17 October, 2024
For $5, Photon Library brings back the feel of the old iOS Photos app
A new app is offering an alternative to those who aren’t pleased with the iOS 18 Photos app “upgrade.” Capitalizing on the consumer backlash over Apple’s now one-page, tab-free redesign of its default Photos app, photography app maker LateNiteSoft is introducing a new app called Photon Library. It not only serves as a complement to its other photography apps and photo editing tools, but it also offers the familiar look of the old iOS Photos app found in iOS 17 and earlier.
The company said it was inspired to create an alternative Photos app after seeing how frustrated iOS 18 early adopters were with Apple’s new design.
Since its debut in the iOS 18 betas, iPhone owners have been lamenting the changes coming to the Photos app. Though the redesign offers better customization, many believe the app’s new look takes a step back in terms of usability by cramming everything into one page. Pages on Reddit are filled with user complaints. Reviewers are calling it their biggest gripe with the iOS 18 software update. Meanwhile, several tech sites have begun offering tutorials on how to customize the redesigned app to make it more useful — and more like the older version.
Photon Library offers another alternative. Now, instead of trying to get comfortable with the changes in Photos, Photo Library offers a way for users to simply return to the older-style look and feel of Photos, albeit in an experience built by a third party.
The app brings back a tabbed design and includes other Photos app features like basic photo grids, a list of albums you can scroll through, and quick access to your Favorite photos.
Rather than scrolling down the screen as in iOS 18’s Photos app, the bottom tabs of Photon Library let you quickly access your recent photos, your albums, a calendar view, or your favorites. This is slightly different than the iOS 17 Photos app, which offered tabs for the Library, Albums, “For You,” and Search, but the company thinks its tabs will prove to be even more convenient.
LateNiteSoft product manager Noël Rosenthal notes that the company hopes the resident family tech support person will keep their company’s app in mind when their families upgrade to iOS 18 and then start complaining about “how difficult the new Photos App is to use.”
To make the option to switch apps easier on users, Photon Library won’t include subscriptions. Instead, the app is a paid download for iPhone and iPad, and starts at $4.99 in the U.S. during its introductory period on the App Store.
Impact investors FMO and BlueOrchard back Ghana’s digital lender Fido in $30M Series B round
Digital lending platforms have become an easy and swift alternative source of credit for microenterprises and individuals overlooked by traditional banking institutions. These platforms have turned into a lifeline for millions of underbanked and demand will keep growing, pushing the value of the digital lending platform market in the Middle East and Africa to reach $2 billion in the next five years, recording a four-fold growth since 2021.
This is the market opportunity Ghanaian fintech Fido plans to tap as it explores new markets in East and Southern Africa, sustained by fresh $30 million Series B debt-equity funding. The new capital includes a $20 million equity injection from global impact investment manager BlueOrchard and Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO.
Initially launched in 2015 by Nadav Topolski, Tomer Edry and Nir Zepkowitz to offer loans over mobile phones, Fido has over the years introduced other products, including savings, bill payments and smartphone financing, to grow its revenue streams.
The fintech is among a sizable number of companies in the African digital lending space, including venture-backed Branch and Tala, that are tapping mobile technology and alternative data sources, like mobile money transaction histories, to offer instant micro-loans to individuals and small businesses that are often unable to access credit from formal banking institutions.
Unlike lending apps, banks often loan to active customers, require collateral and involve lengthy processes that include paperwork. This has made micro-lenders an alternative, but expensive, source of capital even for small businesses, which Fido CEO, Alon Eitan, says “are the driver of economies, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, yet they get so little tools to grow.”
“A majority of the population in sub-Saharan Africa are either unbanked or underbanked, and for a lot of the customers that come into our ecosystem, we are probably their first-ever interaction with financial services. We take them from zero financial footprint to the point where they’ve built a whole financial backbone within an ecosystem where they can get credit, insurance, make savings, buy mobile phones and do their business,” said Eitan.
