USA Rare Earth merges with Inflection Point, debuts with Nasdaq listing

USA Rare Earth (Nasdaq: USAR) went public on Friday as CEO Joshua Ballard and chairman Mike Blitzer rang the opening bell.

The company has spent several years privately working to tap the Round Top rare earth deposit in west Texas, with ambitious plans to create a domestic supply chain. The next step, Ballard said, is to start scaling up lab work and move into the prefeasibility study stage. 

The initial public offering comes only a day after the company closed a deal with Inflection Point Acquisition (Nasdaq: IPXX), with the aim to build one of North America’s largest magnet plants. A release on Thursday didn’t state the deal’s value, but Inflection then had a market capitalization of $91.2 million (C$131 million). 

“We’re moving pretty fast, going public,” Ballard told sister publication Mining.com in an interview. “We’re really pushing to get the magnet facility up over the next year – it’s going to be close to 5,000 tonnes per year. That’s a $700-$800 million revenue company at its peak.”

Shares in USARE gained 70% in New York to close at $18.55 apiece on its first day, while they slid 25% on Monday to $13.85 as wider markets rose slightly. The company has a market capitalization of around $117 million. 

Round Top 

Round Top contains 15 of the 17 rare earth elements, with a “significant” endowment of heavy rare earths dysprosium, terbium, gallium and beryllium, the company said. It expects to produce nearly half of the critical minerals listed in the USGS revised list of raw materials deemed crucial for national security and the economy.

In January, USARE produced a sample of dysprosium oxide  with a purity of 99.1%, which it said marks a breakthrough in domestic rare earth production. In the same month, the company produced the first batch of sintered permanent rare earth magnets at its new plant under development in Stillwater, Okla.

“The recent news on tariffs and rising global geopolitical tensions are a wake-up call for America – we must build a domestic rare earth mineral and magnet supply chain here at home to support a wide range of critical technologies, including our national defense,” CEO Ballard said in a news release on Thursday. “The closing of this transaction and our listing on Nasdaq is another key milestone in our evolution in building this supply chain.” 

The only active rare earths mine in the U.S. is Mountain Pass in California, owned by MP Materials (NYSE: MP), which produces separated and refined rare earths including praseodymium-neodymium oxide, cerium and lanthanum.

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Ballard was appointed the company’s CEO in December after serving years as chief financial officer at Energy Recovery (Nasdaq: ERII), a technology and ceramics manufacturing company. 

“Magnets and ceramics, [are] close in terms of how they’re manufactured. So it’s a pretty easy leap for me on the magnet side,” Ballard told Mining.com.  

“We’ve been working on the processing technology to unlock that deposit, especially the last three years quite intensely. We’ve made a lot of progress here, especially over the last 12 months in separating all of the elements,” Ballard said.  “We’re using a mixture of more typical techniques. It’s heap crushed heap leach – we’re doing solvent extraction and precipitation on the front end to pull out the bulk minerals.

“Then we’re moving into our own continuous ion exchange technology that we’ve been developing in order to separate out the individual minerals from there.”

Ballard pointed out that while reports of rare earths deposits in the Ukraine and Greenland make headlines, “if it’s even there, it’s decades away”, while the US is at a critical juncture. 

“We’re sitting right here. We’re in America. We’ve got an incredible deposit. We just need to get it developed and get these minerals out of the ground so we can get the metals. This is a nearer-term milestone – 12 to 24 months at this stage.”