LOS ANGELES, June 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arcturus, an advanced materials company that infuses carbon nanomaterials into metals to unlock step-change improvements in electrical, thermal, and mechanical performance, today emerged from stealth with an $8 million seed round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from 1517, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Toyota Ventures, and Wireframe Ventures.
Arcturus is developing a proprietary process to infuse carbon nanomaterials into metals, creating a new class of high-performance materials designed to improve electrical, thermal, and mechanical performance. The company is building these materials as a drop-in solution for critical components across electrical systems, with target applications including motor windings, bus bars, heat sinks, and, over time, transmission lines and broader grid infrastructure.
The core problem Arcturus is solving is one hiding in plain sight: copper and aluminum are being pushed to their limits as today’s systems demand more power, more efficiency, and better thermal performance than legacy metals can deliver. As AI infrastructure scales, electrification accelerates, and grid modernization becomes more urgent, the limitations of conventional metals are driving higher heat losses, lower efficiency, added cooling complexity, and rising system costs.
“The industry has gotten used to treating heat, efficiency loss, and power density as system design problems,” said Amir Mashal, Founder and CEO of Arcturus. “To me, they’re materials problems first. Arcturus exists to attack the bottleneck at its source by creating a new class of metals infused with carbon nanomaterials that can move more power, waste less energy, and open the door to the next generation of electrical systems”
Mashal founded Arcturus after working at the intersection of electrical engineering, materials science, and carbon nanomaterials, first at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and later at Hughes Research Laboratory. In aerospace and automotive R&D, he saw firsthand how often the answer was to engineer around the thermal and electrical limitations of legacy metals instead of solving the underlying materials problem.
'Every industry pushing the limits of performance is running into the same wall: the metals carrying their power and heat haven't fundamentally changed in over a century. As demand has grown, we've layered more copper and more cooling on top of materials engineered for a much simpler era,” said Zoe Perret, Partner at Initialized Capital. “Amir has cracked something the largest labs in the world haven't: a new class of carbon-infused metals that let motors run hotter, components carry more, and systems waste far less. Arcturus is building the materials platform the next generation of high-performance industries will be built on.'
That platform approach is resonating across sectors where power density, heat, and efficiency are becoming increasingly difficult to solve through system design alone.
“Arcturus is innovating at the fundamental material level for the future of power delivery,” said Ethan Sohn, Climate Fund Principal at Toyota Ventures. “From next-generation mobility to thermal management and high-power electrical infrastructure, there’s a clear and growing need for better-performing materials across increasingly demanding applications. Arcturus is developing for those real-world requirements.”
“Arcturus sits between a materials breakthrough and a very large market need,” said Lily, Partner at Wireframe Ventures. “When scaled, the company’s technology will save nearly $300B in wasted energy and cut over 500M tonnes of CO2 emissions, every single year.”
Mashal was selected as both a 2025 Breakthrough Energy Discovery’s Fellow and a 2024 1517 Flux Capacitor Fellow, recognition that validated both the urgency of the problem and the scale of the opportunity Arcturus is pursuing.
'Most companies engineer around the constraints of copper and aluminum, Arcturus is actually redefining those limits,' said Ashley Grosh, Head of Breakthrough Energy Discovery. 'By producing a new class of materials entirely, they can improve thermal performance, mechanical strength, and conductivity in a way that can scale. The potential impact extends across energy, compute, and industry. That is the type of breakthrough, system-level innovation we look for at the BE Fellows program.'
That early conviction started when Arcturus was still at the earliest stage of company formation.
'From the beginning, we saw the oak tree present in the acorn with Amir; he possesses that rare mix of technical depth and the ultra-hardcore resolve required to face an unforgiving environment,' said Michael Gibson, General Partner and Co-Founder at 1517. 'The Flux Capacitor Fellowship exists to back missionaries, not mercenaries, at the earliest stage. While most would have walked away, Amir’s obsessiveness took over, he couldn’t unsee the problem. He shows the imaginative daring and sustaining commitment needed to build a company that doesn't just solve a problem, but makes history.'
The funding will be used to expand the team, accelerate manufacturing scale-up, and advance commercialization across electric motors, thermal management systems, data center infrastructure, and grid applications. The company is actively hiring across nanomaterials, process engineering, materials science, additive manufacturing, and manufacturing scale-up.
For more information: https://arcturus.io/ Media contact: amir@arcturus.io
About Arcturus
Arcturus is an advanced materials company that infuses carbon nanomaterials into metals for the next generation of electrical, thermal, and mechanical performance. Founded in Los Angeles by Amir Mashal, Arcturus is developing a scalable materials platform for applications spanning electric motors, thermal management, data center infrastructure, and power transmission. The company is building toward a future where the world's most critical systems are no longer constrained by yesterday's metals.