Fido offers every loan product with embedded insurance and it plans to include additional covers targeting its business customers. This will include climate insurance to cover borrowers in the agriculture sector from extreme weather events such as drought and floods, as well as tradesman insurance.
The fintech’s customers access loans of between $20 to $500, while businesses get higher amounts, depending on their needs, nature of the enterprise and credit score. The loans are repayable within six months, and attract interest of between 7% and 12%. Eitan says Fido’s default rate is below 4%, which he attributes to the company’s credit score system.
“We are able to deliver these industry best rates by a combination of mission-critical AI models across the loan life cycle. From our acquisition model, which scores new customers based on mobile device data and other alternative data, through our fraud models and AI collection treatment models,” he said.
To date, Fido claims to have served a million customers, 40% of whom are small businesses, and extended over $500 million in loans across Ghana, where it is said to have countrywide coverage, and Uganda, where it has served 50,000 customers since launch in December last year.
“Our hope is that by some time early next year, we will have crossed a billion in total disbursement and the idea is to use the new funds to then grow further and reach more customers…and have genuine impact on them,” he said, adding that the business has been profitable the last four years.
Exclusive: Dandelion co-founder is back to help you electrify your home for less
In the nearly 20 years that James Quazi has been a climate tech founder and operator, he’s seen a lot. From solar to geothermal, energy audits to energy storage, he’s had a front row seat as homeowners have sought to slash their energy use.
He’s also been able to observe what makes those startups successful. “You have to be able to model energy systems to a high degree of accuracy, and you have to be able to finance things,” Quazi told TechCrunch. “It just always comes up.”
He’s taken those observations to heart, starting a company that hopes to speed the electrification of homes throughout the U.S. by helping homeowners choose and finance the projects that make the most sense for them. Called Balto Energy, the Southern California-based startup has been operating stealthily, and Quazi recently shared details on the new venture exclusively with TechCrunch. To get off the ground, the startup raised $1 million from KDX, Leap Forward Ventures and others.
Most recently, Quazi was living quasi-retired, having served as CTO at Dandelion, the home geothermal startup that spun out of Alphabet’s X division; before that he was an executive at SolarCity. But after he started studying a recent change in California’s solar power incentives for homeowners, he couldn’t stay out of the game.
The new regulations, known as NEM 3.0, lengthened the amount of time it takes for solar panels to pay off, but it significantly reduced the payoff period for solar panels when installed alongside a battery. The goal was to encourage consumers to store more of their solar power for later, but it had the unintended consequence of dragging down California’s solar market.
To Quazi, the solution to installers’ woes came quickly to him: They needed to branch out beyond just solar panels. Many have also begun installing batteries, yet Quazi knew they’d also have to consider adding to their roster other electrification projects like electric vehicle chargers, heat pumps and heat pump water heaters. “We found that some of those contractors are interested in doing other portions of the work,” he said.
But solar panels are one product with a very straightforward sales pitch: They’ll save customers money on their electric bills. Homeowners could stand to save even more money with heat pumps, too, but the math behind the pitch gets a lot more complicated.
Today, most solar installers haven’t ventured beyond rooftop panels and the occasional battery. That has forced homeowners to turn to a menagerie of contractors, from electricians to plumbers to HVAC specialists. To fully electrify, they have to be willing to serve as a de facto general contractor, envisioning each job as a part of a system.
“We still don’t have, like, a great tool that coaches homeowners through what that experience would be,” Quazi said. “There isn’t a holistic view of it.”
Quazi hopes that Balto is that tool. Many homeowners’ electrification journeys start with solar, which is where Balto is starting, too. For homeowners, the technology is mature, and the financial benefits are widely known. For Balto, there are a large number of solar installers who might benefit from additional work outside of installing new panels; the startup will charge them a fee for access to the platform, which includes various sales tools. In the future, it’ll be available to other trades. “We were very adamant that we want a path that is agnostic of any contractor,” Quazi said.
