domestic-manufacturing
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Ravi Bulusu and the Long Way Around to Building What Matters
A software engineer tried to answer a shortage with a factory. Immigration rules, overseas supply chains and a Senate witness table turned that practical impulse into a revealing American story.
Nicholas Myers Put $7,000 Into a Backyard Experiment. Now He Is Building America’s Rare-Earth Middle.
A physics graduate with no mining résumé helped turn a backyard reactor into a rare-earth business. His wager is that America’s missing industrial link can be rebuilt with cleaner chemistry, patient capital, and a team willing to learn in public.
Rick Sebok Makes People Believe in Steel
The marketing chief at North America's largest independent steel pipe and tube maker took an industry most people never think about and gave it a rally cry.
Alex Grant
Alex Grant is the co-founder and CEO of Magrathea, an Oakland-based startup building a new electrolytic process to make magnesium metal from seawater and brine with near-zero carbon emissions. A chemical engineer who previously founded lithium-extraction company Lilac Solutions and modeled battery supply chains at Minviro, Grant started Magrathea in 2022 to reshore US magnesium production. What began as a climate play turned into a national-security one: after Russia's invasion of Ukraine tightened global magnesium supply, Magrathea won a Defense Production Act partnership with the US Department of Defense. He was a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Energy in 2021.
Howard Yuh
Howard Yuh is a plasma physicist turned founder who is trying to break China's grip on magnesium by pulling the metal out of the ocean. As CEO and cofounder of Tidal Metals, the New Jersey deeptech he spun out of his earlier desalination venture GreenBlu, he uses an adsorption temperature-swing vapor pump - a trick borrowed from fusion research - to extract magnesium salt from seawater with only electricity, no mining, and no waste. The company raised $8.5M in seed funding led by DCVC in 2024 and won the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Mining Challenge the same year.
Suvi Sharma
Suvi Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of SOLARCYCLE, a clean-energy company turning end-of-life solar panels into recovered materials and brand-new solar glass. A three-time solar entrepreneur, he previously built and ran Solaria for 17 years and co-founded Nextracker before it was acquired by Flex. Today he is building one of the first US solar glass plants in Cedartown, Georgia, betting that the fastest-growing source of electricity also needs the smartest plan for what happens when the panels come down.