WC–Co hardmetals continue to gain importance for cutting, milling, lathing, and mining and as chip-less forming tools, as well as for high-performance construction and wear parts. With growing demands on the performance of cutting tools and the ongoing development of more and more sophisticated coating systems, nowadays a lot of effort is put into optimizing the surface microstructure of sintered parts. One development in this field was functional gradient hardmetals, where it was possible to avoid the problems of the interface between coating and substrate. In the present study, inverse functional gradient hardmetals (FGHMs) with combination of WC–13%Co–x TiC–y TiN (x = 5, 7.5–y = 5, 7.5) were produced by powder metallurgy method under controlled atmosphere furnace. This article describes the development of functionally graded hardmetals prepared in situ by sintering in reactive atmosphere. The …