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National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR)—Seven entrepreneurs have joined NLR’s 2026 West Gate fellowship cohort, a two-year program under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program that pairs founders with national laboratory experts, facilities and commercialization resources. Two of the new fellows have roots at the °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï: Ìýof , working to manufacture affordable magnesium metal in the U.S., and Ìýof , developing machine learning tools to speed the discovery of new battery materials.

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The University of Colorado Connection

is a CU °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï spinout founded in 2015, based on technology from the lab of Alan Weimer, professor of chemical and biological engineering at CU °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï. The company has designed an automated, electrified smelting process for magnesium metal that it says can cut material, energy and labor costs below the conventional Pidgeon process—no U.S.-based company has produced magnesium metal since 2021. West Gate fellow , the company's co-founder and chief technology officer and PhD alum of chemical engineering and biological engineering at CU °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï, will work with NLR researchers to test the process at full scale and develop a use for the cement byproduct it generates.

Ìýis a CU °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï spinout founded by , a Ph.D. student of chemical engineering, to advance discoveries made in the lab of , professor of mechanical engineering at CU °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï. The company uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify and troubleshoot new battery materials, including sodium-ion and other lithium-free chemistries that rely on more abundant, domestically available minerals. Through West Gate, Flitz plans to draw on NLR’s thermal modeling and safety-evaluation capabilities to test how Orva’s materials perform in real-world conditions.

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