Found Industries has gone through several distinct phases in the four years since it was originally formed as Found Energy. There was the scrappy startup stage, in which the company was primarily housed in the basement of founder Peter Godart ’15, SM ’19, PhD ’21. Then there was the demonstration phase, in which the company worked to productize its technology for transforming aluminum into high-density fuel for industrial operations.
Now, after confronting supply chain vulnerabilities related to critical metals in its aluminum fuel business, the company is launching a new division, Found Metals, to extract the critical metal gallium from mineral refineries — a move that builds on its original technology while addressing a major national security need.
Gallium is a critical material in the defense, semiconductor, and energy sectors. In 2024, China produced 99 percent of the world’s primary supply — market dominance the country takes advantage of through export controls.
Godart’s company developed an electrochemical gallium extraction technology for internal use after realizing how dependent it would be on China for the catalyst material at the center of its aluminum fuel reactors. Now, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Found is hoping to use that technology to create a new domestic supply chain for gallium and a host of other important metals.
Found Industries is still committed to its aluminum fuel operations, now under its Found Energy division. It is already running a 100-kilowatt-class demonstration plant and is preparing for industrial pilot deployments next year. But with its expansion, which was announced April 21, the company is also working to meet the moment for critical metals production.
“Gallium is the world’s most critical metal, as it’s 99 percent controlled by China,” Godart says. “When you produce 99 percent of something, you also produce 99 percent of the tools required to extract it. We couldn’t get our hands on some of those tools, so we were forced to come up with a new technology. Now we believe we can deploy this at scale to become one the first major Western suppliers of these metals.”
From fuel to metals
Godart focused on robotics as an undergraduate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Following graduation, he worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he explored systems for tapping into high-density fuels like aluminum on other planets.
“I had this crazy idea that you could use aluminum, which is already a common construction material for aerospace, as a fuel on other planets,” Godart says. “You don’t need most of the aluminum on a spacecraft once you land on another planet. Aluminum is around 40 times more energy-dense than lithium-ion batteries, and if you have an oxidizer, like water on an icy moon for example, then you can react that aluminum with water and extract energy as heat and hydrogen.”
Luckily for people who might spill water on aluminum while cooking, the metal is normally very stable when exposed to air. In order to tap into aluminum’s stored energy, it needs to undergo a chemical reaction. Godart began exploring catalyst materials to create that reaction at NASA. He continued that work with professor of mechanical engineering Douglas Hart when he returned to MIT in 2017, this time for applications a little closer to home.
“If we want to think about moving humanity to other planets, we have some problems to solve here first,” Godart says. “That was the impetus for me to go back to MIT to study using aluminum as a fuel for energy distribution on Earth.”
Around 70 million tons of aluminum are already transported around the globe every year. Godart says that gives aluminum an easier path to scale. During his PhD, he created a process for coating aluminum with a gallium-containing alloy to help tap into aluminum’s embodied energy.
“We found a catalyst that, when mixed with aluminum scraps, enabled aluminum to react with water very rapidly and at orders of magnitude higher power density than what had been possible before,” Godart says. “That meant you could use aluminum as a fuel and get megawatt-scale power from compact reactor systems.”
By the time he finished his PhD in 2021, Godart and his collaborators had developed a system that mixes aluminum fuel with those catalysts to continuously produce electricity at the kilowatt scale through a hydrogen fuel cell.
Godart launched Found Energy in 2022, licensing part of his research from MIT’s Technology License Office and receiving support from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service. The company received an Activate fellowship, and after quickly outgrowing Godart’s basement, moved into its current 20,000 square foot facility in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
Today, Found Energy is working with industrial companies that have abundant aluminum scrap.
“When you invent a fuel, you then have to invent the engine,” Godart says. “Our engine is called a catalyzed aluminum water reactor. You feed in aluminum that’s been treated with the catalyst and water, and you get a steam-hydrogen gas mixture. We call that our power stream. We use it to cogenerate industrial heat and electricity. The reaction byproduct is a hydrated aluminum oxide that can be sold into various industries or recycled back into aluminum, which is the long-term vision.”
As Godart worked to build more of the systems, he became concerned about Found’s reliance on Chinese supply chains for its catalyst material. So, in 2024, he developed a new way to extract gallium from Bayer liquor, an industrial process stream used to produce aluminum. Traditional methods for extracting gallium rely on foreign-controlled organic chemicals or resins to bind and concentrate the gallium.
Found uses a continuous electrochemical process to recover the gallium directly from Bayer liquor and other industrial feedstocks, even at low concentrations.
“We thought of it as a way to future-proof what we were doing,” Godart says. “Necessity was the mother of invention.”
Then, toward the end of 2024, China began restricting the export of critical metals including gallium.
“We realized we had already developed a technique for producing these restricted metals that could be very quickly adapted,” Godart recalls.
Scaling for national security
On April 14, the Department of Energy’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation selected Found as part of its $5.4 million program to recover gallium from domestic feedstocks. The company plans to start extracting gallium, along with other critical metals like indium and germanium, by the end of 2027.
Meanwhile, Found is already running a 100-kilowatt-class aluminum fuel demonstration system in Charlestown and is working through a orders of several megawatts from large public companies.
“For our fuel technology, the vision is to go as big as possible,” Godart says. “We envision major power plants. Aluminum refineries today, for example, consume hundreds of megawatts of continuous thermal power. That’s what we aim to deliver.”
Godart says he spends most of his time now on gallium extraction, but both branches of the business could make supply chains more secure in the future.
“The big focus now is critical metals, because the government needs this,” Godart says. “We’re also making these metals for ourselves, so we’re vertically integrating our own supply chain, which is table stakes now for companies that deal in physical goods. You need to be able to control your inputs. By focusing on metals, it improves the likelihood of success for our aluminum fuel business.”
