About Vulcan Elements
Vulcan Elements was founded in 2023 by John Maslin, a former U.S. Navy officer who started the company while attending Harvard Business School, together with co-founder and chief technology officer Piotr Kulik, one of only a small handful of dedicated rare earth magnetics professors in the United States. The company addresses an urgent U.S. national security and industrial policy priority: China's overwhelming dominance of global rare earth magnet manufacturing, particularly neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) magnets, the strongest class of permanent magnets and an essential component in virtually any modern technology involving motors, sensors, generators, or actuators, spanning electric vehicles, robotics, drones, hard disk drives, submarines, and nearly every major defense system, creating what U.S. policymakers and defense officials have described as a potential supply chain "chokehold" that China could exploit against American industry and military readiness.
Vulcan Elements opened its first small-scale commercial manufacturing and research facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina in early 2025, and has since subsequently announced plans to expand its manufacturing capacity: the company announced a $918 million expansion in November 2025 to build what the company says would become the largest magnet factory in the world outside of China, a roughly one-million-square-foot facility in Benson, North Carolina expected to create 1,000 new jobs, alongside a separate $1.4 billion partnership with the U.S. government and ReElement Technologies to build a fully vertically integrated domestic rare earth magnet supply chain, from raw rare earth oxide processing through finished magnet production. In November 2025, the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital extended Vulcan Elements a $620 million loan, the largest loan the office had ever made according to the Pentagon, reflecting the Trump administration's broader push to direct billions of dollars toward domestic rare earth supply chain projects as a strategic priority, alongside a $65 million Series A round led by Altimeter Capital with participation from One Investment Management, the firm founded by former SoftBank Vision Fund CEO Rajeev Misra. Despite its rapid rise and substantial government backing, Vulcan Elements, like its handful of domestic competitors, still faces the considerable technical and commercial challenge of proving that rare earth magnet manufacturing can be achieved profitably outside of the deeply entrenched Chinese and broader Asian manufacturing base that has dominated the industry for the past three decades.
