Where this came from,
and what it does not know

The six segments and their descriptions are Harmonic's, used word for word. It is a good cut: ordered by how material moves, recycling drawn as a loop into the middle rather than a step at the start, and rare-earth-free alternatives given their own segment instead of being buried under magnets.

One boundary trips people up constantly. Processing and separation are one segment here, covering concentrate all the way to individual oxides. Elsewhere you will see the two split, with refining meaning crack, leach and purify to a mixed carbonate, and separation meaning that carbonate to single oxides. Published cost curves split at the second boundary. Check which span a cost figure covers before comparing it to anything here.

Most companies here do one thing. A smaller set holds two or more consecutive links, and those sit in the middle. Membership is a test, not a quota.

Each carries a five-segment strip over explore, mine, process, metallise and magnet, with three states. Owns it means the company operates the asset. Offtake or partner means contracted access through an offtake, a joint venture, or a plant somebody else runs. Gap means neither, and a gap is where a partnership has to go.

Writing the rule down means you can argue with a specific call instead of the definition. Several calls are arguable, especially where a company markets itself as fully integrated while a partner runs the midstream. Every strip is a judgement and every one is a draft until somebody checks it against a filing.

Any company on the map carries a small arrows glyph that draws what it is connected to. This is the thinnest part of the site and it should be read that way.

Seven relationships are drawn, each naming something specific: a joint venture partner, a supply agreement, a shared backer where the sharing is the point, or two companies attacking the same bottleneck from different directions. Nothing is drawn because two companies happen to sit in the same segment. That rule keeps the layer small and worth trusting.

Relationships that reach a company not on this map, which is most of the interesting ones, appear in the record as text rather than as an arrow pointing at nothing. Energy Fuels acquiring Vacuumschmelze matters enormously and Vacuumschmelze is not in this dataset, so it is written down rather than drawn.

Adding an edge means adding one object to the edges array with both company names, a relationship kind, a note and a source. The build refuses any edge whose endpoints are not both in the dataset, which stops the layer from drifting into wishful thinking.

Three states, and the difference matters.

Met means an actual call or meeting, or a direct exchange with someone at the company. In CRM means Affinity holds the company but the nearest interaction does not amount to a meeting. Not checked means nobody has looked yet, and it stays on the page rather than quietly becoming a no.

The middle state earns its place. Cyclic Materials shows a recent last-contact date in Affinity. Open the interaction and it is a Cleantech 100 dinner with 110 attendees, one of whom works at Cyclic, plus an unrelated email thread that happens to touch the same address book. Phoenix Tailings, by contrast, returns a calendar entry called "Intro: Phoenix Tailings, Prelude Ventures" with three people on it. Those are not the same fact and the map should not pretend they are.

So each row gets filled in by reading the interaction, not the date field. Six are done. The other 42 are honest about not being done.

Company records come from Harmonic plus web research, as of August 2026. Each carries stage, total raised, headcount, HQ, core technology, feedstock, output, chain position, key backers and a differentiator. 36 of 48 have a disclosed raise; the rest show "n/d" rather than a zero.

Total capital raised across the dataset is $8.1 billion. Read that as a floor. It sums disclosed totals only, it mixes venture equity with public market capital and government partnerships, and it says nothing about how much has actually been deployed.

Chinese producers. Absent, on a chain China dominates. The source data is venture-oriented, which is the reason, not a view that they do not matter. This is the biggest hole here.

Demand. No OEMs, no turbine makers, no defence primes, even though offtake from those buyers is what decides which of these companies actually gets built.

Double counting. Companies really do sit in more than one segment. Each appears once, in its primary one, which flattens how much vertical integration is going on. MP Materials is filed under exploration and mining and also separates and makes magnets.

Two figures that disagree. Phoenix Tailings shows $149M here and $128.7M in PitchBook at a $395M valuation. Nth Cycle is tagged Acquired at $1.2B, which reads like a valuation rather than money raised. Neither is resolved.

Segment taxonomy and company records: Harmonic, August 2026, cross-checked against PitchBook where a profile exists.

Market structure context draws on published analysis from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Their charts, cost curves and price forecasts are subscription deliverables and are not reproduced here. Where a figure of theirs is used it is stated with attribution and a link to the source, never rehosted.