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Amity Ventures has led a $12.5 million seed round into American Advanced Materials (AAM), a startup that wants to restart the U.S. titanium sponge industry and take on China in advanced materials. The company announced the funding on Oct. 28, 2026, and said it has already signed letters of intent worth over $1 billion with prospective buyers in aerospace and defense. Human Capital, Anti Fund, and Powerset also joined the round.
Titanium sponge is the porous form of titanium that comes out of the extraction process before it is melted into ingots, plate, sheet, and forgings. Without it, no aircraft, rocket, or tank can be made from titanium. The United States once made sponge domestically, but the last production line shut down in 2020. Since then, American users have relied entirely on imports, which reached a record 44,000 metric tons in 2025, according to U.S. Geological Survey data. AAM now projects domestic demand could hit 60,000 metric tons within the next 18 months.
That import reliance is widely seen as a strategic vulnerability. The Pentagon has repeatedly flagged titanium as a critical material for defense programs, including major combat aircraft and naval vessels. While the U.S. still has world-class melters and alloy producers — ATI and TIMET are among the big names — they depend on foreign sponge from suppliers that are concentrated in a handful of countries, including China, Russia, Japan, and Kazakhstan. AAM argues that logistics, geopolitics, and capacity limits make those imports an unacceptable risk for America’s industrial base.
AAM’s countermove is to rebuild the missing “midstream” layer: the chemistry-heavy process that turns titanium concentrate into sponge. The company says its first facility will be built around the Kroll process, the established production route used by most sponge plants worldwide. The founding team says it has direct experience building and operating some of the largest titanium and zirconium facilities in the world, both in the U.S. and abroad. Bringing in veterans with backgrounds at Tesla, ATI, TIMET, and Westinghouse is meant to cover materials, engineering, and advanced manufacturing.
What sets AAM apart from a conventional metals company is the operating model. In its telling, the plant is designed as a single integrated system where the factory floor, process-control software, and robotics work together. Co-founder, President, and CTO Diego Represas, an Army Reserve officer and the founder of AI data platform Able AI, puts it in blunt terms: “For AAM, the factory is the product.” This “AI-native” approach is intended to compress construction timelines, reduce operating costs, and make each future plant more efficient than the last. The company sees this as the only realistic path to matching global cost leaders.
The seed capital is not meant to finance the full plant. That will require a much larger construction budget, which AAM plans to raise through project financing. The $12.5 million will instead pay for the front-end engineering and design needed to mature a bankable project. It will also allow the team to grow. The ultimate goal, according to CEO Alex Liegl, is to stand up an integrated commercial facility that can supply domestic melters and alloy makers at globally competitive prices.
The letters of intent AAM has signed are, on paper, striking for a company at this stage. Worth more than $1 billion, they cover sponge and zirconium oxychloride materials and come from melters and alloy makers that serve the aerospace, defense, AI infrastructure, and energy sectors. LOIs are not purchase contracts, and they can be renegotiated or dropped. But the fact that the company has prospective buyers lined up before a plant exists is a signal that U.S. titanium users are eager for a domestic source.
Zirconium oxychloride, or ZOC, is the other pillar of the strategy. It is the precursor for zirconium and hafnium materials used in nuclear fuel, gas turbines, rocket motors, and even advanced semiconductors. The U.S. currently has no meaningful domestic ZOC production, and relies on Chinese imports. AAM’s longer-term play is to build a platform that can make multiple titanium-group metals from shared feedstock and infrastructure — possibly adding hafnium and other specialty metals down the road. The company talks about this as building a “next-generation DuPont” that would restore American leadership in material science rather than just a single commodity.
Investors are backing the broader thesis, not just the first plant. Patrick Yang, co-founder and general partner at Amity Ventures, which manages more than $2 billion, describes the opportunity as rebuilding “the industrial capacity that America has lost.” In his view, the bottleneck is not technology but speed and execution. This seed round suggests crossover tech investors are willing to take risk on hard industrial infrastructure, a departure from typical venture themes.
AAM was founded in 2025 by Liegl and Represas, who met as freshmen at Stanford. Liegl previously founded Tenet Energy, a fintech for EVs and home electrification backed by Human Capital, and Layer1, a renewable-energy bitcoin mining business backed by Peter Thiel. Represas previously founded Able AI, acquired by Moody’s Corp. That blend of energy, AI, and defense software is part of the company’s identity.
There are obvious challenges ahead. AAM has not yet broken ground, and the Kroll process is energy-intensive, capital-hungry, and notoriously difficult to operate profitably. The last U.S. sponge producers struggled for years before closing. The company’s answer is that AI and modern control systems can change the economics, but it has not yet published detailed cost data. Still, with $1 billion in LOIs and committed seed capital, the startup has at least put itself in position to try.
The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with an operational presence in New York. Its first product will be titanium sponge, to be followed by ZOC. For now, AAM clearly believes the window is open: demand from AI, energy, and defense keeps rising, and America’s advanced materials supply base quietly eroded. Rebuilding it, the company argues, is one of the most strategically important manufacturing efforts the country could fund.
