DexMat, a U.S. scale-up, maintains that the materials that built the modern world can’t build what is next. So it has developed a lightweight, flexible, and conductive carbon nanotube material called Galvorn that is designed to replace traditional metals like copper, aluminum, and steel.
“We aim to make the materials used in bridges, buildings, and vehicles obsolete,” says DexMat CEO Bryan Hassin. The economics of yesterday’s materials, which perform poorly and are polluting, no longer make sense, he argues. Hassin says Galvorn is greener, offers better performance, and allows diversification of the supply chain.
The company claims that Galvorn, which is recyclable,carries 3x as much electrical current as copper weight for weight is 50 times stronger than copper and 15 times stronger than steel; and weighs 80% less than copper and half as much as aluminum. And, says Hassin, the strength and conductivity of the material are doubling every three to four years.
Galvorn’s applications include:
- Lowering grid upgrade costs for the energy and transmission sector. DexMat is co-developing aluminum-carbon nanotube power cables with Prysmian, a Milan-based global manufacturer that specializes in electrical and optical cables
- Reducing weight in signal and sensor wires to improve fuel efficiency , range and payload capacity for the aerospace and defense sectors
- Developing minimally invasive neuromodulation platforms for the medtech sector through a partnership with NeuroBionics
- Improving electric vehicle components and lightweight wiring
DexMat is one of 10 winners in the World Economic Forum UpLink Challenge “Powering Tomorrow: Electricity Systems,” announced September 16 at the Energy Forum in Geneva. (The Innovator’s editor-in-chief, a member of the Forum’s Future Council on Energy Technology Frontiers, was one of the contest judges.)
From Laboratory to Industrial-Scale Manufacturing
For decades, carbon nanotubes promised exceptional conductivity, strength, and flexibility — but remained trapped at the nanoscale, used primarily as additives dispersed into other materials in powder form. Realizing their potential and turning them into an industrial-scale material required a fundamentally different approach.
That is where Rice University and its spin-out DexMat come in.
Richard Smalley, co-discoverer of buckminsterfullerene (C60) and a 1996 Nobel laureate, worked at Rice’s Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory. In the early 2000s he turned to building macroscopic carbon nanotube structures, especially fibers. In 2001 Smalley began trying to spin nanotubes into fibers that kept their electrical and mechanical properties over kilometer lengths. His team borrowed wet spinning from the industrial processes used to make high-performance fibers like Kevlar and Zylon. That meant dissolving the nanotubes in a liquid, extruding the solution through tiny holes, and solidifying the strands. Early attempts struggled because nanotubes were hard to dissolve and the fibers came out misaligned. The breakthrough was a 2004 paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B by Smalley, Matteo Pasquali, now a DexMat co-founder and chief science advisor, and colleagues, which identified a solvent that allowed stable, high-concentration nanotube dispersions. Smalley’s goal was “buckycables,” kilometer-long fibers that could replace traditional power transmission cables. Pasquali has described the company’s origin as a conversation with Smalley on a couch. Rice students later commemorated that conversation by hanging a lightbulb above Smalley’s couch that is both suspended and powered by Galvorn fiber.
Pasquali worked on the project from the start and led it after Smalley died in 2005. By 2013 the team had produced the first carbon nanotube fibers with both high conductivity and high strength. The team included Dmitri Tsentalovich, now a co-founder and senior director of product innovation; Colin Young, now senior research scientist; and Natnael Behabtu, now production advisor. The research was done in partnership with the Dutch firm Teijin Aramid, the U.S. Air Force, and Israel’s Technion. The 2013 results appeared in Science.
DexMat, which was spun out in 2019, already held one Rice patent from the original Pasquali–Smalley collaboration. In early 2024 the Houston-based scale-up licensed two more Rice patents. The company was built largely on grants from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of Energy, NASA, and others. It has raised a total of $11 million in private capital to date and counts Shell and Aramco as investors.
