{"id":113464,"title":"Ultrasonium: Shaping the Future of Metal Manufacturing","tagline":"We make the world’s most difficult metal parts faster, cheaper, and more versatile.","body":"**The problem**\n\nThe technologies that define this century, including 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 limited in the alloys and geometries they can process.\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 comes out, controlled by a Physical AI layer and novel control processes.\n\nWe produce near-net-shape complex metal parts up to 15× faster, 75% cheaper, and with far greater alloy versatility than conventional manufacturing methods, at scale in the U.S.\n\n\u003chttps://youtu.be/5REHWdzDAhk\u003e\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=113464\u0026key=user_uploads/3735756/dbd12c5d-1203-4e50-9939-980a218df45a)\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 incumbent methods, at a moment when domestic manufacturing capacity is a national priority.\n\nOur founding team has worked on some of the most difficult engineering systems in the world, including quantum computers, superconductors, nuclear reactors, and advanced aerospace alloy processing. Between the four of us, we have backgrounds in physics, metallurgy, advanced manufacturing, controls, hardware, and commercialization.\n\nJack Qiu (CEO) completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and published pioneering quantum computing work in Nature Physics. Chris Carter (CSO) left to join Ultrasonium during the 5th year of his PhD program at MIT after more than six years of research in state-of-the-art metallurgy and materials processing. Alexander Urbanski (Chief Research Officer) previously founded a DOE-funded nuclear startup and was the first hire at Phase3D, where he built and commercialized metal manufacturing monitoring technology. Hunter Brown (VP, Engineering) began working at national labs when he was 15, studied physics at UC Berkeley, and contributed to the ITER fusion reactor.","slug":"TW4-ultrasonium-shaping-the-future-of-metal-manufacturing","created_at":"2026-09-02T19:54:37.419Z","updated_at":"2026-09-19T09:00:27.931Z","total_vote_count":6,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/TW4-ultrasonium-shaping-the-future-of-metal-manufacturing","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=113464\u0026key=user_uploads/3735756/dbd12c5d-1203-4e50-9939-980a218df45a","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"}}