Engineered Proteins for Clean Rare-Earth Extraction | Alta CEO Nathan Nielson | SF Deep Tech Week

Presented by Voyager VC at SF Deep Tech Week 2025 (https://luma.com/voyager-materials)
https://www.voyagervc.com/


Deep Tech Week is a decentralized conference hosting the worlds best entrepreneurs and investors bringing science fiction technologies to life
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In this talk from San Francisco Deep Tech Week 2025, Nathan Nielson, co-founder and CEO of Alta Resource Technologies, reveals how engineered proteins are revolutionizing the extraction of critical minerals—including rare earth elements essential for energy, defense, and AI.

Alta’s bio-based separation process replaces hundreds of toxic chemical steps with a single column chromatography system using immobilized proteins—tiny “biological robots” that selectively capture valuable metals with 100× efficiency and near-zero waste.

With $12.5M raised from DCVC, Voyager Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and Orion Industrial Ventures, Alta is pioneering a new frontier: clean, onshore mineral refining that can finally compete with—and surpass—China’s dominance in rare-earth processing.

📝 Description

Alta Resource Technologies is redefining how the world extracts and refines critical minerals.
Today’s rare-earth and specialty metal supply chains are toxic, offshored, and geopolitically fragile. Alta’s breakthrough process uses engineered proteins to separate and purify metals like neodymium, dysprosium, and cobalt from mining ores and e-waste streams—with no hazardous byproducts and a fraction of the energy footprint.

In this keynote, CEO Nathan Nielson explains how Alta’s protein-based separations achieve lab-to-pilot scale breakthroughs—1,000× scale-up from bench experiments—and are now ready for U.S. commercial deployment.
By combining biochemistry, process engineering, and national-security urgency, Alta is proving that clean mineral refining is not only possible but economically superior.

🔹 Topics covered:

Why the world’s mineral refining bottleneck threatens EVs, AI, and defense

How immobilized proteins enable 100× faster, cleaner metal separations

Turning e-waste into a domestic resource stream

Onshoring rare-earth refining safely and economically

The rise of biology as the new frontier in industrial chemistry

🎤 Speaker: Nathan Nielson, PhD — Co-Founder & CEO, Alta Resource Technologies
📍 Recorded live at Deep Tech Week San Francisco 2025

💡 Key Takeaways

Biology meets mining: Alta replaces hundreds of chemical wash cycles with a single protein-based purification step, cutting cost, toxicity, and permitting barriers.

Strategic metals, strategic autonomy: Clean refining unlocks domestic supply of rare earths critical to EVs, semiconductors, and defense tech.

Selective by design: Immobilized proteins act as molecular filters, distinguishing neighboring elements that traditional chemistry cannot separate efficiently.

E-waste as a resource: Alta’s system can recover high-value metals from existing products—creating circular supply chains.

Frontier opportunity: Mineral processing is a frontier industry ripe for innovation; new tech can make known resources economically viable again—just as fracking did for oil and gas.

👨‍🔬 Speaker Bio – Nathan Nielson

Nathan Nielson is the co-founder and CEO of Alta Resource Technologies, a company pioneering bio-engineered mineral separations for critical materials like rare earth elements and battery metals.
He holds an MA and PhD from Stanford University and a Master’s from Princeton, and previously collaborated with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on early protein-based extraction research.

Under his leadership, Alta has raised $12.5M from investors including DCVC, Voyager Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and Orion Industrial Ventures, and is preparing to launch its first U.S. production site in 2026.
Nathan’s vision is to make clean, high-purity mineral refining a cornerstone of national resilience—bridging biotechnology, energy transition, and industrial strategy.