American Advanced Materials Raises $12.5 Million to Make Globally-Competitive Titanium Sponge in America and Announces Signed Letters of Intent with Industry Buyers Worth Over $1 Billion
Amity Ventures led the seed round for the advanced materials platform, with participation by Human Capital, Anti Fund, and Powerset
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- American Advanced Materials (AAM) today announced $12.5 million in seed funding led by Amity Ventures, with participation by Human Capital, Anti Fund, and Powerset. The company is developing an AI-native manufacturing platform for the advanced materials that underpin AI, energy, and defense, starting with titanium sponge. AAM will use the funding to grow its team and advance the front-end engineering and design of its manufacturing projects. The company plans to raise project financing to build and operate the integrated commercial facility. AAM's founding team members have previously designed, built, and operated the world's largest and most advanced titanium sponge and zirconium plants, both in the United States and abroad. They are joined by veterans of Tesla, ATI, TIMET, and Westinghouse.
Titanium sponge is the metal used by melters and alloy makers to manufacture America's most important aerospace and defense programs. The United States is home to some of the world's largest titanium melting operations, yet has produced no sponge since 2020. Meanwhile, titanium sponge imports hit a record 44,000 metric tons in 2025, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Industry experts project domestic demand to reach 60,000 metric tons over the coming 18 months, leaving America's industrial base fully exposed to foreign supply chains that are fragile, unreliable, and capacity constrained. AAM is supporting the most strategic interests of America and allies by restoring the critical midstream process manufacturing layer that sits between upstream mineral mining and downstream end-product fabrication.
"America has the feedstock, energy, and expertise to lead in manufacturing these materials again," said Alex Liegl, co-founder and CEO of AAM. "We aspire to build a next-generation DuPont, with globally competitive quality and cost as the starting point. Our goal is to make advanced materials abundant again so that their supply no longer limits what we can build."
AAM's first facility is designed with a vertically-integrated approach around the commercially proven Kroll process, drawing on the team's direct experience building and operating large-scale titanium sponge plants. It is the first step toward an integrated manufacturing platform for titanium group materials that can add related materials using shared feedstock, infrastructure, and process expertise.
In addition, AAM is developing zirconium oxychloride (ZOC), the key precursor for all zirconium and hafnium materials used in nuclear fuel, gas turbines, rockets, and AI chips. Today, America fully relies on Chinese imports of ZOC. Over time, AAM intends to extend this model to offer America and its allies an advanced materials platform that manufactures the building blocks for all of their most important strategic interests.
AAM has signed offtake letters of intent for its future production of titanium sponge and zirconium oxychloride materials worth over $1 billion. Its prospective customers include domestic melters and alloy makers that supply the aerospace, AI infrastructure, defense, and energy sectors.
"We're combining decades of process knowledge with modern engineering, AI, and robotics automation," said Diego Represas, co-founder, President, and Chief Technology Officer of AAM. "America doesn't need to wait for new technologies to lead the world in production cost, quality, and volume. What it needs is to build quickly. For AAM, the factory is the product. We design the plant, its software, and its operations as one system to carry what we learn into every future facility we build."
"The opportunity in advanced materials isn't simply to invent a new process. It's to rebuild the industrial capacity that America has lost," said Patrick Yang, Co-Founder and General Partner at Amity Ventures, which manages more than $2 billion in assets. "Alex and Diego have brought together the rare team, technical ambition, and urgency required to do that, starting with titanium sponge. We believe AAM has the potential to become a cornerstone of the next generation of American reindustrialization."
Liegl and Represas founded AAM in 2025 after years of considering solutions to the same problem: demand for AI, energy, and defense kept climbing, while the supply of the advanced materials required by America and its allies stayed flat or entirely vanished. Liegl previously founded Tenet Energy, a nationwide fintech platform for electric vehicles and home electrification backed by Human Capital, and Layer1, a renewable-energy bitcoin mining company backed by Peter Thiel. Represas, an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, previously founded Able AI, an AI data platform backed by Human Capital and Canapi Ventures, that was acquired by Moody's Corp. The two met as freshmen at Stanford University.
About American Advanced Materials
American Advanced Materials (AAM) is an AI-native advanced materials platform that manufactures the building blocks for AI, energy, and defense Our mission is to restore American leadership in the materials that underpin our most important strategic interests. Founded in 2025 and based in Mountain View, California and New York City, New York, AAM brings together America's top industry experts, industrial engineers, and AI talent to enable globally competitive production in the United States. Titanium sponge is its first commercial project, followed by zirconium oxychloride. Learn more at www.americanadvanced.com.
Media contact
Garrett Marquis | Throughline Global Advisors
garrett@throughline.global
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