Arcturus Raises $8M in Seed Funding led by Initialized Capital

The round also saw participation from 1517, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Toyota Ventures, and Wireframe Ventures. The round brought the total capital raised to $10 million.

The company plans to use the funding to grow its technical team, expand its manufacturing capabilities, and speed up the commercialization of its products for electric motors, data centers, and power grid applications.

Arcturus is developing a proprietary process that adds carbon nanomaterials to metals, creating high-performance materials with improved electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties. These materials are designed to replace conventional metals in components such as motor windings, bus bars, heat sinks, and eventually transmission lines and power grid infrastructure.

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The company aims to address the growing limits of copper and aluminum, which struggle to meet the increasing demands of AI infrastructure, electrification and grid modernization. By improving efficiency, reducing heat, and lowering cooling needs, Arcturus materials could help reduce costs and improve the performance of electrical systems.

Mashal founded Arcturus after working in electrical engineering, materials science, and carbon nanomaterials at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and later at Hughes Research Laboratory. During his work in aerospace and automotive research, he saw that engineers often had to work around the limits of traditional metals instead of improving the materials themselves.

"From the beginning, we saw the oak tree present in the acorn with Amir; he possesses that rare mix of technical depth and the ultra-hardcore resolve required to face an unforgiving environment," said Michael Gibson, General Partner and Co-Founder at 1517. "The Flux Capacitor Fellowship exists to back missionaries, not mercenaries, at the earliest stage. While most would have walked away, Amir’s obsessiveness took over, he couldn’t unsee the problem.

"Most companies engineer around the constraints of copper and aluminum, Arcturus is actually redefining those limits," said Ashley Grosh, Head of Breakthrough Energy Discovery. "By producing a new class of materials entirely, they can improve thermal performance, mechanical strength, and conductivity in a way that can scale. The potential impact extends across energy, compute, and industry. That is the type of breakthrough, system-level innovation we look for at the BE Fellows program."

“Arcturus is innovating at the fundamental material level for the future of power delivery,” said Ethan Sohn, Climate Fund Principal at Toyota Ventures. “From next-generation mobility to thermal management and high-power electrical infrastructure, there’s a clear and growing need for better-performing materials across increasingly demanding applications. Arcturus is developing for those real-world requirements.”

“Arcturus sits between a materials breakthrough and a very large market need,” said Lily, Partner at Wireframe Ventures. “When scaled, the company’s technology will save nearly $300B in wasted energy and cut over 500M tonnes of CO2 emissions, every single year.”

“The industry has gotten used to treating heat, efficiency loss, and power density as system design problems,” said Amir Mashal, Founder and CEO of Arcturus. “To me, they’re materials problems first. Arcturus exists to attack the bottleneck at its source by creating a new class of metals infused with carbon nanomaterials that can move more power, waste less energy, and open the door to the next generation of electrical systems”

About Arcturus

Founded by Amir Mashal, Arcturus is an advanced materials company developing metals enhanced with carbon nanomaterials to improve electrical, thermal, and mechanical performance. The company is building a scalable materials platform for applications including electric motors, thermal management, data center infrastructure and power transmission.

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