Hertha Metals Secures $133.65M for Domestic Steel Production

Hertha Metals has successfully secured $133.65 million in Series A funding, co-led by Khosla Ventures and Doerr Capital. This financing round also saw participation from the U.S. Government, CEV, Pear Ventures, Gates Frontier, Niterra SUISO, Toyota Ventures, and Siemens Financial Services. The investment will be utilized to construct Hertha Chalyx, a new facility aimed at producing 10,000 tonnes of high-purity iron. This iron will be used for both steel-grade and magnet-grade applications.

The United States currently imports nearly all of the high-purity iron needed for rare-earth permanent magnets, resulting in a supply gap for domestic magnet production. Neodymium-iron-boron magnets, which are crucial for various applications such as defense, aerospace, electric vehicles, and other technologies, contain about 70% high-purity iron by weight.

Hertha Chalyx aims to address this supply gap by establishing domestic production of this essential material. This could help create an integrated iron and steel innovation complex by connecting American mining and manufacturing within a single supply chain.

Hertha Metals has developed the Flex-HERSTM process, an innovative approach to iron production that aims to reduce costs and lower emissions. This continuous processing technology uses a single reactor instead of multiple production steps and can handle various grades of iron ore. The process employs natural gas or hydrogen as reducing agents, potentially reducing production costs by 25% and emissions by up to 50% when using natural gas, or up to 98% when using hydrogen.

Hertha's technology is designed to offer cost-competitive iron and steel production while reducing reliance on coal-intensive processes.