He read the Pentagon's memos on why America can't make its own metals. Then he stopped writing recommendations and started building a reactor.
The pivot, in one face. Banker, then researcher, then lawyer, then the guy who decided to manufacture titanium. Co-founder and CEO of Duranium, Alameda, California.
The periodic table is having a geopolitical moment, and Brenden Prins-McKinney is standing right where it gets uncomfortable. He is the co-founder and CEO of Duranium, a company in Alameda, California, with a deceptively dull mission statement and a genuinely radical plan: make the metals America has quietly stopped making.
Titanium. Magnesium. Aluminum. Zirconium. Hafnium. The light, strong, corrosion-resistant elements that go into jet engines, missiles, EV frames and reactor cladding. The United States produces essentially none of the first two at meaningful scale. Duranium's pitch is that this is not a law of nature. It is a chemistry problem that nobody bothered to solve, because for decades it was cheaper to buy from overseas.
What makes Prins-McKinney an unlikely person to fix it is that he is not, by training, a metallurgist. His co-founder Berkley Noble is the one who built the only U.S. pilot magnesium electrolyzer in more than twenty years. Prins-McKinney brings the other half: finance, policy, and a year spent inside the machinery of American supply-chain anxiety.
Before Duranium, he was a consultant at McKinsey in Washington, D.C., advising the Department of Defense on reshoring critical chemical production. He spent time embedded with the Defense Logistics Agency, the part of the Pentagon that worries about whether the country can actually get what it needs. The job was to recommend. At some point, recommending stopped being enough.
The U.S. has zero domestic magnesium production and no meaningful titanium sponge production.
Duranium's core idea is almost contrarian in a startup world addicted to novelty. It does not invent new chemistry. It modernizes a 1950s process called carbochlorination, which turns metal oxides into chlorides using chlorine and carbon at high temperatures. The trick is a reactor design that runs the process as a closed loop.
The CO2 that the reaction would normally vent gets recycled back into carbon monoxide and fed in as feedstock. A valuable bleaching agent comes out as a co-product, which helps the economics stand on their own. The result, in the company's telling, is metal that can match Chinese pricing without subsidies, and without direct emissions. As Prins-McKinney's team puts it, the goal is to stop fighting thermodynamics and start using it.
It is a strangely elegant bet: take the boring old process, plug its leaks, and let the byproducts pay the rent. That is the kind of move you make when you have stared at supply-chain spreadsheets long enough to know that the winning idea is rarely the flashiest one.
The reason any of this matters fits on an index card. A handful of nations control the overwhelming majority of the world's supply of these metals. Duranium cites that three leaders control 97% of global magnesium and 96% of global titanium sponge. When that few players hold that much, every American manufacturer that needs the material is one trade dispute away from a very bad quarter.
Prins-McKinney's wager is that economics, not patriotism, wins this fight. If domestic metal is genuinely cheaper to make, reshoring stops being a slogan and becomes a purchase order. Duranium says it has already proven the process at benchtop scale - producing magnesium, generating the bleaching co-product, and converting CO2 to CO. The next step is a pilot facility, aimed to be operational in the Bay Area by June 2026, and a stated target of supplying 12% of U.S. magnesium by 2029 at margins that work at world pricing.
These three leaders control 97% of global magnesium, and 96% of global titanium sponge.
The detail that explains Prins-McKinney best has nothing to do with metal. In 2017, while still finding his footing after McGill, he co-founded Zua, a microinsurance initiative in Zambia. It offered index-based crop insurance to subsistence farmers - people one drought away from losing everything. The pilot insured 35 farmers across two villages, 31 of them women who were the primary breadwinners of their households.
The clever part was in the payout. Zua did not hand over cash. It delivered claims as seeds, fertilizer and pesticides, so the money could not be diverted and would actually reach the next planting season. The same instinct runs through Duranium: design the system so the incentives can only point one way.
He co-founded Zua with Meagan Prins, a McGill classmate and, like him, later a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. The hyphenated surname is not an accident. It is a partnership that predates the company.
Offering insurance ensures that even if there were a drought, farmers would be able to prepare - at least buy inputs, for the next harvest.
Read his path quickly and it looks scattered. Read it slowly and a pattern shows up. He studied economics at McGill. He worked as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs. He was a research fellow with the McKinsey Global Institute and the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility before moving into consulting in D.C. He earned a spot in the 2022 cohort of Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford, where he pursued a J.D. at the law school and work toward a Ph.D. in sociology.
Banking taught him how money moves. Consulting taught him where the supply chain breaks. Law and sociology taught him how institutions actually behave. Zambia taught him how to ship a system that survives contact with reality. Duranium is where all four collide - a hard-tech manufacturing company run by someone fluent in the policy, capital and incentive structures that decide whether hard tech ever leaves the lab.
The advice he once gave to students reads like a quiet self-portrait: do not wait, take the opportunities in front of you, use the resources you have. He took his own counsel and pointed it at one of the least glamorous, most strategically loaded problems in the American economy.
Duranium is young - founded in 2025, ten or so people, fresh out of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch, backed by seed funding and YC. The hard part is still ahead: turning a benchtop reaction into a pilot plant, and a pilot plant into tonnage. Manufacturing is unforgiving in ways software never is. You cannot patch a furnace.
But the thesis is clean. America forgot how to make some of its most important metals. Prins-McKinney thinks the way back is not a subsidy or a speech, but a reactor that turns its own emissions into raw material and quietly undercuts the incumbents. If he is right, the most consequential thing he ever does will have started with old chemistry, a closed loop, and a refusal to keep writing recommendations nobody would act on.
Duranium's process targets the light, strong, hard-to-make metals that modern industry runs on - and that America largely imports.
Pilot plant targeted for the Bay Area, 2026.
Co-founds Zua, an index-based crop microinsurance project in Zambia, paying claims in seeds and fertilizer instead of cash.
Joins McKinsey in Washington, D.C.; research fellow with the McKinsey Global Institute and the Institute for Black Economic Mobility.
Named a Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford, pursuing a J.D. at Stanford Law and work toward a Ph.D. in sociology.
Co-founds Duranium with Berkley Noble; joins Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch as CEO.
Targets a Bay Area pilot plant operational by June - the bridge from benchtop chemistry to real tonnage.
Duranium's reactor recycles CO2 into CO feedstock and sells the bleaching-agent co-product - turning a pollution problem into a revenue line.
The company deliberately does not invent new chemistry. It modernizes 1950s carbochlorination so it stops fighting thermodynamics.
He co-founded Zua with Meagan Prins, a fellow McGill grad and Knight-Hennessy Scholar. The hyphen tells the story.
He advised the Pentagon on reshoring critical chemicals, then concluded the fastest fix was to leave consulting and make the metal himself.