Critical minerals are essential to the world’s most powerful clean energy technologies, from batteries and electric vehicles to power lines, wind turbines, and solar panels. But the vast majority of the U.S. mineral supply comes from countries such as China, putting supply chains for a whole host of decarbonization technologies at geopolitical and economic risk.
Recycling minerals domestically would go a long way toward solving this problem, which is exactly what ChemFinity, a new startup spun out of the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to do. The company claims its critical mineral recovery system will be three times cheaper, 99% cleaner, and 10 times faster than existing approaches found in the mining and recycling industries. And it just got its first big boost of investor confidence, raising a $7 million seed round led by the climate tech firms At One Ventures and Overture Ventures.
“We basically act like a black box where recyclers or scrap yards or even other refiners can send their feedstock to us,” Adam Uliana, ChemFinity’s co-founder and CEO, told me. “We act like a black box that spits out pure metal.”
It works like this: After a customer sends ChemFinity its feedstock — anything from a circuit board to a catalytic converter to recently mined metal ore will do — the material goes into a chemical solution that dissolves the metals to be recovered, separating them from the solid feedstock. That liquid is then pumped through ChemFinity’s sorbent filters, which capture target minerals “like metal-selective Brita filters.”
The core breakthrough is a new polymer used in these filters that Uliana and his co-founder designed while PhD students in Chemical Engineering at Berkeley. The novel material is made of innumerable mineral-trapping pores smaller than the width of a hair, making it “so porous that 1 gram of the material — like a spoonful of the material — can have the same surface area internally as that of a football field,” Uliana told me. This allows the filters to capture an astonishing amount of metal using very little polymer.
Crucially, the pores are customized for each specific mineral. “You can tune the size of these pores, the shapes of these pores, the chemistries of these pores, and it basically acts like a cage, or like an atomic catcher’s mitt, just for that individual metal,” Uliana explained. After that atomic mitt traps the minerals, a proprietary liquid solution flows through the mineral-filled polymer, stripping off the minerals so that they can be recovered. The company can then reuse the porous sorbent without performance loss.
Uliana told me this method is orders of magnitude more efficient than what exists on the market today — even when compared to the most successful and innovative startups in the space such as Redwood Materials, which recycles lithium-ion battery minerals. That’s because refining typically requires more than a dozen steps and extremely high temperatures, as systems remove impurities one by one, gradually concentrating a mineral until it’s pure enough for commercial viability.
ChemFinity’s process, on the other hand, operates at room temperature. And because its filter is so selective, there are far fewer steps overall. “If we’re able to successfully scale this, it’s really unprecedented unit economics,” Uliana said. He sees potential for other companies like Redwood to adopt the startup’s refining technology as part of a larger operation.
But that’s a ways down the road. ChemFinity isn’t prioritizing battery recycling to begin with, instead focusing on recovering and refining precious metals such as gold, silver, and platinum. These minerals are all over the e-waste from consumer electronics —- things like circuit boards, connectors, memory chips, capacitors, and switches all contain precious metals.
They’re a good group of minerals to go to market with, Uliana explained, both because they’re expensive and difficult to purify. “These metals have extremely high value. So you don’t necessarily need to be quite as large-scale as if you were recovering copper from a copper tailing,” he told me. The flip side, though, is “that these are some of the hardest minerals to separate.” So if ChemFinity proves capable of refining these at scale, it will be a pivotal proof point as the startup looks to apply its process to more than 20 critical minerals across the periodic table.
With this first influx of funding, the company is looking to scale production of its novel sorbent material from a few kilograms to about 100 kilograms per day as it sets up initial pilots. And while ChemFinity’s first customers could range from manufacturers of clean tech to metal traders and jewelers, the company says its materials breakthrough could have applications in an even wider array of sectors, from wastewater treatment to carbon capture and petrochemical processing.
Because if ChemFinity has, as Uliana told me, truly created the “that perfect cage, just for one mineral at a time,” there really is a world of opportunity out there.
A chart showing the trio of South America nations' share of next year's oil production. EIA
