Randy Allen has a useful qualification for advising a founder: he remembers being one. Before the venture firms, before the mentoring meetings, before the copper company, there was a sensor startup called Pascalor. And there were decisions made on hunches. He has said so himself. It is an unusually practical item to carry through a career. A doctorate certifies what you learned. A remembered mistake can determine what you do next.
Allen now leads Still Bright, where the problem is copper: how to recover more of it from material that conventional processing finds difficult or leaves behind. The company brings him back to the founder’s desk after years spent helping other people occupy it. That gives his story a pleasing circularity, although circles are much easier to draw on a slide than to finance.
His name is Ranulfo; professionally, he also goes by Randy. His route to this particular job runs through chemical engineering, a first business, market research, business school, venture capital and founder coaching. The turns make sense when you follow the question underneath them. How does a scientific result become something people can actually use?
The sensor startup before the copper company
Allen studied chemical engineering at Princeton, graduating in 2008, then completed his Stanford PhD in 2013. In Zhenan Bao’s group, his work involved aligned carbon nanotube films and fibers made from polymer-wrapped nanotube gels. Bao and Gerald Fuller advised his doctoral research. The vocabulary is specialized; the underlying concern is tangible. The arrangement of a material changes what it can do.
His lab biography also lists snowboarding and video games. That small detail belongs beside the nanotubes. A scientific career may be described in papers and appointments, but the person living it also has a weekend. Allen’s subsequent public biographies preserve the snowboarding, adding podcasts and reality television. There is room in the schedule for both a thought-provoking discussion and a gloriously unproductive episode.
After Stanford, he moved to Dallas for postdoctoral work at the University of Texas at Dallas. He explored smart plastics and flexible electronics, including materials that could repair themselves and very soft elastomers. With a labmate, he formed Pascalor to commercialize arrays of pressure and temperature sensors. He served as co-founder and chief technology officer.
Pascalor placed his research in a different kind of experiment. A material’s performance was one question. The business around it presented others. During his time running the company, Allen noticed scientific ventures with potentially useful technologies struggling to attract investment. He decided to move closer to the financing decisions. That shift widened his view of what commercialization requires.
A mentor who remembered the hunches
At Frost & Sullivan, Allen worked on market landscapes and entry strategies across chemicals, advanced materials and food science. He went on to Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. During those business-school years, he gained experience at Spike Ventures, Tech Council Ventures and Pillar VC. The laboratory had taught him to investigate a material. These roles asked him to investigate the setting in which someone might buy it.
That is a consequential change of scale. A researcher can improve an experiment without changing the question it answers. A founder sometimes has to discover that the question itself belongs to the wrong market. Allen’s work moved toward that uncomfortable intersection: a technology may be convincing while its commercial direction still needs reconsideration.
In 2021, he joined Activate as its first Boston-based executive-in-residence. He was particularly interested in helping founders choose markets, identify problems and evaluate funding opportunities. He recalled making strategic choices on hunches at his own startup. He wanted entrepreneurs to gather information before committing their effort.
“In my startup, we made these decisions off of hunches.”
Randy Allen, 2021
He also wanted the process to feel less lonely. That concern became part of his leadership as Activate announced his promotion to Boston managing director in February 2022. He had already helped fellows with strategy and pitch decks. In the larger role, he wanted to reach engineers beyond the familiar institutions and help people who had not previously considered becoming entrepreneurs.
The work connected him to Jon Vardner. Still Bright describes Allen as Vardner’s personal mentor at Activate Boston and as involved with the company from its inception. Vardner, a Columbia chemical engineering PhD, had continued developing the copper process during postdoctoral work and received an Activate fellowship in 2022 to spin out the business.
Allen later became a company-building partner at Material Impact. By the time Still Bright announced him as CEO in December 2024, he had seen early scientific companies from several seats. He described joining the company operationally in the first quarter of 2025. An adviser can suggest priorities. A chief executive has to put people, money and time behind them.
A battery idea gets another job
The technology Allen is helping commercialize originated at Columbia. HAX describes it as an electrochemical alternative to smelting, designed for installation at mine sites and for processing resources that are difficult to use with conventional methods. Its industrial ambition begins with a change in how copper is separated from the material around it.
Still Bright calls the process RACER, short for Rapid and Complete Electrochemical Reduction. The company says it operates at ambient temperature and pressure and can recover up to 99 percent of copper from sulfide ore. Those are process claims, with the next stage of development aimed at putting the chemistry into larger working systems.
The vanadium reagent is regenerated electrochemically and circulated back through the process. That reuse matters because the reagent must keep doing its job economically. A loop that looks elegant in a diagram has to remain useful through repeated operation. At a mine, repetition is the business.
Conceptual diagram of the company’s process. Feedstock performance varies.
Allen’s scientific background makes the subject familiar, but he credits Vardner with inventing the approach. The pairing puts the technical work alongside experience in financing, operations and company formation. Both kinds of work become visible as the enterprise grows. A clever reaction needs a reliable system; a reliable system needs a business that can deliver it.
The arithmetic after the invention
In July 2025, Still Bright announced an $18.7 million seed round led by Material Impact and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Azolla Ventures, Fortescue, Impact Science Ventures and SOSV participated. The funding supported the move toward larger production. Its investor group included people accustomed to scientific startups and a mining company with a direct interest in the industry.
The development plan published at the time called for a demonstration unit producing 500 tons of copper annually in 2027 or 2028, followed by a commercial system targeting 10,000 tons a year. These were future capacities. They give the project a measurable destination without turning a destination into an arrival.
demonstration target
commercial system target
Planned capacities, not current production. Demonstration timing was targeted for 2027-2028.
By June 2026, the company had announced a 15,000-square-foot headquarters and laboratory space at the Northeast Science and Technology Center in Kenilworth, New Jersey. Leaving the HAX incubator in Newark would give the team room for research, testing and pilot manufacturing under one roof. A company that intends to handle physical material eventually needs more than a good address on its pitch deck.
In August 2026, Still Bright appeared among nine projects selected by the Department of Energy for critical-materials recovery award negotiations. The program’s combined selections totaled $162 million. That total belongs to the program, and selection begins negotiations rather than guaranteeing a payment. For Allen’s company, it marked another step in the work of advancing a laboratory process toward a prototype.
The company he would want to advise
Allen’s public writing returns to the people around the machinery. In his letter to prospective recruits, he describes supporting employees’ own goals, including goals beyond Still Bright. He says the company is honest about fit. That is a recognizable continuation of the mentor’s job: care about the person doing the work as well as the work being done.
His argument about resources extends beyond the copper itself. In another letter, he calls for processing closer to the mine so that more value can remain with the country that owns the ore. His stated mission includes resource owners and nearby communities. The industrial design and the distribution of its benefits belong in the same conversation.
He has continued taking that conversation outside the company. In June 2026, he joined a Scale For ClimateTech panel on the paths taken by climate hardware startups. In August, he presented electrochemical copper extraction for domestic supply chains at the Molecular Foundry annual meeting. The subjects connect his older role as a guide to entrepreneurs with the daily demands of building his own venture.
Allen’s career makes a case for learning across boundaries without pretending the boundaries disappear. Chemistry, customers, capital and teams each require their own attention. His earlier decisions have given him a vocabulary for the next ones. Still Bright will give those decisions consequences. The former mentor is back where the advice becomes a schedule, an expense and a task someone must finish.