…and we’re back!

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready in the new year to dive into a bunch of new early-stage startup profiles. We’ve got plenty of them lined up for you in coming editions.

Apologies if today’s edition gets a certain Alanis Morissette song stuck in your head, but Ironic Metals is tackling a major problem with iron, and therefore steel, production.

It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife… I am SO sorry. Read on!

But first:

• For the whole of January we’re offering 50% off a Premium subscription to PreSeed Now, for a whole year! The discount applies whether you pay monthly or annually. Now is the best time to upgrade and support this newsletter!

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– Martin

Ironic Metals is doing green iron production in a fresh, commercially scalable way

Iron production is a foundational part of much of the infrastructure we rely on in modern life.

But it’s also a dirty business. The CO2 emissions from blast furnaces are one of the main drivers of the climate emergency.

Ironic Metals wants to change that with a new approach to iron production.

“Iron is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. It's 85% of the core of the planet. So it's a significant material, not just for industry, but for the world… Every tonne of steel that's made produces two tonnes of CO2 emissions, and 75% of that is down to the iron-making stage. If we can solve that problem, we can solve about 6% of humanity's emissions in a single move,” explains CEO Mike Woodcock.

The way the startup aims to do this is by boosting the efficiency of the iron-making process using alkaline electrolysis. Ironic’s process uses electrochemistry to break down iron ore and extract pure iron from it, which can then be used to produce steel.

Doing this at the same cost as using a blast furnace is the big challenge. The company aims to achieve this by re-engineering the electrolysis cell in a way that will enable a high level of productivity that reaches cost parity with a blast furnace, CTO Jim Hickey says.

Doing that theoretically in a lab is one thing, but achieving it practically at scale is quite another.

“The key is that our technology is modular and flexible, so we can produce iron cost-effectively from as little as 100 tonnes a year,” Woodcock says.

“The steel industry is expected to be about 2.5 billion tonnes by 2050, so that's a lot of CO2 if we don't solve the problem. And the nice thing is, our product scales easily. So we can start at 100 tonnes. Our plan then is to look at getting to 100,000 tonnes, and then into the millions.”

And unlike blast furnaces, Ironic’s technology can be easily switched off when it’s not needed.

“We can make sure that we run it during the hours when we can get the lowest cost electricity, the most sustainable electricity, to deliver the best solution to our customers,” Woodcock says.

The story so far

Woodcock has an engineering background, including a 20-year stint at Tata Steel, while Hickey has a materials science PhD focused on steel.

Ironic Metals came about after Hickey joined Deep Science Ventures as a founder in residence, exploring opportunities in zero-emission steel production.

Examining the market, Hickey identified alkaline electrolysis as a process with strong potential to enable green iron making at scale.

“That's where the idea to re-engineer the electrolysis cell came from. We talked to steelmakers, iron ore miners, and also high-value powder metal manufacturers to validate the concept,” he explains.

Woodcock was then brought in as CEO and the Ironic Metals was incorporated in June 2025. The startup has attracted early support from mining giant Anglo American and the Henry Royce Institute, and hired a team of three to develop a proof-of-concept.

Woodcock says results so far are very promising:

“The process is already robust enough to run for several hours before it produces so much iron that we have to stop it to take the iron away. That's something that we want to fix, because we want it to become a truly continuous process.”

Hickey adds that beyond high-grade iron ore, Ironic wants its process to be developed further to work with more impure or waste source materials, providing a more cost-effective and appealing product.

“If you can reduce the cost of your feedstock, or even use waste materials, you're solving not just the green iron making problem, but waste utilisation, and also reducing opex through being able to purchase lower grade iron ore,” he says.

In 2026, Ironic wants to scale up to a cell that can produce 10 tonnes of iron per year. Woodcock says this will be commercially viable.

“Unusually for a deep tech company, we're able to get into commercial markets pretty quickly. We expect by 2027 to be selling products into the market and generating revenues of, hopefully, in excess of a million dollars a year. It's a rapid journey that we've started on, and it's not slowing down over the next year.”

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