effects if your technology is widely adopted?

"Most technological progress eventually runs into two physical constraints: energy and materials. And those constraints compound such that when you make energy or materials more efficient and accessible, you often do not simply reduce consumption; you enable entirely new applications and ultimately create more demand."

Peter is describing Jevons' paradox, and treating it as the point rather than a problem.

"So the ripple effect is much larger than producing more aluminium-derived energy or more critical metals. If we can make critical inputs more abundant and make energy easier to store, move, and use, we remove constraints on everything downstream: computing, manufacturing, transportation, defence, and the energy system itself. A future of technological abundance needs an equally abundant physical supply chain underneath it."

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Why this matters

Most people answer the critical metals question by describing something to build, a mine or a refinery or a trade agreement, while Peter asked what is already flowing through the plants we have.

That difference is the whole company. The gallium is already there, moving through plants that already run, and it has been leaving as waste because nobody had an economical reason to look at it as anything else. Found did not have to discover an ore body, instead, it had to reopen a question the industry had settled by default.

This is the pattern we keep finding in physical industries. The world has spent trillions of dollars on industrial infrastructure, and the largest remaining gains are often sitting inside it rather than waiting to be built next to it. Recovery beats construction on capital, on permitting, and on time, which are the three things a concentrated supply chain does not give you.

Whether Found Industries clears the bar from demonstrated to commercially deployed is still ahead of it, and Peter is clear-eyed about the timing risk that carries. What convinced us is the discipline of the question underneath it. Start with the physical bottleneck, then ask whether the answer is already in the system. Get that right for gallium, and the interesting part is not the gallium. It is how many other strategic materials the world is currently planning to dig up, only because no one has checked what is already flowing past.

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About Found Industries

Found Industries develops technologies to remove physical bottlenecks in energy and materials supply. Its Found Metals business recovers critical metals from the process streams of existing industrial facilities, using an electrochemical approach that requires no new ore body or parallel supply chain. The company has demonstrated the process for gallium, a material essential to advanced semiconductors and high-efficiency power electronics, and is working with industrial partners toward commercial deployment. Its work on aluminium addresses the storage and movement of energy.

Continue reading about Found Industries by visiting their website at www.found-industries.com

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Written by Pauline Jimenez, Head of Marketing at KOMPAS VC