How a Chennai company is trying to break India's dependence on imported rare earth metals
The Chennai-based company processes rare earth oxides into metal and alloys in Tamil Nadu, supplying an input that Indian magnet manufacturing has had to import.
A permanent magnet sits inside almost everything that turns: the traction motor in an electric car, the generator in a direct-drive wind turbine, the actuator in a defence system, the speaker in a phone. The strongest of them are made from neodymium, and the supply chain that produces them has three distinct stages.
Mining is the first, and India has deposits. Magnet-making is the third, and India has companies attempting it. The middle stage, turning mined oxide into metal and then into alloy, is chemically and metallurgically difficult, expensive to build outside the few places that already do it, and it is where the global bottleneck sits.
works on that middle stage. Incorporated in Chennai in August 2022 by Simha Kumar, the CEO, and Nagarajan Mahadeven, it operates manufacturing facilities in Tamil Nadu and describes itself as focused exclusively on neodymium-praseodymium metal and neodymium-iron-boron alloy production.
The step between the mine and the magnet
The company's products are raw material inputs that magnet manufacturers purchase and process further. It produces NdPr metal, bonded powders and strip-cast alloys, which are the forms in which rare earth material arrives at a magnet plant.
Each product serves a different type of magnet: bonded powders are used in smaller, moulded components, while strip-cast alloy is used in sintered magnets, which are used in applications requiring higher magnetic strength. Getting there involves processes the company lists on its own site: molten salt electrolysis, which is how oxide becomes metal, along with automated vacuum melting and melt spinning, the rapid-cooling technique that produces strip-cast alloy with the crystal structure a magnet needs.
Kumar has said proving technical capability in rare earth metal and alloy manufacturing is not straightforward. He adds that Entellus is the first company to do it verifiably in India. The company also describes consistent quality, certification and repeatable delivery as the barriers that keep new suppliers out of industrial supply chains. The next step is sintering. Sintered magnets are made by compacting metal powder under heat and pressure, and they are generally used in applications that require greater magnetic strength. Moving into sintered alloys would extend the company's operations further down the supply chain, closer to finished magnet production.
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Rs 50 crore, and 2,000 tonnes
Entellus raised Rs 50 crore in January 2026 in a round led by ZeroW, an investment firm backed by the Mekapati Family Office, promoters of the KMC Group. ValPro acted as transaction adviser. The company had earlier raised $12 million from Social Capital, which paid for the NdPr metal and bonded powder alloy plants in Tamil Nadu.
The new money is for capital expenditure: expanding into sintered alloys and taking the existing products to market. The company says the expansion would support production capacity of around 2,000 tonnes of magnets a year.
Policy has moved in the same direction. In November, the government approved a scheme to promote domestic manufacturing of sintered rare earth permanent magnets, with Rs 7,280 crore allocated to it. Magnets are a critical component in two industries India is currently working to expand domestically, electric vehicles and wind energy, and both currently depend on imported material.
Indian companies are also working on the other side of the problem, designing motors that avoid rare earth magnets altogether. ZeroW has backed a company in that segment too. What Entellus has not disclosed is a customer, an order or a revenue figure, and the 2,000 tonne capacity is a target attached to an expansion that has just been funded.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)