The best tools for this startup could be military drones, luxury watches, and chef’s knives.

How people mix metals is the same today as it was in the Bronze Age: Melt certain metals in a pot and mix them until a new, better metal is formed.

An early stage startup, Foundation Alloy, has developed a new fusion method that beats ingredients instead of melting them.

“We’re actually smashing the metal powder particles together instead of melting them,” Jake Guglin, founder and CEO of Foundation Alloy, told TechCrunch. “We can create structures that other people cannot do.”

Until now, watchmakers have been selling their bespoke instruments in small batches, but Guglin said his company is “held back by our ability to make things, not the people who want to buy them.”

Looking at the types of industries that Foundation Alloy sells to, it seems that everyone is looking for better existing alloys or completely new ones. Guglin said the building houses pilots and companies in the automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, and defense industries, as well as others that make chef’s knives and luxury watches.

“We can save tons of money and tons of waste,” he said.

To increase production to several tons per week by 2027, Foundation Alloy has raised a Series A round of $22 million led by Voyager Ventures, the exclusive startup told TechCrunch. Other participants in the round were Trust Ventures, Yamaha Motors, America’s Frontier Fund, Overlap Holdings, Material Impact, Engine Ventures, El Cap, and Kanematsu Corporation, which will also distribute the startup’s equipment in Japan and Southeast Asia.

Foundation Alloy technology emerged from scientific research conducted over the past 20 years. Tim Rupert and Chris Schuh led efforts to understand what happened to metals at the nanometer scale, which forms the basis of Foundation Alloy technology. Schuh is no stranger to the original game, having previously founded Desktop Metal and Xtalic.

Where almost all alloys used commercially today are made by melting different metals, Foundation Alloy uses a special type of mill that grinds the different metal powders together into a single new metal. To avoid meltdowns, Guglin said his company’s solid-state process uses a much lower energy density.

The goal of any alloying process is to create a molecular-scale crystal structure that combines two or more metal elements. A complete alloy can be completely homogeneous – that is, the entire crystal pattern will be repeated continuously throughout the material.

Traditional alloys do a reasonably good job of achieving this, but they are not perfect, leaving voids that can reduce the performance of the alloy, make it smooth or easy to heat. The standard method also doesn’t work for metals with very different melting points, which means there are whole classes of metal alloys with potentially beneficial properties that we can’t make.

The solid-state alloying process allows Foundation Alloy to make materials that solve the old trade. Traditionally, steels are designed to withstand heat or mechanical stress, as trying to do both often results in steel that is bad for both. Steels used in furnaces tend to be brittle, while stronger ones used in making things like car parts tend to deteriorate quickly when exposed to heat.

But Foundation Alloy managed to solve that problem, making steels that can take heat and take a hit. Some of its first products used parts from automakers and aerospace and defense companies, Guglin said. Within defense, one early market is parts for drones, where some supply chains were designed for F-35 fighter jets.

“They’re thinking of making 100 complete parts a year,” Guglin said, and the drones need more than 10,000 a month.

Alloying is like cooking, says Guglin. Two different chefs may use the same ingredients but produce dishes that taste differently, for better or worse, if they don’t follow the same process steps.

“The quality of the product of the dish is not based only on the ingredients, it is the way you cook it,” he said. “We have a new way of cooking.”