Gadolyn, Inc.

A startup claiming a one-step, plasma-assisted process that turns rare earth and transition-metal oxides directly into magnet master alloys (NdFeB, SmCo, FeDy), skipping separate metal-making. Demonstration stage, with no published capacity.

Points to check

Facts from the sources on this page that a reader should weigh before relying on the company's own figures.

No capacity, facility address, funding, customer or patent in the company's name has been published.
The one outside endorsement, in a paid release, comes from the chair of the company's own advisory board.
The company gives its energy saving two ways, as 95% less energy and as 1-2% of the electricity of conventional methods, and neither figure says whether the energy in the reductant is counted.

At a glance

Founded: Not established in public sources — Founding year not published. Co-founders are Chris Haase (CEO; formerly director of the DOE Critical Materials Institute), Orlando Rios (CTO; formerly Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and David Weiss (COO; formerly Eck Industries).
Headquarters: Kingston, Tennessee, United States
Ownership: Private. No funding round, investor or valuation has been disclosed. The company describes itself as DARPA-funded; no program, contract or amount has been found.
Stage: Early stage. A claimed demonstration facility with no published capacity, location, funding or customers.
Listing: Private.
Revenue: Not publicly disclosed. This company does not publish revenue and no named third party has published an estimate of it.

Capacity

Each date below links to the document the figure came from. A capacity figure with no source is not on this page.

What	Figure	Status	As of
NdFeB, SmCo and FeDy master alloys from oxide, demonstration facility in the United States	no capacity, batch size or output published; the company states 'plans for dedicated manufacturing capability'	Pilot scale	Jan 2026

Narrative

Gadolyn's process, called DIRECT (and D-DIRECT in its 2025 R&D 100 award entry), is described as an electrolyte-free, plasma-assisted co-reduction of oxide powders into alloys, which would combine the metallization and alloying steps. The company says it operates a demonstration facility in the United States and has not published its location, capacity, reductant, or an alloy specification beyond a stated 99.9% purity. Its public record consists of its website, two paid wire releases (December 2025 and January 2026) and the R&D 100 entry. The founding team comes from the lineage of the DOE Critical Materials Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Eck Industries, where direct reduction of cerium oxide into aluminum alloys was demonstrated at laboratory scale. The January 2026 release carries an endorsement from Jack Lifton, who had joined as chair of the company's advisory board in December 2025.

Where public sources disagree

Energy claims: the company describes the process as using 95% less energy than conventional methods, and elsewhere as using 1-2% of the electricity. The two figures are not the same claim, and neither states whether the reductant's energy is counted.
The company describes the process as the world's first and only direct oxide-to-alloy route. Calcium reduction-diffusion of oxides directly into SmCo5 and Nd2Fe14B alloys has been published for decades.
The R&D 100 entry describes converting oxide into '99.9% purity NdFeB and SmCo magnets'. The company's own site describes master alloys, which are an input to magnet making, not magnets.
A quoted alloy price of $25-30/kg is compared with $65-75/kg for conventional routes, without stating whether either figure includes the rare earth feedstock.

Sources

Gadolyn (company site) — Gadolyn (2026-09-24)
Gadolyn expands advisory board — Gadolyn via GlobeNewswire (2025-12-18)
Jack Lifton endorses Gadolyn's technology — Gadolyn via GlobeNewswire (2026-01-06)
D-DIRECT rare earth alloying platform, R&D 100 winner — R&D World (2025)
Critical Materials Institute, program review (Haase as director) — US Department of Energy (2019-06-11)
Orlando Rios staff profile — Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2026-09-24)
Reduction-diffusion synthesis of SmCo5 (example of prior direct oxide-to-alloy work) — OSTI (2015)

How this page is sourced

Everything here comes from public sources — company filings, annual reports, exchange announcements, government releases and trade press. Every figure is linked to the document it came from and carries the date that document was published, because a capacity number without a date is not a fact, it is a rumor with a decimal point.

What is deliberately absent: material nonpublic information. I have spent more than two decades in this industry and a good deal of what I know about these companies I learned under NDA. Those obligations do not expire and they do not bend for a website. Nothing I have been told in confidence appears here in any form, and nothing on this page — or missing from it — should be read as a signal about what I know privately. I hold NDAs absolutely. It is the reason clients tell me things.

Judgment is the other thing left out on purpose. This page reports what has been published and who published it. Whether a target is credible, whether a ramp will hold, whether a capacity figure survives contact with the plant behind it — that is the work I do for clients, and it does not belong in a free reference page.

Where public sources disagree, I say so rather than picking a winner. Where a figure has not been published, the field says so rather than carrying an estimate. An empty field is information too.

Public filings tell you what a company has said. Whether it holds up is a different question, and the one I get hired to answer.

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