Phoenix Tailings

A US rare earth metal maker that reduces purchased oxide to NdPr metal and DyFe alloy by molten-salt electrolysis at Exeter, New Hampshire, and is developing a non-solvent-extraction separation route for mine tailings and recycled magnets.

Points to check

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

The $500 million Office of Strategic Capital loan is a conditional commitment; no closing or disbursement has been reported, and the plant's site had not been chosen as of June 2026.
Exeter's 200 t/yr is nameplate; no tonnage produced or shipped has been published.
An August 2026 headline described the company as scaling from 200 kg to 120 metric tons; in the underlying Associated Press report the 200 kg figure follows a sentence about samarium, and the company separately claims 200 t/yr of total metal nameplate.

At a glance

Founded: 2018 — Founded in 2018 by Nick Myers (CEO) and Tomás Villalón (CTO), among others, out of MIT.
Headquarters: Burlington, Massachusetts (the company and the Office of Strategic Capital; the Associated Press gives Woburn), with the pilot plant there and the metallization plant in Exeter, New Hampshire
Ownership: Private, venture-backed. Series B of $43M (December 2024) and $33M (April 2025), led by Envisioning Partners with BMW i Ventures, Yamaha Motor Ventures and others, and a Series B-3 of $40.2M ($30.2M equity and $10M venture debt) in February 2026. Traxys invested in February 2026.
Stage: Ramping. Its Exeter metallization plant opened in October 2025 with 200 t/yr nameplate; actual output has never been published.
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
Rare earth metal (NdPr) and DyFe alloy, Exeter, New Hampshire — nameplate	200 t/yr, described by the company as scalable to more than 1,000 t/yr; actual output not published	Operating	Oct 2025
Rare earth metal, Massachusetts pilot	40 t/yr nameplate	Pilot scale	Apr 2025
Samarium metal, as described by the company's commercial officer to the Associated Press	about 200 kg/yr now, about 5 t in three months, 120 t by 2027-2028	Pilot scale	Aug 2026
Integrated separation and metallization, 'Freedom Facility', site not selected	no capacity published; initial operations targeted for 2028; supported by a $500M Office of Strategic Capital conditional loan commitment	Announced	Jun 2026

Narrative

Phoenix Tailings began as an MIT spinout aimed at recovering metals from mining waste and has become, first, a metallizer. Its Exeter, New Hampshire plant opened in October 2025 with a 200 t/yr nameplate for NdPr metal and DyFe alloy, made by mixed-halide molten-salt electrolysis at about 700 °C from oxide concentrate whose supplier the company does not name; a patent application covers tapping molten metal from the cell under argon. Actual output has not been published. Its separation process, which it calls selective halogenation, is at pilot scale and is the basis of a $66 million DOE award selected for negotiation in June 2026 and of the 'Freedom Facility', an integrated separation and metallization plant for which the Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital signed a $500 million conditional loan commitment in June 2026, with the site not yet chosen and initial operations targeted for 2028. The company has reported more than $100 million of supply contracts with unnamed counterparties and has a trading partnership with Traxys.

Where public sources disagree

Fortune's August 3, 2026 headline describes the company as scaling from 200 kg to 120 t in two years. The company describes Exeter as a 200 t/yr facility. In the Associated Press text, the 200 kg figure follows a discussion of samarium, which is the reading consistent with both.
In January 2024 the company described a target of more than 3,000 t/yr of finished rare earth metal by 2026. The operating nameplate in September 2026 is 200 t/yr at Exeter plus a 40 t/yr pilot.
Exeter was scheduled to open in June 2025 (January 2025) and in summer 2025 (April 2025), and opened on October 23, 2025.
The company gives its Series B total as $116.6 million; the announced tranches ($43M, $33M and $40.2M, the last including $10M of venture debt) add to $116.2 million.
The company and the Office of Strategic Capital place the headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts; the Associated Press places it in Woburn.
The company calls its process zero-waste and non-solvent-extraction; a 2024 MIT description refers to using water and recyclable solvents to extract oxidized metals, and no third-party life-cycle assessment has been published.

Sources

Phoenix Tailings opens US rare earth metallization facility — Phoenix Tailings via Business Wire (2025-10-23)
Additional $33M closes the Series B at $76M — Phoenix Tailings via Business Wire (2025-04-30)
Series B-3 of $40.2M — Phoenix Tailings via Business Wire (2026-02-19)
Traxys strategic partnership and investment — Traxys via Business Wire (2026-02-24)
Rare earth refiner gets $500M loan from Pentagon — MINING.COM (2026-06-17)
Office of Strategic Capital loans to Phoenix Tailings and Energy Fuels — Manufacturing Dive (2026-06)
DOE selections for rare earth demonstration facilities — US Department of Energy (2026-06-02)
America's $500 million bet on rare earths — Fortune (2026-08-03)
BMW, Yamaha Motor back Phoenix Tailings — Reuters via MINING.COM (2025-01)
Startup Phoenix Tailings turns mining waste into critical metals — MIT News (2024-11-08)
The rare earth materials clean energy needs — MIT Technology Review (2024-01-05)
US20230340682A1, molten metal tapping — Google Patents (2023-10-26)
One of the country's few rare earth processing plants opens in Exeter — NHPR (2025-10-30)

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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