How a New Jersey startup found an electrifying way to slash copper costs

Skyrocketing demand for copper promises to push prices to new heights. As the global economy transitions away from fossil fuels, it is going to need twice as much copper in the coming years than humanity has mined throughout all of its existence.

Still Bright, a New Jersey-based startup founded in 2022, thinks it has found a novel (and cleaner way) to slash those costs.

“The fact that we’ve already mined the easily mineable stuff, and the fact that we need many more mines to come into production every year — we’re talking like 60-plus mines — is it seems like an impossibility, like there’s no path to get there,” Randy Allen, co-founder and CEO of Still Bright, told TechCrunch.

But a large fraction of that demand could be met if companies can extract more copper from the ore they already mine. 

Still Bright has developed a new way to extract copper, one that it says can recover nearly all the copper from typical ores without pre-processing steps that lose up to 20% of the metal. It’s effective enough that it could even be used on tailings, the discard piles that still contain smaller amounts of the metal that mines leave behind.

“Any copper that was lost as waste, we can actually process that and get the copper back,” Allen said.

To boost production from single digits to hundreds of tons per year, Still Bright has raised an $18.7 million seed round led by Material Impact and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Azolla Ventures, Fortescue, Impact Science Ventures, and SOSV participated.

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Still Bright’s technology allows it to extract copper without producing harmful pollution. Where most companies essentially burn away unwanted parts of the ore — releasing much of it into the atmosphere — Still Bright soaks copper-containing ores in a vanadium-based solution, which draws the metal out of the ore. When the vanadium solution is spent, the company’s system uses electricity to regenerate it.

The core technology was inspired by a type of long-duration energy storage known as a “vanadium flow battery.” In it, a vanadium-based solution that can be stored in large tanks is charged and discharged by flowing it past a membrane. 

“All of this is kind of happenstance. The technical inventor, the CTO of the company Jon [Vardner], he was working on two different projects,” Allen said, one on vanadium flow batteries and another on using vanadium to extract copper. “It’s connecting the dots. One person happened to be doing both.”

Still Bright’s modular system will be able to be installed at mines spanning a range of sizes. Because the vanadium-based process works so quickly, the company’s equipment is much smaller than a typical refiner for the same amount of copper production. “The processing is on the order of minutes, up to an hour. That allows us to keep everything really small.”

The small size pays financial dividends, too. Allen said that Still Bright’s equipment is 70% to 90% cheaper than typical pyrometallurgical gear. Currently, the company’s process costs about the same to run as a typical refinery, but Allen expects that to change. “There’s a lot of opportunity for us to be cheaper,” he said.

Still Bright is planning to build a demonstration unit in 2027 or 2028 that’s capable of producing 500 tons of copper annually. It’s a big leap from the current pilot scale unit, which makes 2 tons per year. The ultimate commercial-scale system will produce 10,000 tons per year.

The clock is ticking, though. Still Bright would like to start refining copper in large enough quantities to benefit from any tariffs President Trump might impose on imports of the metal. If it does, it can use that revenue to develop and deploy commercial-scale units.

“We see ourselves as having a path to be among the cheapest copper producers,” Allen said.

This article has been updated to correct the name of one of the investors. Azolla Ventures, not Apollo Ventures, invested in Still Bright.