The materials that dominate aerospace and defense — steel, titanium, aluminum — are shaped today the way they were shaped generations ago: melted, cast, machined, and compromised. Complex geometries take days or weeks to produce. Precision costs exponentially more at every decimal place. And the properties themselves have plateaued; the industry engineers around the limits of its alloys rather than beyond them. When performance is bounded by the metal itself, no amount of clever design closes the gap.
A different class of metal. A different physics of forming.
Supercool Metals produces custom high-performance components from amorphous metals — bulk metallic glasses — a class of materials with properties superior to steel, titanium, and aluminum alloys, and a processability no crystalline metal can match. Using novel thermoplastic forming, Supercool net-shapes highly complex parts in minutes rather than the days or weeks demanded by traditional methods, at precision and geometries beyond the reach of conventional metal manufacturing. The result: lighter components, miniaturized designs, ultra-high strength and resilience — amorphous metals transformed from laboratory curiosity into affordable industrial material.
More Thoughts From the Team at BVVC:
“Materials are the quiet substrate of military advantage. Every leap in what a platform can do — faster, lighter, harder, farther — traces back to a leap in what its materials can survive. Yet the West’s manufacturing base has spent decades optimizing processes for alloys whose fundamental properties stopped improving. That is the blind spot: we invest billions in new platforms while the metal inside them stands still.
Bulk metallic glasses have been called the material of the future for thirty years. The barrier was never the properties — harder than steel at a fraction of the weight — it was manufacturability. Supercool Metals solved the process, not just the material: thermoplastic forming turns a metal that behaves like glass into parts shaped with the speed and precision of plastics, without sacrificing the strength. That is not an incremental improvement to machining. It is a new column in the materials selection chart.
We invest in Teams, and this one pairs the deepest scientific pedigree in the field with the commercial discipline to industrialize it. The nations that command superior materials command superior systems. We intend for those nations to be the United States and our allies.”
“This material is 50 times harder than plastic, nearly 10 times harder than aluminum and almost three times the hardness of steel…Developing a fabrication method for BMG sheets has been extremely difficult because it requires a fundamentally different process.”
– Jan Schroers, Founder