Boston Metal raised $75 million this week to keep itself alive after a difficult year. The company's plant in Brazil's Minas Gerais region suffered a reactor leak in January, missed a funding milestone as a result, laid off 71 employees in April, and only survived because investors stepped in hard. The round includes Tata Steel, one of India's largest steel producers, alongside existing backers.
The core technology runs electric current through a reactor filled with ore dissolved in a heated liquid at around 1,600 degrees Celsius. The electricity drives a chemical reaction that separates the metal from the rock. Pure metal gathers at the bottom and gets siphoned off. No coal, no coke, no carbon emissions from the process itself. The company has been building toward this for over a decade and has now raised more than $500 million in total.
The original vision was green steel. Steel production accounts for roughly 8 to 10% of global carbon emissions, and Boston Metal's process would eliminate that entirely. The problem is that nobody wants to pay more for steel just because it is cleaner. That commercial reality pushed the company toward a smarter short-term angle: produce metals that are already expensive and scarce, prove the technology earns real money, and come back to steel later.
Niobium is the clearest example of why this pivot makes sense. Brazil supplies approximately 90% of the world's niobium. The US has had no domestic production since 1959 and relies entirely on imports. Niobium goes into high-strength steel alloys, jet engines, and the superconducting magnets inside MRI scanners. Boston Metal's Brazil plant works with low-grade waste material from existing mining operations, pulling niobium, tantalum, and tin out of feedstock that nobody else is processing.
Tantalum has a similar profile. It is used in rocket nozzles, turbine blades, medical devices, and electronics. Both metals sit on the US government's official 2025 list of 60 critical minerals, a list that also includes chromium, vanadium, and nickel, all of which Boston Metal intends to target next.
Chromium is the US story. The country imports almost all of its chromium supply, primarily from South Africa and Kazakhstan. It goes into stainless steel, aerospace parts, and automotive manufacturing. Boston Metal plans to build a US plant for chromium production, which would be the first domestic source in over 60 years. That plan, however, has to wait for Brazil to prove the process works reliably at commercial scale.
The Brazil plant is currently being repaired and should be operational in September 2026. That is the near-term test. If it runs well and produces commercially sellable metal, Boston Metal has a credible path toward the US chromium plant and eventually back to its original steel ambition. If it encounters more problems, the company will face hard questions about whether its technology is ready for the demands of continuous industrial operation.
Tata Steel's participation in this round is worth noting. Tata is not a passive financial investor. It operates steel plants across Europe and Asia and has every reason to want this technology to work. Its involvement signals that serious industrial operators are watching closely and keeping a seat at the table.