Alan Lund isn’t new to high-stakes manufacturing. A former MIT postdoctoral fellow, he has spent his career building companies around hard-to-solve problems in advanced materials. He founded Xtalic, a maker of high-performance coatings that helped electronics manufacturers reduce their dependence on precious metals, scaling the business to more than 50 employees and landing some of the world’s largest tech firms as customers.
He later launched two more ventures—one focused on advanced metals manufacturing and another tied to what became the first aluminum rolling mill built in the United States in more than 40 years.
By the time he discovered MP Materials in 2020, he was looking for something bigger…