The separations and refining layer for the modern industrial stack

Kunal Sinha

Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

Kunal spent 14 years at Glencore, most recently as CEO of its global recycling business — one of the world's largest electronics and battery recycling franchises. He also led investments for Glencore in the critical minerals space. He co-founded Valor to bring back separations and refining to America. He is an engineer from IIT Kharagpur with graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from London Business School.

Paul Voigt

Chief Engineering and Technology Officer (CTO)

Paul was the first engineering leadership hire at Redwood Materials, where he spent more than five years as VP Engineering, successfully taking new lithium-ion battery recycling and refining processes from the lab to commercial scale. Before that he spent 18 years at Glencore, nine of them leading the hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy business units. At Valor he leads engineering and technology, from the pilot facility through the design of the first commercial plant and beyond.

Prof. Xiao Su

Chief Science Advisor

Xiao invented the electrochemical separation platforms that Valor commercializes. The Robert D. Bent Chair Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Xiao is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the DOE Early Career Award, as well as the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) awards in separation science. He started his academic career at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and has over 100 publications and more than 20 patents in electrochemical separations and processing. PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT, BASc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

David Lian

Head of Engineering

Dave builds pilot plants that run. At Redwood Materials he was accountable for a 10,000 sq ft cathode pilot plant operating 24/7, leading a 35-person organization to 90% uptime across 19 consecutive campaigns; at Tesla he designed, constructed and commissioned a pilot plant from scratch and scaled a novel process tenfold. He is a Professional Engineer and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt with a decade at DuPont behind him.

Ann Kowalski

Head of Grants and Business Operations

Ann turns hard technology into funded programs. At Twelve she won more than $40M in non-dilutive awards, managed multiple $10M+ Department of Energy projects, and ran the technical diligence behind $600M+ of private investment and multi-billion-dollar customer agreements. Ph.D. in chemical and biological engineering from Colorado State.

Julius Heidlas

Principal Chemist

Julius is a hydrometallurgical scientist and chemist with more than ten years of industrial and academic experience, most recently at Freeport-McMoRan and BASF, where he led development of chemical additives for metallurgical processes and leaching. He created a line of PFAS-free mist suppressants now used at industrial scale in copper SX/EW plants worldwide, and catalysts that accelerate primary copper sulfide leaching, with several patents granted and products deployed. At Valor he leads chemistry development — the core of how the process selects and separates target metals.

Tanner Dean

Computational Scientist

Tanner builds machine learning models that predict chemistry before the lab runs it. His Nature paper introduced cross-attention graph neural networks for predicting how molecules and enzymes interact, and his previous ML-driven screening has repeatedly turned model predictions into experimentally confirmed hits. Ph.D. in biophysics and quantitative biology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Griffin Clark

Process Engineer

Griffin runs pilot lines that turn feedstock into recovered metals and actionable process data. At Redwood Materials and Ascend Elements he led plant operations for battery materials pilot lines — experimental campaigns, equipment commissioning, and the real-time data systems behind product quality. B.S. in chemical engineering from Stanford.

Aderiyike Aguda

Chemical Process and Research Engineer

Ade is a co-author of the Nature Chemical Engineering paper that introduced electrochemical liquid-liquid extraction. A researcher in Prof. Xiao Su's group at the University of Illinois, she leads development of the second-generation e-LLE system and works on electrochemical recovery of precious metals from electronic waste. First-class chemical engineering degree from the University of Lagos.

Colin Stewart

Engineering and R&D Intern

Colin is completing an M.S. in electrochemical science and technologies at the University of Oregon, after a chemical engineering degree from Oregon State. He pairs electrochemical characterization and modeling with eight years of keeping real process equipment running, including the recommissioning of a dormant facility.

William Gross

Engineering and R&D Intern

William is completing an M.S. in electrochemistry at the University of Oregon, after graduating magna cum laude in chemistry and physics from the University of Denver. His research spans electrochemical characterization, a PEM electrolyzer catalyst study with Nel Hydrogen, and synthetic chemistry under inert conditions.

T. Alan Hatton

Advisor

Alan mentored Xiao and Johannes during their time at MIT, where his group's pioneering research in electrochemically mediated separations helped shape the scientific field in which Valor's platform was later developed. He is the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering Practice at MIT, where he led the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice for more than three decades.

Sean Hunt

Advisor

Sean was an early backer of Valor and is the co-founder and CTO of Solugen, where he leads the scale-up of proprietary chemoenzymatic process technologies and the development of Solugen's Bioforge molecular factories. An MIT PhD in chemical engineering and NSF graduate research fellow, he has held engineering roles at the U.S. Navy, Merck, and General Mills, and is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree with first-author publications in Science, Angewandte Chemie, and Energy and Environmental Science.

Mark was an early backer of Valor and served as Chief Executive of Anglo American for nine years, where he led a sweeping restructuring and revitalization of its global operations, after serving as CEO of AngloGold Ashanti and before chairing Vale Base Metals from 2023 to 2025. A mining engineer who began his career in underground coal mining in Australia in 1976, he brings five decades of leadership across mining, processing, and marketing, spanning six continents, 20 countries, and more than 30 minerals and metals.

Jeff Johnson

Advisor

Jeff was an early backer of Valor and is a General Partner and Global Head of Energy at B Capital, bringing nearly 25 years of investment, entrepreneurship, and corporate experience across energy and technology. He previously led Temasek's US energy and industrial growth investment team, deploying more than $1 billion of capital, and co-founded Xpansiv, the world's leading market infrastructure provider for environmental commodities.

Dr. Johannes Elbert

Advisor

Johannes designed the redox-active materials that make e-LLE work. As a research scientist in Prof. Su's lab he co-developed the platform and co-authored the Nature Chemical Engineering paper that introduced it, after working on electrochemical water purification at MIT and redox-flow batteries at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Ph.D. from TU Darmstadt and prior appointment at UIUC.