Chattanooga-Based Brickyard Helps Startups Scale and Grow
If you’re going to launch your business at Brickyard, strap in and hold on.
As of mid-2025, the Chattanooga-based incubator invested more than $25 million across 59 companies – with all but two hailing from outside Tennessee.
“Austin, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, San Diego, L.A., Dallas, the Bay Area, New York City,” says Cam Doody, Brickyard co-founder and managing partner. “All the usual suspects.”
Founders nationwide are drawn to Brickyard’s high-intensity, boot-camp approach.
“What really matters for companies at this stage is extreme focus,” Doody says. “You come here and burn your ships. You go as fast as humanly possible. You work super hard, 100 hours a week, surrounded by like minds.”
Burn Ships, Share Bunks
Doody says most of the founders working to launch under Brickyard’s wing live in rented housing on Chattanooga’s trendy south side, but the incubator also owns a 7,500-square-foot, 11-bedroom home 100 yards from its offices.
“There are 23 portfolio companies under one roof,” Doody says. “And 70 founders from all over the country.”
For about 18 months, one of those founders-in-residence was Daniel Rau, a Chicago native who studied chemical engineering at Vanderbilt University. Kunin, a company founded by Rau, targets mining sites to reclaim valuable rare earth elements from existing waste streams.
“Say it’s a copper mine,” Doody says. “Someone’s mining the copper, but then that slurry runs into a holding pond. There are all kinds of heavy metals inside that slurry, and no way for the miners to chemically extract those elements. Kunin is completely novel, playing in an absolutely enormous space. It has the potential to be a $100 billion business, and Daniel is an incredibly impressive guy.”
Rau says he was tipped to chemical engineering by his older brother, a commodities trader in oil, natural gas, metals and minerals.
“He told me the best traders are chemical engineers, because they understand costs,” Rau says.
“So, I start with physics, chemistry, math – and it turns out chemical engineers rule the world.”
Rau notes that China’s president, Xi Jinping, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, studied chemical engineering and mining economics, respectively.
Rau was raising capital on the West Coast in 2025 when Ian Rountree, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist who attended prep school in Chattanooga, told him about Brickyard.
Rau says he was already planning to locate Kunin in Chattanooga to work alongside a company there.
Heavy Metal, Light Distractions
He soon met Doody and Matt Patterson, another Brickyard co-founder and general partner.
Rau pitched his idea, was successful and hunkered down at Brickyard with his fellow founders.
“Matt and Cam are absolutely right,” he says. “It is 100-hour weeks. I slept on another founder’s couch for a while before I rented my own place.
“At Brickyard, I was able to put mental blinders on and focus on what was important – hiring great people, building product and making a lot of money,” he says. “In L.A., I would have been distracted, and it would have been more expensive. Brickyard, for me, was a place to lock in.”
Rau says Kunin now has a team of eight and 10,000 square feet of space in Chattanooga, including a chemical lab. He says Kunin has won a $3 million “fixed price award” from the federal Department of Energy.
“Our whole mission,” he says, “is to mine every metal on the periodic table in America, and to do it cost-competitively with China. Our model is to go to operating mines and build mini processing plants to recover those metals.
By the fourth quarter of 2027, he says, the company could be producing metal not made in the U.S. for more than 60 years.
“Kunin isn’t possible if we hadn’t come to Brickyard,” Rau says.
Doody says Kunin is exactly the kind of company Chattanooga needs to thrive.
“By 2030, Brickyard will have moved more than 100 top-tier startups to Chattanooga,” he says. “If two or three major breakouts decide to headquarter here, that changes our city’s trajectory.”
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