The following interview is a conversation we had with Preston Bryant, Co-Founder of Momentum, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $20 Million Raised to Transform Battery Recycling Through Materials Science Innovation
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Preston Bryant, Co-Founder, executive chair and chief commercial officer of Momentum, a material science company that’s raised 20 million in funding. Preston, how are you?
Preston Bryant
I’m doing well. Thank you very much for having me on today, Brett.
Brett
Yeah, super excited. So let’s go ahead and jump right in. Talk to us about what Momentum Technologies does, just in simple terms. You we just finished up Thanksgiving, so maybe take us back to those conversations around the Thanksgiving table, talking with grandma and older aunt. Like, how do you explain in simple terms what Momentum does?
Preston Bryant
Yeah. So at the end of the day, I say, look, you have a battery and either your cell phone or your toothbrush or your hearing aid or your car that you drove over here today. If you’re a very progressive grandma, there’s all these batteries, and they’re in all of these devices that are scattered throughout the world, and they have these very critical metals that come from many different distant lands. And a lot of mining has to occur, and a lot of geopolitics gets in the way of those metals getting from that location into the device that you’re using. And, grandma, with our technology that we have, we’re going to disrupt that entire flow of material.
Preston Bryant
And that way, when your battery’s here and you are done with the device, at the end of it, we can process it here and we can put it back into a new battery here, and you can use it again. That’s what we do, and that’s what we offer.
Brett
How do you get up into this world? Like, what’s the path to end up where you are right now?
Preston Bryant
So it really just starts with my exploration into energy. My father was a wildcatter. He went out and drilled into places that had been unexplored. And I grew up in that oil and gas and, you know, hit or miss sort of oil life. And when I went to school, my father passed away and I started my own oil company and went and drilled an oil well. I named it after my father And I drilled a few other wells after that. And then I got the idea that, you know, drilling these oil wells, it’s really unsustainable. And not just, you know, from, you know, burning carbon emissions unsustainable. The actual operations and business model around it is unsustainable. There’s a saying in oil and gas that you have to keep drilling to survive. And that’s because these things, when you drill them, they have depletions.
Preston Bryant
And once you drill it, you have to move on to the next one and the next one and you get what’s called mailbox money. And there’s no innovation going on. The pie doesn’t get any bigger once you drill an oil well. And I just saw that as a very unsustainable future. And so I looked and said, what else is going to be out there? Where are things moving? And I fell in love with the concept of rare earth elements and these metals that were going touch everything that turns on. And so I invested in a mining company and the US government approached this mining company with this recycling technology. They said, look, you know, it fits in the palm of your hand. We’ve shown it works at lab scale. You know, we’re the US government, we don’t want to commercialize this.
Preston Bryant
They went to this mining company I’d invested in, gave them the license and then that company went under. This was in 2014. I was just a young 23 year old at the time with working within this company and you know, I said that recycling piece is interesting. And you know, all of these other individuals didn’t really see that as where the value was. And they said, fine, you can buy this from us. And that was the start to Momentum. It began in my love and my desire to figure out how to extract, you know, resources out of a rock, which is what we did in oil and gas. And now I understood through the power of fracking. You know, this is an interesting story.
Preston Bryant
In the old days my father used to drill through shale and you used to curse at it because it was hard. It didn’t yield anything. And nowadays through the power of fracking, we now hit that shale and that’s where we get an abundant amount of resources. So this MSX technology, I always like to use it as analogy to that. It’s similar to fracking. We’ve a new processing technique that allows us to get value out of a resource, which is these batteries, in a much more efficient, much cheaper way. And that’s really what the breakthrough here is. With Momentum.
Brett
Last year, I read the book the Frackers. I’m sure you’re familiar with the book. You’ve probably read it from what I recall. And, you know, it’s been like a year. Like, at the time, people didn’t believe in fracking or they didn’t believe in the method, the approach. Are you facing something similar? Like, are there some people who look at your approach and what you believe and say, like, no, like, that’s not it. That’s not going to be a big market.
Preston Bryant
Yeah. So, you know, again, it’s interesting. You know, again, let’s start with fracking. Back in the 50s, you know, fracking was around. It was a technology that was used. And then, you know, they’ve been able to push the boundaries of that technology to, you know, what happened in the 2000s, which is, you know, the unlocking of all the shale gas and the shale revolution. And so these technologies, they take time. They start off not, you know, loved by the industry, but eventually they really pick up steam and they release a breakthrough. And again, with this technology, that’s exactly what I’ve seen. When I first got on the market, that was nine years ago. Now, nobody was interested in this technology. Nobody was interested in critical metals. Nobody wanted to talk about recycling, especially even after you talked about critical metals.
