Our Investment in Red Metals
Reshoring American copper by building domestic production capacity.
Copper is the connective tissue of electrification. It runs through EV motors, grid infrastructure, data centers, and building construction, to name a few applications. With surging demand for data infrastructure and electrified transport, copper demand is accelerating alongside it, with projections ranging from 3 million to over 4 million metric tons by 2035. This gap between supply and demand was serious enough that copper was designated a U.S. critical mineral in November 2025. New mines take decades to come online and offer no near-term relief. Exacerbating the issue, the U.S. exports roughly one-third to 40% of its annual copper scrap to China because the domestic supply chain lacks the refining capacity to process it efficiently.
The irony is hard to miss. We need a process redesign that makes domestic scrap-to-rod production fast, efficient, and economically competitive. One that can turn the valuable minerals being shipped overseas into finished copper rod for American manufacturers.
MCJ is thrilled to announce our investment in Red Metals, a company building a fully integrated scrap-to-copper rod operation in the United States. We are proud to have participated in Red Metals’ $10 million Seed round, led by Gigascale Capital, with participation from Future Ventures and J.B. Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and Co-founder of Tesla.
What is Red Metals?
Based in Charleston, South Carolina, Red Metals is building a fully integrated scrap-to-copper rod operation. Amid heightened demand for copper, Red Metals aims to address the supply chain bottleneck that has led some companies to secure upstream sources of copper. The company has developed a first-principles process redesign that enables a direct path from copper scrap to finished copper rod, bypassing the traditional multi-step, multi-company supply chain that typically takes six to ten months.
The Red Metals approach combines physical processing, advanced sorting, and metallurgical refining to produce high-conductivity copper rod in a single integrated facility. Its process delivers 40% fewer unit operations, 85-95% lower energy use, and compresses time to production from months to days or weeks. Red Metals is designed to be feedstock flexible. The company is initially focused on domestic copper scrap, and its first commercial product will be high-conductivity copper rod, which is the industry standard input used in wire, magnet wire, and other electrical applications. Red Metals recently announced its first facility in Charleston, South Carolina.
Why We Invested
Our conviction in Red Metals rests on the strength of the founder, the structural nature of the supply gap, and the durability of the tailwinds behind domestic copper production.
Jackson Switzer (Founder & CEO) is a chemical engineer with a PhD from Georgia Tech who combines rare technical depth with a demonstrated ability to execute at scale. Before founding Red Metals, Jackson spent seven years at Albemarle, the world’s largest lithium company, in technical and commercial leadership before joining Redwood Materials as an early commercial hire. At Redwood, he built the commercial function from scratch, scaling revenue from zero to over $200M and negotiating more than $1B in contracts. Jackson was central to company building from Series C onward, spanning strategy, technology roadmaps, partnerships, and fundraising. That background maps directly onto what Red Metals requires: the technical credibility to redesign an industrial process and the commercial experience to aggregate feedstock, sign offtake agreements, and build the customer relationships that make the economics work. JB Straubel encouraged Jackson to start the company and participated in the round, a strong signal from someone who knows his work firsthand.
Unlike single-sector dependencies, copper demand is structurally diversified across EVs, grid infrastructure, data centers, and construction. The multi-use nature of this mineral reduces cyclical risk. Red Metals sits squarely within our industrial throughput thesis. It’s a bet on process innovation that unlocks domestic materials production when supply chains can’t afford to wait. But it also speaks to something broader in our portfolio: the belief that the infrastructure of electrification needs to be built here, fast, and built to hold. We’re proud to back Jackson and the team as they get to work.
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