Building the Future
Tepper alumna Sarah Jordan reinvents metals manufacturing
By Tricia Miller Klapheke
Sarah Jordan was ready for a career in metals manufacturing. Her MBA from Carnegie Mellon helped her put an even bigger plan into place.
It took about eight years before Skuld — the metals manufacturing company Sarah co-founded — to really start building momentum. Now, the Piqua, Ohio-based company is attracting a wide variety of clients — from small machine shops to the U.S. Air Force to major original equipment manufacturers — and producing everything from cookware to rocket parts.
Inspired by a pitch competition hosted by the Youngstown (Ohio) Business Incubator, Sarah co-founded Skuld (named after the fate in Norse mythology that's in charge of the future) with her spouse and fellow metallurgical engineer Mark DeBruin. Skuld was a finalist, but did not win funding.
Sarah, who holds two engineering degrees as well as the MBA she earned at the Tepper School of Business in 2011, continued to work on Skuld on the side while consulting. The company was waylaid by near misses and 2020’s global pandemic, but a break came in 2023, when she was chosen for Oak Ridge National Laboratory's prestigious Innovation Crossroads program for entrepreneurs working in energy or advanced manufacturing technologies. It was the third time she or Mark had applied.
"One of the things I know now after being in that program is it's very common for people to apply more than once," Sarah says. "I think they like to see people making progress."
Vision
To overthrow conventional metals manufacturing and save the world.
Mission 
Our mission is to get metal parts made in the most environmentally friendly and efficient manner which saves time, money and the planet. We do this by developing new technology for manufacturing and metallurgy and by making 3D printing for metal as affordable as conventional processes.
"One of the things I know now after being in that program is it's very common for people to apply more than once. I think they like to see people making progress."
A Bumpy Ascent
A native of Athens, Ohio, and the daughter of a ceramics engineer, Sarah always wanted to work in engineering, and she got her undergraduate degree and first master's degree in that field. But when she shifted her goal from teaching engineering to managing a business, she realized she had more to learn.
She completed her MBA at the Tepper School, commuting from Youngstown to CMU’s Pittsburgh campus for more than three years. She says her Tepper courses taught her about entrepreneurship, human resources and psychology, subjects that had not been covered in her engineering classwork.
She also worked full time as a student and — after drawing inspiration from the Tepper Entrepreneur Bootcamp — co-founded a short-lived steel and iron foundry, Aesir Metals.
Following the Youngstown pitch competition in 2015, Sarah decided to continue developing Skuld even without funding. For about five years, she worked as a consultant doing aerospace and quality audits for two to three weeks a month, while focusing on Skuld in her remaining time.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, and the work travel she had been doing dried up. She put Skuld on hold for almost two years and took a job as a product manager at Fabrisonic, a metal 3D printing company near Columbus, Ohio.
That detour turned out to be a valuable education in what customers need and what they are willing to pay. Having come from a foundry background, Sarah had an expectation of what a shape or volume of metal would cost; she learned, however, that 3D printing companies were charging exponentially more than she would have expected.
"I was like, 'Oh, we have a problem, people think we must be crazy,' because we didn't know what everybody else in the industry was thinking and doing," she recalls with a laugh. "I was like, 'Well, this is an easy problem to solve. We can raise the prices.'"
In 2022, she left Fabrisonic to focus on Skuld full time. A year and a half later, Sarah was named to Innovation Crossroads' 2023 cohort.
“It may go without saying, but startups use literally all the skills taught at Tepper and more, everything from marketing, financial analysis, public speaking and operations.”
Reaching Cruising Altitude
Innovation Crossroads is a two-year fellowship that provides classes, mentors and networking opportunities, in addition to a salary and health insurance. Sarah's cohort started with three months of intense entrepreneurship training, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, at the Spark Cleantech Accelerator at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
The Oak Ridge program gave Sarah momentum and validation as she continued to meet with potential business partners. The conversations about the Skuld process that began then are coming to fruition now.
"People have never heard of a new process like this," she says. "They have to learn about it at first and figure out, 'What is this thing? How would this work?'"
Sarah's goal is to change conventional metals manufacturing, making it faster and cheaper, through a process called additive manufacturing evaporative casting (AMEC). It's a way to merge 3D printing with lost foam casting, and it has gained Skuld some customers in unexpected places.
"Our process was invented primarily to eliminate tooling in the lost foam industry," Sarah says, "so I find it ironic that a lot of what people want us to make for them is, in fact, tooling for other processes."
In January 2024, Skuld bought a foundry in Piqua, and Sarah is building capacity there as they renovate the space and grow the team, which numbered about 20 in spring 2025.
Skuld is taking off, and Sarah says her Tepper MBA left her well prepared, even as she encounters bumps along the way.
“It may go without saying, but startups use literally all the skills taught at Tepper and more,” she says, “everything from marketing, financial analysis, public speaking and operations.”