Balto functions as a sort of decision tree for homeowners to help them decide where they’d like to start and which projects they’d like to tackle and when. Are they only interested in saving money? Then a relatively simple solar-plus-battery installation with an EV charger might be the answer. Or maybe they want resiliency during extreme weather or natural disasters? In that case, they also might want to electrify more of their home, including heating and cooling, hot water, and even cooking.
“You have to help people understand what the options are and what’s the best one for them,” Quasi said. To provide recommendations that make sense, Balto models energy usage for a home using customer-provided utility data.
All those projects, though, can be expensive propositions. Solar panels alone tend to cost tens of thousands of dollars; the same is true of heat pumps. An all-in electrification plan would be far more. That’s a hefty sum that most homeowners don’t have, and with interest rates being high, they wouldn’t be jazzed about financing it, either.
Quazi thinks he can ease the burden by offering a form of financing that he said is not a loan. “For a residential project that’s financed through a loan, a lot of benefits actually fall on the ground. There’s a bunch of trailing things that we think we can monetize,” he said, including depreciation and renewable energy credits that it sells to other companies.
That’s because Balto would be owning the solar assets for a period of time, making it the entity that receives the credits. Some of its revenue would come from that revenue stream, and it would direct another portion of it toward reducing the interest rate on the financial instrument it offers customers. “While you might take out a loan today [for solar], and if that loan is 20 years, the interest rate could be 12%. We’re looking at half that or less,” Quazi said.
We’ll know in a few years if Quazi is right, that creative financing is what’s really needed to speed the electrification of American homes. He’s hoping that, when that time comes, “infrastructure that pumps combustible gases in the people’s homes” will fall out of favor. “It’s one of the things we’ll look back and be like, ‘That was crazy. We shouldn’t have done that.’”
Marc Andreessen, Sequoia again back Kearny Jackson, this time in $65M Fund III
After securing $14 million for its second fund in 2023, early-stage VC firm Kearny Jackson is back with a third fund, this time bringing in $65 million in capital commitments, including from a number of first-time institutional funds.
The bi-coastal Kearny Jackson invests in B2B SaaS and infrastructure as well as fintech infrastructure, often leading or co-leading rounds.
“One of the things that we emphasize with founders that launch with us is time to value,” co-founding general partner Sriram Krishnan told TechCrunch. “We are pretty fortunate to have the LP mix that we do have, because at the end of the day, we want to build a preceding seed-stage platform that has a phenomenal brand, but also that is able to work as quickly as the founders.”
Krishnan, who did product management stints at Tinder and Spotify, and his co-founding general partner, Sunil Chhaya, who was previously with Menlo Ventures and Tenaya Capital, say they have no problem investing in a team that is both pre-revenue and pre-product.
Thanks to Chhaya’s background as a venture capitalist and Krishnan’s as a founder/operator, they drew interest from limited partners like Sequoia and Marc Andreessen.
“Sunil and I have known each other for a long time,” Krishnan said. “He comes from a dog-eat-dog world of Series A and Series B investing. We have a blend of background to write bigger checks, but also the experience to help these founders.”
The pair declined to disclose the names of all the limited partner investors in the new fund, however, they did say they included more than three endowments, as well as pension funds, including Stepstone, and funds of funds. Sequoia, which invested in Kearny Jackson’s second fund, is back with a 5x commitment, they said.
Other LPs include Bain Capital Ventures and Menlo Ventures, along with a number of individual investors, including Andreessen (personally, not through Andreessen Horowitz), who also invested in Fund II, plus former GitLab CTO Eric Johnson, former Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn, Unit co-founder Itai Damti and Insight founder Jeff Horing.
The significantly larger size of their third fund gives the duo more leverage, but they’re glad they started small.
Now having a bigger fund size, the pair can execute on their strategy of gaining more ownership into their portfolio companies. Kearny Jackson targets 6% to 10% ownership stake in companies, investing around $1.5 million in pre-seed and seed-stage startups. That’s smaller than the typical 15% to 20% stake most early-stage firms aim for, says Chhaya, which could help them compete for deals.
