MIT spinout Allium Engineering has raised a $3.25 million seed round to scale up its long-lasting steel manufacturing process, complete with a new facility in Boston.
Allium manufactures a more sustainable type of steel through a steel cladding process that makes it last longer, said Steven Jepeal, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
The company is trying to address part of the infrastructure crisis by making steel that holds up longer, preventing rapid decay with materials that last longer.
“You can get something that, instead of lasting 20 to 30 years on a bridge, can last 100,” Jepeal said.
Allium has partnered with steel mills for its proof-of-concept phase to manufacture tons of steel. With this new funding, it plans to begin producing hundreds of tons at its own facility.
Allium is the newest investment from Propeller, a Boston-based venture capital firm that announced its first portfolio startups in January. Other participants in the round include Aera VC, Greatwave Ventures, and Anthropocene Ventures.
The Allium process is inserted in the middle of a traditional steel manufacturing cycle, Jepeal said. Stainless steel cladding is added to steel rebar, which extends the lifetime of the steel potentially five-fold. It does not significantly impact the price of the steel, according to Jepeal.
The impetus to seek out institutional funding was the desire to create an Allium-owned facility where their advanced manufacturing could occur, Jepeal said.
The company is in the process of entering a lease agreement for the facility in one of Boston’s southern neighborhoods. Jepeal declined to provide the exact address before the lease is finalized.
The company expects the facility to be live by July, according to a news release. It will be staffed by engineers and other technical workers, but the cladding process will be mostly automated by robots, Jepeal said.
Jepeal and co-founder Samuel McAlpine began developing the technology that would become Allium Engineering while PhD students at MIT. The company was created in 2022.