In 2022 Hassin left a job at Third Derivative, a joint venture to accelerate climate innovation formed by Rocky Mountain Institute and New Energy Nexus, to join DexMat as CEO.
At Third Derivative he saw thousands of clean-tech pitches. It was through this work that he realized there was no credible way of decarbonizing metals. What’s more, almost all of the thousands of energy transition projects he reviewed depended on these depleting materials. This poses not only an environmental problem but also dangerous dependencies, says Hassin. When it comes to copper, for example, most of the refining is done in China. “It is a huge risk factor,” he says.
Hassin had worked as an entrepreneur in residence at Rice University and jumped at the chance to join DexMat when a former colleague approached him. “I realized that the company had made a profound manufacturing breakthrough that could scale industrially and have a huge impact,” he says.
Since spinning out from Rice, DexMat has scaled up production 3,000-fold, says Hassin. Today the company can produce nearly 2 million meters per year of 26 AWG conductive wire (electrical wire sized according to the American Wire Gauge standard). It is scaling rapidly and should “10x capacity again” by the end of 2026, Hassin says. DexMat’s cost structure is driven by economies of scale, so this aggressive growth has cut the cost of Galvorn production nearly 300-fold over the same period, he says.
How It Works
DexMat starts with very pure, high-quality carbon nanotubes. Using solvents, it dissolves them into a solution — a critical first step that enables precise control over the material’s final structure and properties. Its proprietary fluid-phase process then aligns the carbon nanotubes and increases their packing density to form single-filament fiber tow or films. The alignment and packing at the molecular level are key to achieving Galvorn’s high-performance properties, according to the company.
The fluid processing technique is similar in principle to the processes used to produce high-performance polymer fibers like Kevlar and Dyneema. This approach not only optimizes material performance but also makes production economically and industrially scalable in a way that no dry-process carbon nanotube fiber technique can match, according to DexMat. As a result, Galvorn is engineered for industrial scale from the process up, the company says.
Galvorn fibers and films are constructed into multiple forms to suit the specific requirements of wire and cable manufacturers across the industries DexMat is targeting. Each form factor is designed for direct integration into standard industrial manufacturing processes, with no special handling required.
Competitive Landscape
DexMat is not the only company using a carbon nanotube fiber or yarn “spinning” approach that can trace its roots back to Rice University. The Netherlands’ Conyar and Houston-based Wootz — both of which trace their technology to Rice carbon nanotube research — are going after aerospace, defense, and electronics conductive-material markets similar to those targeted by Galvorn.
Hassin says DexMat’s products are stronger and more conductive and can be produced at scale less expensively. He says the company is already “on a credible pathway to undercut metals on price” and is close to cost parity with the high-grade copper used in aerospace.
Other approaches also compete with DexMat’s technology. Nanocomp Technologies, an established U.S. company that was acquired by Huntsman in 2018, uses a one-step process rather than spinning to create durable carbon nanotube material in sheet and yarn formats. Its client list includes NASA, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Yet another promising approach was detailed in a May 2026 Science paper out of Spain’s IMDEA Materials Institute. It demonstrated a scalable manufacturing process for carbon nanotube fibers with electrical conductivity comparable to that of copper and aluminum, using gas-phase intercalation to reach conductivity of up to 24.5 MS/m, comparable to aluminum and roughly 40% that of copper”).
DexMat and IMDEA are longtime research collaborators through the Rice Carbon Hub, led by Pasquali, and they are working together to commercialize this new intellectual property.
To keep up with exponentially growing customer orders, DexMat recently secured ISO 9001 quality certification for its factory in Houston and signed a non-exclusive joint development agreement with one of the largest Tier 1 wire and cable manufacturers in the world, says Hassin. “The focus is on customer adoption: delivering the performance, cost, and scale necessary to empower industrial customers to go ‘all-in’ on bringing Galvorn-based products to their markets,” he says.