Krishnan and Chhaya expect to invest in between 30 and 35 companies over the next three and a half years. They have already made one stealth investment in a startup led by an ex-Snowflake team.
“Before, we were introducing our founders to lead VCs, and we’re now in the position to be that ourselves,” Krishnan said. “Had we gone with a bigger fund, I don’t think our strategy would have resonated as much. Here, we can get the ownership we want and can also work with big VCs or smaller VCs.”
Chhaya added that they are “well-suited to support these founders at the early stages.” As a result, founders often joke that they get “two for the price of one,” he said.
Notable investments from its first two funds include database company MotherDuck, engineering software company Cortex, insurance brokerage Comulate, Ethereum protocol EigenLayer, developer tools company Sprig and workplace productivity company Rhythms.
Andrew Ng steps back at Landing AI after announcing new fund
Andrew Ng is stepping down from his role as CEO at Landing AI, the computer vision platform he founded in 2017. Dan Maloney, formerly the COO, will take the reins as Ng transitions to executive chairman to “continue to help drive” the tech and collaborate on “key decisions.”
Formerly of Google Brain, Coursera, and Baidu, Ng has seldom stayed put for long, and it’s probably not a coincidence that his AI Fund just announced plans to raise another $120 million. Chances are Ng — who was appointed to Amazon’s board in April — is simply choosing to focus on investing for now. At the same time, these executive reshufflings often precede other, bigger news, so we’ll be watching for more news from Ng over the coming months.
Exclusive: Dandelion co-founder is back to help you electrify your home for less
In the nearly 20 years that James Quazi has been a climate tech founder and operator, he’s seen a lot. From solar to geothermal, energy audits to energy storage, he’s had a front row seat as homeowners have sought to slash their energy use.
He’s also been able to observe what makes those startups successful. “You have to be able to model energy systems to a high degree of accuracy, and you have to be able to finance things,” Quazi told TechCrunch. “It just always comes up.”
He’s taken those observations to heart, starting a company that hopes to speed the electrification of homes throughout the U.S. by helping homeowners choose and finance the projects that make the most sense for them. Called Balto Energy, the Southern California-based startup has been operating stealthily, and Quazi recently shared details on the new venture exclusively with TechCrunch. To get off the ground, the startup raised $1 million from KDX, Leap Forward Ventures and others.
Most recently, Quazi was living quasi-retired, having served as CTO at Dandelion, the home geothermal startup that spun out of Alphabet’s X division; before that he was an executive at SolarCity. But after he started studying a recent change in California’s solar power incentives for homeowners, he couldn’t stay out of the game.
The new regulations, known as NEM 3.0, lengthened the amount of time it takes for solar panels to pay off, but it significantly reduced the payoff period for solar panels when installed alongside a battery. The goal was to encourage consumers to store more of their solar power for later, but it had the unintended consequence of dragging down California’s solar market.
To Quazi, the solution to installers’ woes came quickly to him: They needed to branch out beyond just solar panels. Many have also begun installing batteries, yet Quazi knew they’d also have to consider adding to their roster other electrification projects like electric vehicle chargers, heat pumps and heat pump water heaters. “We found that some of those contractors are interested in doing other portions of the work,” he said.
But solar panels are one product with a very straightforward sales pitch: They’ll save customers money on their electric bills. Homeowners could stand to save even more money with heat pumps, too, but the math behind the pitch gets a lot more complicated.
Today, most solar installers haven’t ventured beyond rooftop panels and the occasional battery. That has forced homeowners to turn to a menagerie of contractors, from electricians to plumbers to HVAC specialists. To fully electrify, they have to be willing to serve as a de facto general contractor, envisioning each job as a part of a system.
“We still don’t have, like, a great tool that coaches homeowners through what that experience would be,” Quazi said. “There isn’t a holistic view of it.”
Quazi hopes that Balto is that tool. Many homeowners’ electrification journeys start with solar, which is where Balto is starting, too. For homeowners, the technology is mature, and the financial benefits are widely known. For Balto, there are a large number of solar installers who might benefit from additional work outside of installing new panels; the startup will charge them a fee for access to the platform, which includes various sales tools. In the future, it’ll be available to other trades. “We were very adamant that we want a path that is agnostic of any contractor,” Quazi said.