Preston Bryant
It was so far down the value chain that, you know, I would try to pitch this to anyone and everybody that would listen to me. Over time, these metals and the clean energy revolution started to take off. And it really caught it. Steam with the ira, or it’s caught its role with the Iraq. And now a ton of money has been invested into it. There’s believers in it. People understand critical metals, they understand the energy security piece, they understand the job creation piece now, and they understand, at the end of the day, the environmental piece of these breakthroughs.
Brett
And so, yeah, what did the early days look like? You know, you have this idea, you see this problem, you want to build this technology. Where do you even begin with something like this?
Preston Bryant
Yeah, so you begin with something like this just looking for your very first customer. Anybody who has a supply of. Again, this was a magnet recycling technology when I first got it. And so in order to take the next step up at the national lab, I needed to fund it and I needed to find some feedstock for it. And I couldn’t get the funding for it, and so I had to fund it myself. And then I went and found the feedstock from one company in the US that was working on rare earth magnets. At the time, that had some waste feedstock. And we got that feedstock, we processed it, I got the project, kicked off that deal, you know, never took off anywhere, but at least showed that there was a supply of this and that we could at least process it.
Preston Bryant
So that gave me my jump to start finding, you know, the next deal. And we actually signed a deal with a company called Wish Drawn, which is a Taiwanese based company that does recycling for all the major OEMs to recycle magnets. We signed a deal with them in 2018, and were going to build a plant there. We brought them to the national lab. They loved the technology. And then all of a sudden, a new manager came in and said, nope, we’re not going to recycle magnets. That’s not going to be something we do. And that really killed that opportunity. So then we had to go find, well, where else can we get magnets? And the other place is magnet manufacturing. But the problem is there’s only about five magnet manufacturers outside of China that actually make magnet manufacturing waste that you can process.
Preston Bryant
And it’s such a small volume, you can’t really build a massive business around it. And so that’s what made us start looking, what else is there out there? What other waste streams, what other metals can we recover in order to build a business around this technology? And that took, I would say, from 2016 to 2020 for us to go through. So four years of trying to find our way out. You know, out in the wild, we built a machine that could punch magnets out of hard drive so we can get enough magnets. But the business model around, that’s extremely complicated because you need about 4 million hard drives that all look the same. And so we tried automation, we tried many different supply partnerships, and none of them really worked out for this magnet recycling.
Preston Bryant
But, boy, did it take off for the battery recycling piece. And we continue to push the innovation of this technology and have now found a foothold in the battery recycling space.
Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about some of the major milestones. So I see one big Milestone came in 2022 where you won a $7.4 million grant. Take us behind the scenes. How do you win a $7.4 million grant?
Preston Bryant
Yeah, so that’s a really unique case there. We began, started talking with this company, Service Solutions, about a year and a half, maybe two years before that grant was awarded. And again, they were a company that was coming up in the battery recycling space. They had bought a bunch of companies and had joined them all together in the collection and the recycling space. And they are interested in actually doing the processing of all those batteries that they collect and shred. And they looked to us, they saw that this might be an interesting technology when looking out into the future, because the other alternative is building a $500 million plant.
Preston Bryant
And when you’re looking out into the future and you’re saying, I have to build a $500 million plant that’s going to take several years to build, and then I have to have enough capacity to feed it, and it has to show up in the exact right ratio for me to make this thing economic. It starts to become a really daunting business model. And so they started looking at us and they said, hey, your technology can build these things at, you know, 1/10 or 1/20 the cost of Capex and can give us the raw materials we need back. That’s exciting. And so we joined on with them and another company they called 6K. And so the partnership is Cerbus Supplies, collects and supplies the shredded batteries. We process the metals, and 6K turns them into cathode active material to put into new batteries.
Preston Bryant
And we took a risk on that partnership because the product that the 6K company that wanted our material, they don’t use the normal sulfates that are used in the industry. They actually use nitrates. And so we had to take a risk. Hey, are we going to put all of our resources into doing this nitrate testing for them while we’re trying to build this business, you know, and from the ground up. And we did. We decided, okay, that would be a worthwhile, even though that this was very custom to one sort of customer, it would show that we could do the whole supply chain, from collection to processing to end product here in the United States. And that’s a really big win.
