Given that Donald Trump almost invaded Greenland for its critical minerals, it might be relevant that a UK startup has figured out how to literally manufacture them. Co-founder and CEO Assia Kasdi spoke exclusively to Pathfounders on our latest podcast.
Milvus Advanced launched last year with a brand new way to make critical elements in the labs and, potentially, level this geopolitical playing field for countries around the world. It uses abundant materials and turns them into alternatives for critical minerals like platinum, iridium and indium.
The short story is that the world has a critical minerals addiction.
Hydrogen electrolysers, batteries, solar panels, touchscreens and other electronic devices depend on metals that are expensive, geographically concentrated and increasingly caught up in geopolitical competition. Even Trump’s negotiations with Ukraine involved access to critical minerals, at one point.
Governments have generally responded by trying to secure new deposits, finance domestic mining and strike agreements with mineral-rich countries. But Oxford-based startup Milvus Advanced believes there may be another option: replace the critical minerals themselves.
Milvus is engineering materials made from abundant elements that can reproduce the useful properties of scarce metals such as platinum, iridium and indium.
Rather than searching for a new source of a particular mineral, the company examines why that mineral is needed in a specific product or industrial process. It then attempts to recreate those characteristics using combinations of cheaper and more readily available materials.
“We can substitute any kind of metal if we understand how this metal works in a specific application,” Milvus founder and CEO Dr Assia Kasdi told the Pathfounders Podcast.
Building properties in the laboratory
Kasdi developed the foundations of Milvus’s technology while completing a doctorate in inorganic chemistry at the University of Oxford.
Her early research focused on optoelectronics, including indium-based materials used in touchscreens. These materials face supply constraints as well as technical limitations, particularly as manufacturers develop flexible and next-generation electronic devices.
Kasdi began exploring whether nanotechnology could be used not merely to improve existing materials, but to construct new ones with the required properties from more abundant elements.
Materials can behave differently when engineered at the nanoscale. By controlling their composition and structure, scientists can create nanoalloys that reproduce properties normally associated with much scarcer metals.
Kasdi initially demonstrated the approach by developing an alternative to the chemical element indium. Towards the end of her doctorate, she began applying the same principle to platinum.
Platinum is widely used as a catalyst because it can accelerate chemical reactions without being consumed. That makes it important to technologies including hydrogen electrolysers and fuel cells, but it is also scarce and costly.
Milvus attempts to reproduce those catalytic characteristics by combining abundant elements into engineered nanoparticles.
The replacement is application-specific. A metal may be valuable for one property in a catalyst and another in an electronic component. Milvus therefore designs its materials for particular uses rather than claiming to have created one universal substitute.
Switching from milligram to kilogram production
More recently, Milvus has moved beyond milligram-scale academic experiments.
The company says it can now produce kilogram quantities of some materials and has had them tested by external industrial partners. According to Kasdi, those trials showed performance that met or exceeded commercially available alternatives in certain catalytic applications.
However, that still leaves a considerable gap between scientific validation and industrial manufacturing.
Kasdi describes Milvus as being in pre-production. Its next goal is to move towards tonne-scale batches, requiring a larger facility and significantly more capital.
The company raised a $6.9 million seed round in 2025, led by Hoxton Ventures. Now, Kasdi said it is likely to seek a Series A round to finance the next stage.
Although DeepTech companies frequently struggle in the gap between successful experimentation and reliably producing tonnes of material at a competitive price, Milvus says it has designed scalability into its chemistry from the beginning. Its synthesis takes place in water, uses relatively low temperatures and avoids the harsh gases or extreme conditions required by some advanced-materials processes.
The materials are also designed to be “plug-and-play”. Milvus produces powders that customers can use in much the same way as the critical-mineral-based powders already present in their manufacturing processes.
“No industry wants to change the whole supply chain or how they manufacture stuff,” Kasdi said.
That matters because even a cheaper or more sustainable replacement can struggle to gain adoption if manufacturers must rebuild production lines to use it.
“There are a lot of companies that are leaving the UK,” she said. “For us, we want to stay here, but we would like to have more support.”
A sovereignty issue
The supply chain associated with critical minerals is also an issue of industrial security.
Critical minerals have become an industrial-security issue as governments attempt to reduce their exposure to concentrated supply chains which source from only a limited number of geographies. Most policy responses focus on diversifying mining and refining. Engineered substitutes of the type Milvus makes could offer another form of resilience by reducing the amount of strategically sensitive material required.
This means advanced materials fit into the world of sovereign technology, particularly if they can be manufactured close to the industries using them.
Yet Kasdi argues that the UK is not well equipped to turn this kind of research into large-scale production.
Oxford provides world-class scientific talent, but specialist chemical laboratory space is scarce and expensive. Many British startup facilities have been designed for biotechnology rather than materials science, leaving companies such as Milvus with only few suitable places to expand.
Kasdi also pointed to weaker scale-up funding and industrial incentives than those available in continental Europe or the US. Britain remains strong at producing research and technical talent, she said, but is becoming a harder place to build capital-intensive companies once they move beyond the laboratory.
She wants Milvus to remain headquartered in the UK, although the company may eventually establish a production site in the US.
“There are a lot of companies that are leaving the UK,” she said. “For us, we want to stay here, but we would like to have more support.”
Milvus must still prove it can manufacture consistently at tonnes rather than kilograms and persuade industrial customers to qualify new materials for critical products.
But replacing even part of the platinum, iridium or indium used in energy and electronics supply chains could reduce costs and geopolitical exposure.
The conventional answer to mineral scarcity is to mine the earth more deeply, and these days, to invade another country.
Milvus is betting that another answer lies in engineering the properties we need into materials we already have.
