A smelter melts rock at 1,200 degrees to free copper. Still Bright does it with electricity, at room temperature, in minutes - and pulls out up to 99% of the metal without the smoke.
THE SCENE: A quiet lab in Newark. A tank of blue-violet vanadium solution. Ore goes in dirty; copper comes out clean. The furnace, for the first time in a century, is optional.
Walk into Still Bright's lab and the thing you notice is what's missing. No roaring furnace. No plume. No sulfur bite in the air. Just a tank of vanadium solution the color of a bruise, and copper appearing where copper wasn't. For roughly a century, making copper has meant fire - crushing sulfide ore, then cooking it near 1,200 degrees to drive the metal out. Still Bright decided fire was a habit, not a requirement.
The company's answer is a patented process called RACER - Rapid and Complete Electrochemical Reduction. Soak copper-bearing material in a vanadium-based solution and the solution draws the metal out. When the solution is spent, electricity regenerates it. The chemistry was borrowed, cheekily, from vanadium flow batteries - the same technology built to store grid power for hours. Still Bright pointed it at rock instead.
Four moves take dirty concentrate to refined copper - no heat, no waste stream, minutes not days.
Copper ore, concentrate, or discarded tailings drops into a vanadium-based solution at ambient temperature and pressure.
The solution strips the copper out of the material in minutes - and enriches gold, nickel, cobalt, and molybdenum along the way.
Spent solution is renewed with electricity in a closed loop, the same trick a vanadium flow battery uses to store power.
Up to 99% of the copper comes out refined, with no harmful emissions and a footprint small enough to sit at a mine.
The electric age runs on copper - motors, grids, batteries, data centers. The trouble is making enough of it without the smoke. Here's the contrast Still Bright is selling.
There's a lot of opportunity for us to be cheaper.- Randy Allen, Co-founder & CEO, Still Bright
Still Bright is business-to-business hard tech. Its customers are the mines - and the waste piles - that already exist.
Copper the industry already dug up and discarded becomes feedstock again - resource recovery without opening a new pit.
RACER thrives on the dirty concentrates smelters reject, unlocking unconventional copper resources others write off.
A small, modular footprint that integrates with mine infrastructure - building a resilient, domestic copper supply chain.
The same pass enriches precious and critical co-products, adding value beyond the copper itself.
Ambient temperature and a closed vanadium loop mean clean production - climate-friendly by construction, not by offset.
Rapid extraction shrinks equipment and can ease the permitting path for new copper capacity.
Vincent Musi would frame them mid-thought: one who spent years hunting copper alternatives, one who invented the process that made the hunt unnecessary.
A second-time founder with a Stanford PhD spent developing copper alternatives - and 17+ years across the industry and venture capital, having mentored 20+ startups. He came back to fix copper itself.
A Columbia chemical-engineering PhD and NSF Graduate Research Fellow who invented Still Bright's copper process and earned an Activate fellowship in 2022 to bring it out of the lab.
A seed round that mixed climate capital with a strategic mining giant - a signal that the economics, not just the chemistry, hold up.
Founded by Randy Allen and Jon Vardner; RACER emerges from the HAX hard-tech accelerator in Newark.
Closes $18.7M seed round led by Material Impact and Breakthrough Energy Ventures; TechCrunch profiles the vanadium approach.
Leases ~15,000 sq ft at Kenilworth's NEST campus - a 1.2M-sq-ft building - as global HQ and pilot-manufacturing space.
Scaling from a ~2 tonnes/year pilot toward a 500 tonnes/year demonstration unit, with a commercial 10,000 tonnes/year system in view.
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