The Stone Age. The Bronze Age. The Iron Age. Humanity’s early eras are named for the most advanced materials of their day. While many would claim we are living in the Silicon Age, Elementum 3D CEO and 2024 Vistage Impact Award winner Jacob Nuechterlein, Ph.D., believes differently.
“We’re living in the Composite Age,” he says.
Combine certain distinct materials — ceramic with aluminum, for instance — and the result is a composite, a wholly new and improved thing. And creating wholly new and improved things is how Nuechterlein launched his 3D metal-printing juggernaut.
As the Erie, Colorado-based company’s tagline puts it, “We develop materials that others can’t figure out.”
These additive-manufacturing alloys cool Formula One race car engines, support space rockets headed to Jupiter’s moon Europa and are essential for the GPS satellite antennas across the globe.
After decades of innovation, Elementum 3D is on target to double its 2025 revenue to $20 million — mainly because it’s become the first call for some of the world’s most innovative companies when they need “the impossible.”
What’s that, NASA? You want a superalloy that can endure temperatures of 1,100 degrees Celsius and stress up to 2,500 times more than the materials currently on the market can handle? No problem.
Over the years, Nuechterlein has become a master at combining the right composition of talent to build something incredible while being intentional about his investors and his growth.
In 2014, Nuechterlein combined his postdoctoral work on ceramic-metal alloys for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) with the then-up-and-coming technology of 3D printing, creating Elementum 3D. The company owes much of its strength to a unique mix of science, talent and some very early supporters.
Elementum 3D’s first investor was Nuechterlein’s middle school science teacher, a gold-mining CEO who briefly moonlighted as a teacher in the early aughts and inspired Nuechterlein.
“I absolutely loved that class,” he says. “We were getting into the natural and physical sciences, and I was really, really excited.”
After earning his materials science Ph.D. in 2013 from the Colorado School of Mines, Nuechterlein received a job offer from his former teacher. But, well…
“I absolutely hate mining,” he says.
Instead of accepting the job, Nuechterlein pitched a 3D metal-printing company that could create alloys no one in the industry could make and use that technology to solve machining problems no one in the metal alloys industry had considered. The teacher was so impressed that he invested $100,000.
That seed money gave Nuechterlein the ability to pursue his passion and the time to perfect his technology.
“I had seen quite a few companies that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but they didn’t have a product yet,” he says. “They had pressure to deliver and were having to make decisions that were antithetical to the business.”
Nuechterlein took his time building the technology and growing a team that understood his vision. Over time, he created something entirely new and successful, but his composition still needed something.
“I wanted support and help from people who had been through it before,” he says. “With other CEOs, no matter what industry you’re in, you all have the same issues.”
A call from Vistage Chair Lori Halverson in 2022 gave Nuechterlein what he needed.
“I said, ‘This was exactly what I was looking for, exactly what I was trying to find. Between that camaraderie of issue processing and the quality of speakers, I often come out pretty inspired.”
Nuechterlein credits Vistage with helping him position Elementum 3D for its current rapid growth by providing him the tools to build an intentional company culture, with clear hiring priorities and aligned expectations. Elementum 3D has gained so much value from Vistage that Nuechterlein now sponsors Jeremy Iten, Ph.D., his chief technology officer, in a Key Executive group.
“Vistage has made a significant difference,” Nuechterlein says of his company’s culture. “It just helps that we’re all on the same page, and we all have a common language around what we expect of each other.”
A company, after all, is a composite. If built with the right mix of skills and expectations, a strong team can create something new, something no other company can duplicate.
Something that defines a new age.
