Rare earth elements sit inside nearly everything that defines modern life: electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, phones, fighter jets, AI data centers. The metals aren't scarce. What's scarce is the ability to process them outside of China, which controls over 90 percent of production and nearly all of the final conversion step, turning refined material into usable metal.

Co-founders Hooman Reza Nezhad and Artem Iurkovskyi set out to close that gap with a new pyrometallurgical process, one that avoids the hydrofluoric acid and perfluorocarbon emissions that make the conventional method, molten oxyfluoride electrolysis, illegal to run at scale in the US. The result is a way to convert feedstock directly into metal domestically, at a cost already competitive with China.

Alysaa met the founders when Hooman was 19 and Artem was working on similar problems on the East Coast. What was striking was Hooman’s ability to deliver a vision. Hooman could speak to a room full of magnet buyers and producers, speak with the authority of someone decades into the industry, and make a compelling case for an American-made supply chain most people assumed would always belong to China.

That conviction has translated into speed. Solcoa's 10-ton line already runs around the clock, a 500-ton facility is on track to commission within a year, and one-kiloton and three-kiloton sites are already underway. The company aims to supply at least a third of North America's NdPr demand by the end of the decade.

Bain Capital's ownership of Proterial, one of the world's largest magnet producers, gave the firm an unusually direct view into why this mattered from day one. The mandate since founding has been simple: get to market first. Solcoa believes it now has.