Balto functions as a sort of decision tree for homeowners to help them decide where they’d like to start and which projects they’d like to tackle and when. Are they only interested in saving money? Then a relatively simple solar-plus-battery installation with an EV charger might be the answer. Or maybe they want resiliency during extreme weather or natural disasters? In that case, they also might want to electrify more of their home, including heating and cooling, hot water, and even cooking.
“You have to help people understand what the options are and what’s the best one for them,” Quasi said. To provide recommendations that make sense, Balto models energy usage for a home using customer-provided utility data.
All those projects, though, can be expensive propositions. Solar panels alone tend to cost tens of thousands of dollars; the same is true of heat pumps. An all-in electrification plan would be far more. That’s a hefty sum that most homeowners don’t have, and with interest rates being high, they wouldn’t be jazzed about financing it, either.
Quazi thinks he can ease the burden by offering a form of financing that he said is not a loan. “For a residential project that’s financed through a loan, a lot of benefits actually fall on the ground. There’s a bunch of trailing things that we think we can monetize,” he said, including depreciation and renewable energy credits that it sells to other companies.
That’s because Balto would be owning the solar assets for a period of time, making it the entity that receives the credits. Some of its revenue would come from that revenue stream, and it would direct another portion of it toward reducing the interest rate on the financial instrument it offers customers. “While you might take out a loan today [for solar], and if that loan is 20 years, the interest rate could be 12%. We’re looking at half that or less,” Quazi said.
We’ll know in a few years if Quazi is right, that creative financing is what’s really needed to speed the electrification of American homes. He’s hoping that, when that time comes, “infrastructure that pumps combustible gases in the people’s homes” will fall out of favor. “It’s one of the things we’ll look back and be like, ‘That was crazy. We shouldn’t have done that.’”
Marc Andreessen, Sequoia again back Kearny Jackson, this time in $65M Fund III
After securing $14 million for its second fund in 2023, early-stage VC firm Kearny Jackson is back with a third fund, this time bringing in $65 million in capital commitments, including from a number of first-time institutional funds.
The bi-coastal Kearny Jackson invests in B2B SaaS and infrastructure as well as fintech infrastructure, often leading or co-leading rounds.
“One of the things that we emphasize with founders that launch with us is time to value,” co-founding general partner Sriram Krishnan told TechCrunch. “We are pretty fortunate to have the LP mix that we do have, because at the end of the day, we want to build a preceding seed-stage platform that has a phenomenal brand, but also that is able to work as quickly as the founders.”
Krishnan, who did product management stints at Tinder and Spotify, and his co-founding general partner, Sunil Chhaya, who was previously with Menlo Ventures and Tenaya Capital, say they have no problem investing in a team that is both pre-revenue and pre-product.
Thanks to Chhaya’s background as a venture capitalist and Krishnan’s as a founder/operator, they drew interest from limited partners like Sequoia and Marc Andreessen.
“Sunil and I have known each other for a long time,” Krishnan said. “He comes from a dog-eat-dog world of Series A and Series B investing. We have a blend of background to write bigger checks, but also the experience to help these founders.”
The pair declined to disclose the names of all the limited partner investors in the new fund, however, they did say they included more than three endowments, as well as pension funds, including Stepstone, and funds of funds. Sequoia, which invested in Kearny Jackson’s second fund, is back with a 5x commitment, they said.
Other LPs include Bain Capital Ventures and Menlo Ventures, along with a number of individual investors, including Andreessen (personally, not through Andreessen Horowitz), who also invested in Fund II, plus former GitLab CTO Eric Johnson, former Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn, Unit co-founder Itai Damti and Insight founder Jeff Horing.
The significantly larger size of their third fund gives the duo more leverage, but they’re glad they started small.
