Disruptors are poised all around the edges of the global mining and metals industry. Pound for pound – atom for atom, even – they don’t come more potentially disruptive than New Zealand’s Atomic Tessellator.

The 2024 start-up and its founder, Alain Richardt, are getting lots of attention. That should continue when they come to IMARC for the first time next month. Richardt, Atomic Tessellator’s CEO, will join a panel discussion examining what investors should make of the very rapidly changing world of technology, data centres, electrification and meeting escalating demand for key materials, including through substitution.

In the meantime, US prime defence contractors, the CIA, Google, London and NZ venture capital firms are all taking more than a little interest in the Auckland company. Richardt recently returned from a visit to the White House and says he could be back there in a few weeks.

Speaking at NZ VC GD1’s biennial Believe Bigger event in Auckland, the former Google software engineer said Atomic Tessellator’s atomic-scale models and simulations of ‘synthetic’ substitutes for some rare earths and other materials were garnering predictable attention at a time when governments were looking for ways to unblock critical supply chains. In-Q-Tel, a US VC with links to the CIA, Crane Venture Partners, New Zealand’s Icehouse Ventures, Outset Ventures and GD1 backed Atomic Tessellator’s US$8.1 million April seed funding round. Australia’s Salus Ventures and Side Stage Ventures, and IBM business Confluent, are other supporters.

Google even expanded its Australian Startup Accelerator program across the Tasman for the first time this year, “inspired by two incredible Kiwi startups”. Readers can guess the name of one of them.

If using quantum physics to create replacement versions of some minerals seems like it belongs in the realm of science fiction, Richardt says Atomic Tessellator has discovered “two flagship materials” in the past year and “the pace of increase has been crazy”.

“Because our models are based on raw physics we are able to study and attempt to replace everything,” he said.

“It doesn’t always work; it’s not a silver bullet. But what we’re able to do is come as close as we can to the performance of real materials.

“Our first generation material took us four or five months to make. Then it was down to two months, then it was down to weeks and now it is just one week. So we can be given a material that’s under a geopolitical constraint, we scale our computations up, we run our simulations that tell us how it performs in the real world and then we have a candidate material in the lab in a week.

“When we finally get to the lab instead of having single-digit success percentages like most other material science companies we have an … 80% success rate with this synthesis.

“We are doing quantum physics. We use a huge amount of computation. But it’s all relative to what you’re delivering and … then also, what are the alternatives. One of the things we’re happy to get across when we’re explaining the company to people is that it only costs maybe $100,000 or $200,000 to find a suitable replacement for a rare earth. We can do that now in just one week. And that’s comparable to a billion dollars and five years opening a mine.”

Richardt said Atomic Tessellator’s profile was rising with the pace of its progress.

“They [investors and clients] recognise that this is a problem that is at the national security level,” he said.

“Most people when they worry about RE materials are still thinking about opening a mine. They don’t even know that substitution like this is possible. It is something that we’ve made possible.

“Who is this New Zealand start-up that’s doing quantum physics; that’s got these crazy founders and crazy employees?

“Part of it is telling people we can actually do this. And then getting over that hurdle of, okay, does it work in the real world. And we usually bring a suitcase full of samples we can show them. We say, this material doesn’t exist anywhere else except in this room. It is completely novel.

“And then we show all of the data sheets and the testing and it suddenly brings it right into the real world.”

Richardt said Google’s support had been two-tiered: technical and financial in the form of cloud computing credits.

“At the time we had raised US$1 million,” he said. “And they gave us about $0.5 million in credit. At one stage our US intelligence partner gave us a material that they wanted the US off [foreign dependence] and we were able to scale up to 200 GPUs and find an alternative material. That was our first one we found in a week.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do that without the enormous support of Google’s computing credit.

“Just a few weeks ago we were in the White House presenting this to some very senior people in US critical materials and we met with the Department of Energy and [the House Select Committee’s] Critical Minerals Policy Working Group.

“We’ve already got solutions for them, just in the last few weeks, and I’m going back in three weeks to present them to them.”