Preston Bryant
And so we focused on that, and that’s the reason that, you know, we’ve been able to get this grant is we had success doing the nitrate work, and that’s now tied us to that 6k partner and now we have, you know, a great partnership between the three of us.
Brett
What do you think? Spend your keys to success. When it comes to commercializing deep tech like this, obviously there’s a lot of amazing tech out. A lot of it just never makes it outside of R and D or outside of the lab. Like, what’s been the key for you, would you say?
Preston Bryant
Because I funded this company from the beginning because it was, you know, hard tech is expensive. Working with a national lab is expensive. Everything’s expensive. I like to operate on shoestring budgets. You know, you have to fight me to add somebody to the payroll because I’ll try to do it all myself. That’s the way I approach these. Again, in the beginning with these hard tech startups, you need to figure out how to make your dollar go further. You need to be very choosy about the projects and the feedstocks that you’re willing to process because you can start getting demands from several different customers on, oh, hey, we have this, try this, try that, and it can start getting overwhelming. So you have to be very direct in what you’re trying to achieve. Again with that 6K.
Preston Bryant
Point is, we knew that, yes, nitrates were very custom to this company, but if we could show a CAM manufacturer wanted our product, that’s one of the biggest wins you can get in the industry. So again, you have to be very concentrated on your spend. You have to be very concentrated on who you’re bringing on the bus onto your team. Luckily I had a fantastic Co-Founder who was also our CTO, so could do the technical part as well, and I can trust him. That was key to me is finding a good partner is really what a lot of this is about.
Brett
How do you think about the marketing strategy? And you know, we’re depressingly already recording this on December 5th, so 2024 is almost done. What’s the marketing plan? What’s the marketing strategy look like for 2025?
Preston Bryant
Yeah, so we just had a ribbon cutting for our commercial demonstration plant in Dallas, Texas and we are now setting out to raise our Series B, which again is going well. We have several different bites from companies looking into our data room. So the market is feeling positive right now. Even though there’s been sort of a down trend on the clean energy side, we really touch in that critical metals and energy security and defense security market, which again puts us in a unique area in this time that I think that we’ll continue to see a lot of support from the government. I Think we’ll see a lot of interest from investors. And again, you know, we’ve been at the bottom of the metals market cycle now for about a year and a half, two years, you know, maybe we go lower.
Preston Bryant
But again, I think the way that the tightening is happening and the amount of metals being used and the lack of mines being opened is going to eventually cause a supply crunch and there will be a return to the heyday of metal prices.
Brett
There’s a quote from Elon Musk that may get wrong here, but I think he described entrepreneurship as chewing on glass and staring into the abyss. And I think that perfectly captures, I think, what it’s like to be a Founder. As you probably know, there’s a lot of hard challenges. Being a Founder is very hard. I think one of the hardest challenges that’s probably out there is, you know, transitioning out of a CEO role into another role. So I know you just went through that transition. Can you talk to us about that transition and what you learned from that process?
Preston Bryant
Yeah, you know, I totally understand the staring out into the abyss part is kind of when you’re sitting there laying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, going, what am I doing? That’s the abyss part. I’ve been there. Especially when, you know, you’re a one man shop and you know no one’s believing in you and you’re several years into the project and you’re burning through all your money, you get a best part, the glass part. You know, I understand pain. But pain really started to come as we started to scale up, you know, the expectations of when you finally do build a product that come along, what the demand is from, you know, these investors and their timelines. You start to question yourself. I mean, you already question yourself. The whole write up.
Preston Bryant
You had your friends question, you might have had some family question, you might even use some of their money. And you, so you’ve had questions all along the way you’re developing your business, you might have even questions about your technology or your business. And then you start questioning yourself. And you know, that can be a really difficult emotional state for any entrepreneur, no matter who you are. And so that’s where the eating glass, I think part comes into play. And again, you know, I was able to build a product and my investors were able to provide me with a CEO that was allowed us to take this next step out of sort of the startup manufacturing phase and proof of concept into the actual scale up phase. And again, that’s allowed me to take on the executive chairman role also.
Preston Bryant
I’m chief commercial officer, so I get to play at the board level, and I also get to play at the commercial development level, which is something that I’m highly passionate about. It allows me to continue working on the business, and so I enjoy where I’m at the moment. As the company gets bigger, you know, splitting the executive chairman role and the chief commercial officer role is a very unique position. And eventually, you know, decision will be made where I’ll have to go after that. But nonetheless, I’m getting to see a lot of different sides of the business. I’m getting to see how, you know, professionals come in, work with private equity firms, scale projects, build out engineering plans, and make final investment decisions.
