Alta Resource Technologies, a Boulder, CO-based company which specializes in using advanced biochemistry to transform mineral separation, raised $5.1M in seed funding.
The round was co-led by DCVC and Voyager Ventures, with participation from Orion Industrial Ventures, Overture, and WovenEarth Ventures. As it emerged from stealth mode, Alta also announced that it has secured nearly $1 million in grant funding from the federal government, including the Department of Defense’s DARPA, and the State of Colorado. Earlier funding was provided by Baruch Future Ventures and Climate Capital (now Juniper).
The company intends to use the funds to expand its technical team, further develop and de-risk its platform in collaboration with Lawrence Livermore, and deploy it across a growing range of metal targets, ore types, and waste streams.
Led by Founder and CEO Nathan Ratledge, Alta Resource Technologies leverages technology that uses custom-designed proteins acting like microscopic robots to separate high-purity rare earth elements and other critical minerals with selectivity and cost-effectiveness in order to reduce the environmental footprint of mining while expanding access to essential raw materials.
Alta’s advanced biochemistry platform, which leverages technology licensed from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory co-developed with collaborators including researchers at Pennsylvania State University, tailors proteins to bind selectively to individual elements and expand the scope and scale of mineral separation and processing.
With its first products, the company aims to increase supplies of rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium – essential for electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, and defense technologies – by cost-effectively separating them from abundant low-grade sources and end-of-life products that cannot be processed using conventional methods.
