Mining / Critical MineralsNew Mexico

Tollan Materials

Mining / Critical Minerals · Los Alamos, NM

Los Alamos National Laboratory spinout recovering heavy rare earth elements domestically from overlooked US waste streams. Founded by Luis Chavez; supported by the New Mexico Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (NM LEEP).

Founded

Region

New Mexico

Investors

People

About New Mexico

New Mexico runs on two national laboratories most of the country only half-remembers exist: Los Alamos, where the first nuclear weapons were designed and where Triad National Security now holds the management contract, and Sandia in Albuquerque, run by Honeywell's NTESS since the contract moved off Lockheed Martin in 2017. Descartes Labs, a satellite-imagery and geospatial-AI company headquartered in Santa Fe, was founded by scientists who left Los Alamos to build it -- the exact same lab-to-company pattern that built San Antonio's cyber cluster and Tampa's CENTCOM-adjacent defense firms, playing out here around physics instead of signals.

Region Stats

Total firms 53

VC / investors 1

Companies 47

Schools 5

Known For

The Bomb

The Labs It Left

What Spun Out