Preston Bryant
So it’s been a very big learning path ever since the very beginning, and it just keeps on changing and it requires different things of you, from being a startup Founder to then being an actual manager of people to then, you know, being executive chairman. It just requires a lot of you and it requires a lot of change. And you’ve got to be willing to change or you’ll quickly get swept aside.
Brett
Do you still feel like you’re staring into the abyss or has that calmed down a little bit?
Preston Bryant
So we’re at the second valley of death. We’ve crossed that first one. Our technology works. It works at scale. The next is execution phase and securing these partnerships. So we’re right now crossing the chasm of the second valley of death. Once we get our first plant up and going next year, we’ll be past that. I don’t think we’re staring into the abyss anymore. Again, from a technology standpoint, you know, to have that de risk now, you know, gives you a ton of confidence, but now it’s about execution. And, you know, there’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, but if you have experience behind you can at least, you know, have done some of those cat skinnings before. Great.
Brett
Peter is going to be all over us now. Let’s talk about fundraising. So the Series A there, what was that like, raising the Series A? And what did you learn from that journey and from that experience?
Preston Bryant
Yeah. So again, you know, spent six years not having outside funding, was able to actually get a grant through the Department of Energy, but it was a match grant, so I had to put, you know, my capital in to match it. And so, you know, for the longest time it was, you know, had no believers. And then I got into Halliburton Labs during COVID got Forbes 30 under 30 and I got into a Halliburton Labs accelerator because they weren’t doing anything in person. So I was able to finagle my way into some of these pitches. And the first company is going through Halliburton’s Labs accelerator. That was great because they helped us not only build a product, but that name helped attract attention to us from investors. And during that phase, you know, we had different companies looking at us.
Preston Bryant
We had one we really wanted to tie to and they kind of strung us along and they gave us a little bit of funding to kind of keep stringing us along, little bridge funding. But you could tell they were whittling us down on purpose to kind of make it that we would be their only choice in the end. And at that point went to another private equity shop and they swooped in and they took the deal. And, you know, the rest is history. But again, you know, what I’ll learn about that phase was that these investors are very knowledgeable. They have their own tricks. If you’re not a savvy startup Founder, you can find yourself in piled high and deep by maybe some things you don’t understand.
Preston Bryant
Again, my Co-Founder has done about seven startups, so it’s great to have somebody with industry experience that can guide you through some of that stuff. But again, you have to be on the lookout. These are, you know, very smart people that want to make a return on their dollar. They’re not doing this for charity.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like?
Preston Bryant
So three to five year vision, this technology, although we can recycle batteries, we can also do magnets, and we can also do hard metal waste. And again, there’s a lot of different feedstocks out there where they could use a technology to recover their waste product. But building a $100 million, $500 million hydrometallergy plant isn’t reasonable. And so there’s a lot of different use cases for our technology out there. There’s a lot of different companies approaching us with different feedstocks. I can see us expanding into several different countries, into several different waste streams over the next few years. That’s really the hope.
Preston Bryant
But in the end, the mass dream here Brett, is that we control the pipelines and the flow of these critical materials one day that we ultimately now have control over that supply and we can actually go make higher end value products ourselves. So that would be the ultimate dream one day. But at the moment, it’s about expanding our metals processing business.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. I love the vision. I really love this conversation. You know, I speak with a lot of SaaS founders, so I’m really enjoying conversations with those who are building deep tech and hard tech. So really appreciate you taking the time to come on and talk. Especially appreciate you talking through the transition. Like I mentioned, there’s a lot of founders who are going through something similar or probably going to go through something similar. So it’s always nice when another Founder can share their experience. So really appreciate you taking the time to share all this with us.
Preston Bryant
Yes, Brett, thank you. I know you’ve had a campaign of interviews, so I just want to say thank you. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for taking the time and, you know, getting our stories out there because it’s not easy to find people going through the same problems. And again, the thing I loved about your website was when I went on there, I. I like that you had, you know, how much money each one of them has raised. Because when you’re just looking at those regularly, you see startup names and you’re like, okay, don’t know that one, don’t care. Like, you know, they could be nobodies. But showing the funding they’ve raised gives you an insight into their scale and what maybe problems they’re facing, et cetera. So just want to commend you on your project here.
Brett
Amazing, man. Really appreciate it. Let’s keep in touch.
Preston Bryant
Yes. Thank you, Brett.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io Podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category visioners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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