Now having a bigger fund size, the pair can execute on their strategy of gaining more ownership into their portfolio companies. Kearny Jackson targets 6% to 10% ownership stake in companies, investing around $1.5 million in pre-seed and seed-stage startups. That’s smaller than the typical 15% to 20% stake most early-stage firms aim for, says Chhaya, which could help them compete for deals.
Krishnan and Chhaya expect to invest in between 30 and 35 companies over the next three and a half years. They have already made one stealth investment in a startup led by an ex-Snowflake team.
“Before, we were introducing our founders to lead VCs, and we’re now in the position to be that ourselves,” Krishnan said. “Had we gone with a bigger fund, I don’t think our strategy would have resonated as much. Here, we can get the ownership we want and can also work with big VCs or smaller VCs.”
Chhaya added that they are “well-suited to support these founders at the early stages.” As a result, founders often joke that they get “two for the price of one,” he said.
Notable investments from its first two funds include database company MotherDuck, engineering software company Cortex, insurance brokerage Comulate, Ethereum protocol EigenLayer, developer tools company Sprig and workplace productivity company Rhythms.
Exclusive: Dandelion co-founder is back to help you electrify your home for less
In the nearly 20 years that James Quazi has been a climate tech founder and operator, he’s seen a lot. From solar to geothermal, energy audits to energy storage, he’s had a front row as homeowners have sought to slash their energy use.
He’s also been able to observe what makes those startups successful. “You have to be able to model energy systems to a high degree of accuracy, and you have to be able to finance things,” Quazi told TechCrunch. “It just always comes up.”
He’s taken those observations to heart, starting a company that hopes to speed the electrification of homes throughout the U.S. by helping homeowners choose and finance the projects that make the most sense for them. Called Balto Energy, the Southern California-based startup has been operating stealthily, and Quazi recently shared details on the new venture exclusively with TechCrunch. To get off the ground, the startup raised $1 million from KDX, Leap Forward Ventures and others.
Most recently, Quazi was living quasi-retired, having served as CTO at Dandelion, the home geothermal startup that spun out of Alphabet’s X division; before that he was an executive at SolarCity. But after he started studying a recent change in California’s solar power incentives for homeowners, he couldn’t stay out of the game.
The new regulations, known as NEM 3.0, lengthened the amount of time it takes for solar panels to pay off, but it significantly reduced the payoff period for solar panels when installed alongside a battery. The goal was to encourage consumers to store more of their solar power for later, but it had the unintended consequence of dragging down California’s solar market.
To Quazi, the solution to installers’ woes came quickly to him: They needed to branch out beyond just solar panels. Many have also begun installing batteries, yet Quazi knew they’d also have to consider adding to their roster other electrification projects like electric vehicle chargers, heat pumps and heat pump water heaters. “We found that some of those contractors are interested in doing other portions of the work,” he said.
But solar panels are one product with a very straightforward sales pitch: They’ll save customers money on their electric bills. Homeowners could stand to save even more money with heat pumps, too, but the math behind the pitch gets a lot more complicated.
Today, most solar installers haven’t ventured beyond rooftop panels and the occasional battery. That has forced homeowners to turn to a menagerie of contractors, from electricians to plumbers and HVAC specialists. To fully electrify, they have to be willing to serve as a de facto general contractor, envisioning each job as a part of a system.
“We still don’t have, like, a great tool that coaches homeowners through what that experience would be,” Quazi said. “There isn’t a holistic view of it.”
Quazi hopes that Balto is that tool. Many homeowners’ electrification journeys start with solar, which is where Balto is starting, too. For homeowners, the technology is mature, and the financial benefits are widely known. For Balto, there are a large number of solar installers who might benefit from additional work outside of installing new panels; the startup will charge them a fee for access to the platform, which includes various sales tools. In the future, it’ll be available to other trades. “We were very adamant that we want a path that is agnostic of any contractor,” Quazi said.
