Boston-based BlueShift has emerged from stealth with $2.1 million in pre-seed funding as it sets out on an ambitious goal of rapidly creating scalable supply chains for critical minerals, such as nickel, and building a cost-effective solution to remove carbon dioxide.
Founded in 2024 by a small team of academics, engineers, and climate-tech veterans, BlueShift is led by co-founder and CEO Deep Patel, who has advanced degrees in nuclear engineering. Another co-founder, David Kwabi, holds a Ph.D. from MIT and presently is an associate professor at Yale.
BlueShift’s electrochemical system has won the backing of ConocoPhillips, Ridgeline, which has offices in Washington, D.C., and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC), among others. The company plans to build a pilot facility using the funds.
“BlueShift was founded with the mission of promoting economic resilience by unlocking underutilized resources using advanced technologies,” said Patel, who has worked with multiple climate and sustainability groups, and Amazon’s Lab126, where he worked on building large-scale electrochemical systems for decarbonization at scale.
Prioritizing critical minerals and rare earth elements (REEs), Patel said, “Given the dramatic scale of environmental degradation, operational inefficiencies, and global trade imbalances plaguing this market, we felt it was imperative to develop a more sustainable, scalable, and geopolitically stable source of these vital resources.” BlueShift also fancies it can reduce the world’s reliance on China for critical minerals.
BlueShift will work out of North America’s largest climate tech incubator, Greentown Labs, and MIT’s The Engine accelerator to run the first pilot of its electrochemical technology in Boston Harbor. Its system — working together with related proprietary technology from the University of Michigan and Harvard — aims to isolate critical minerals from alkaline industrial waste and seawater. By simultaneously extracting CO2 directly from seawater as limestone, it expects to address the environmental issue of ocean acidification. BlueShift claims its system is up to 10 times more energy efficient than competing technologies. Patel told Axios BlueShift aims to produce one ton per year of nickel and rare earths from its pilot project by the second quarter of 2026.
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The company says it has developed a business model that comprises multiple revenue streams from sale of critical minerals such as nickel, REE products such as neodymium and dysprosium, carbon credits, and technology licensing. It also has the support of Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), an agency within the U.S. Department of Energy.
“Meeting our climate goals is going to require low-cost, large-scale carbon dioxide removal. BlueShift’s electrochemical technology is a promising new solution to this problem, while its domestic production of critical minerals could contribute to resilient supply chains for clean-energy industries,” said David Wilson, investment principal at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.
“BlueShift raises the bar for sustainable industrial innovation – advancing domestic critical-mineral production while capturing carbon from seawater,” said Ridgeline co-founder and managing partner Ryan Clinton.
