{"id":109239,"title":"Ultrasonium: A new way to make complex metal parts, 15x faster and 75% cheaper","tagline":"Ultrasonium makes the most difficult metal parts for the world's most important systems 15x faster and 75% cheaper. ","body":"\n**The problem**\n\nThe technologies that define this century - data centers, rockets, satellites, robots, etc. - are built from complex metal parts. As these systems advance, the parts get harder to make. Past a certain complexity, casting and machining stop working, and the advanced methods that remain are slow, expensive, and hazardous.\n\n**What we built**\n\nUltrasonium has invented a new method to make these critical parts. Solid metal feedstock goes in and a finished part safely comes out, controlled by a physical AI layer and novel control processes. We produce near-net-shape complex metal parts 15x faster and 75% cheaper than the methods they replace, in the U.S. and at scale.\n\n \u003chttps://youtu.be/M9T49n6WuV8\u003e\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=109239\u0026key=user_uploads/2875171/55d1e111-fc43-450d-a83c-2c191d88d909)\n\n\n**Why now / why us**\n\nThe systems that matter most, in aerospace, defense, energy, and compute are demanding metal geometries that can’t be machined or cast and are too expensive and slow to make with the incumbent methods, at a moment when domestic manufacturing capacity is a national priority.\n\nOur founding team has built and innovated some of the most complex engineering systems known to man - quantum computers, superconductors, nuclear reactors, and novel aerospace alloy processing methods. Jack Qiu (CEO) completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and has published pioneering quantum computing work in Nature Physics. Chris Carter (CSO) dropped out during the 5th year of his PhD program at MIT and has over a half dozen years of experience researching state of the art metallurgy and materials processing systems. Alexander Urbanski (Chief Research Officer) previously founded a DOE-funded nuclear startup and was the first hire at Phase3D where he built and commercialized metals manufacturing monitoring technology. Hunter Brown (VP, Engineering) began working at national labs when he was 15, graduated from UC Berkeley Physics, and contributed to the ITER fusion reactor.","slug":"SPv-ultrasonium-a-new-way-to-make-complex-metal-parts-15x-faster-and-75-cheaper","created_at":"2026-08-05T17:31:24.990Z","updated_at":"2026-09-18T23:05:07.316Z","total_vote_count":8,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/SPv-ultrasonium-a-new-way-to-make-complex-metal-parts-15x-faster-and-75-cheaper","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":32750,"name":"Ultrasonium","slug":"ultrasonium","url":"https://ultrasonium.com/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/734dc12d12265ba8890bf4ef5e7e564bdb629a87.png","batch":"Summer 2026","industry":"Industrials","tags":["Hard Tech","Hardware","Robotics","Manufacturing"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/32750"}}