Amir Mashal runs his company out of a Calabasas garage. Venture capitalists have been flying in from across the country to see why.
That garage is home to Arcturus Technologies, which emerged from stealth in late June with $8 million in seed funding, led by Initialized Capital. Breakthrough Energy Discovery, 1517, Wireframe Ventures and Toyota Ventures also participated.
Mashal’s company infuses carbon nanomaterials – more than 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair – into common metals like copper and aluminum. That’s it. That’s the startup drawing investors cross country to a Calabasas garage for a closer view of the tiny nanomaterials at work that could have a huge impact.
Any use case for electrical conductors – from everyday power cords and batteries to large-scale data centers and robotic manufacturing factories – loses energy because the metals carrying that power overheat.
“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,” Zoe Perret, a partner at Initialized Capital, said in a statement. “As demand has grown, we’ve layered more copper and more cooling on top of materials engineered for a much simpler era.”
By infusing electrical conductor materials with carbon, Arcturus Technologies creates a new kind of material that carries more power and runs more efficiently. It’s also less prone to overheating, which saves energy. That means the copper in electric vehicles, drones and the electrical grid can run more efficiently, without automatically needing a cooling system that burns energy of its own.
“That same limit just shows up everywhere because the entire modern world runs on metals,” Mashal says. “So, this isn’t just a motor problem or a copper or aluminum problem. It’s a materials problem that’s just hiding in plain sight.”
Addressing the root
Mashal, an electrical and material science engineer, received a National Science Foundation Fellowship for a carbon nanomaterial energy storage idea as a student at the University of Wisconsin. After graduating, he moved to Los Angeles and joined an aerospace and automotive research and development lab.
“Nearly every electrical system that I encountered, whether it was an electric motor, a data center or the transmission lines and the energy grid around us, they were all just being pushed harder and hotter. And nearly everyone in this space is just kind of treating that as a cooling problem,” he says. “I realized that we’re really kind of only treating the symptoms there. And the real culprit is the materials themselves.”
Copper is widely used in electrical engineering because its low resistance allows electrical currents to easily pass through the material. But put that copper in an electric motor, its resistance increases by 60% by the time the motor reaches its operating temperature, weakening electricity’s ability to push through it and demanding more energy. Because the copper also expels an outsized amount of energy as heat, those motors need to be equipped with even more energy-hungry cooling systems.
In Mashal’s garage, Arcturus Technologies uses a laser process to fabricate these hybridized metal materials. Because the technology can create any shape, design or gage, the existing copper or aluminum supply chain doesn’t need to change – any piece of metal can be infused with carbon nanomaterials. Companies can also use less raw materials and stretch its further with carbon nanometers, Mashal says.
“We’re turning a methane source into the carbon nanomaterials that get infused in it,” he says. “There’s no real reason we won’t be able to achieve near cost parity with just simple copper and simple aluminum.”
A materials revolution
The industrial materials sector has raised around $5 billion in capital so far in 2026, more than double what the sector made the year prior, according to PitchBook. These companies, working in aerospace, defense and advanced manufacturing, are aiming to create new substances for innovative projects.
In the 20th century, scientists mixed and matched molecules to create what were then novel materials like Styrofoam, Teflon and polyester. Cambium, an El Segundo-based materials startup, raised $100 million in series B funding in January to manufacture new polymers that can withstand intense pressure and heat in the aerospace sector.
“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,” Ethan Sohn, climate fund Principal at Toyota Ventures, said in a statement.
As the world grows more power-intensive, raw materials mined from the planet are being pushed to the brink of what they’re fundamentally capable of – just as AI, electrification and manufacturing demands more from them.
In response, companies are moving beyond software and technology solutions and rethinking the core properties of the materials themselves: improving the recyclability, enhancing performance or refining how they’re obtained.
“I think that we’re at this kind of materials era because of this massive inflection point that’s created by electrification, AI and our different systems that are kind of aging,” Mashal says. “We’re starting to hit the material limits of everything from metals to plastics. So, this next decade is really going to be a material dominated one.”