Balto functions as a sort of a decision tree for homeowners to help them decide where they’d like to start and which projects they’d like to tackle and when. Are they only interested in saving money? Then a relatively simple solar-plus-battery installation with an EV charger might be the answer. Or maybe they want resiliency during extreme weather or natural disasters? In that case, they also might want to electrify more of their home, including heating and cooling, hot water, and even cooking.
“You have to help people understand what the options are and what’s the best one for them,” Quasi said. To provide recommendations that make sense, Balto models energy usage for a home using customer-provided utility data.
All those projects, though, can be expensive propositions. Solar panels alone tend to cost tens of thousands of dollars; the same is true of heat pumps. An all-in electrification plan would be far more. That’s a hefty sum that most homeowners don’t have, and with interest rates high, they wouldn’t be jazzed about financing it, either.
Quazi thinks he can ease the burden by offering a form of financing that he said is not a loan. “For a residential project that’s financed through a loan, a lot of benefits actually fall on the ground. There’s a bunch of trailing things that we think we can monetize,” he said, including depreciation and renewable energy credits that it sells to other companies.
That’s because Balto would be owning the solar assets for a period of time, making it the entity that receives the credits. Some of its revenue would come from that revenue stream, and it would direct another portion of it toward reducing the interest rate on the financial instrument it offers customers. “While you might take out a loan today [for solar], and if that loan is 20 years, the interest rate could be 12%. We’re looking at half that or less,” Quazi said.
We’ll know in a few years if Quazi is right, that creative financing is what’s really needed to speed the electrification of American homes. He’s hoping that, when that time comes, “infrastructure that pumps combustible gases in the people’s homes” will fall out of favor. “It’s one of the things we’ll look back and be like, ‘That was crazy. We shouldn’t have done that.’”
Hydrogen is back. At least, CES 2024 suggests it is.
Hydrogen has always been presented by automakers and politicians as an alternate clean-energy option for electric vehicles, but it’s never really caught on. Don’t tell anyone at CES 2024, though, as this year’s show floor was littered with vehicles of all sizes that are hydrogen-powered.
There has been so much focus on battery-powered electric vehicles over the last few years that it seemed like hydrogen might be left in the proverbial dust. So is hydrogen power about to experience a comeback? Or is it yet another example of companies making promises at CES that they won’t be able to keep?
Let’s start by looking at what was at the show this year.
Perhaps no company is more married to hydrogen power than Nikola. The trucking startup was founded around the idea of a big rig with a fuel cell, and its former CEO Trevor Milton went to great lengths — to the point of criminal fraud charges — to promote it.
Nikola has spent the last few years trying to build itself anew with Milton in the rear view. In order to do that, the startup put off the hydrogen truck in favor of an all-electric version, which it started shipping in 2021.
At CES, Nikola finally showed off one of its first U.S.-built hydrogen trucks that it’s starting to ship to customers. If there’s a future where a reimagined Nikola helped usher in the proliferation of hydrogen-powered trucks, this is where that begins.
Another startup at the Vegas trade show, Croft Motors, is developing “rugged” hydrogen-powered vehicles. The firm is starting with a three-row, prototype SUV with an “anticipated 1,000 miles of driving range,” co-founder Isaac Holeman told TechCrunch.
Holeman believes the recent slowdown in battery-electric vehicle adoption has made it the “right time to reignite that conversation” about hydrogen’s potential. Croft is also developing a refrigerator-sized device that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen (a process called electrolysis). Holeman argued that “distributed fueling products” such as Croft’s will enable “rapid” hydrogen vehicle adoption.
Far on the other end of the spectrum, well-established automaker Hyundai also appears to be embracing hydrogen in a new way.
The Korean automaker has spent decades working on hydrogen-powered vehicles, and says the tech will play a “prominent role” in the Hyundai Group’s attempt to become a carbon-neutral company by 2050.
What that looks like involves not just an attempt at popularizing cars and SUVs that run on hydrogen, but doing the same for all of the heavy-duty vehicles it makes. Hyundai says these construction vehicles are too big and require too much energy to run on battery power. Instead, the firm argues hydrogen makes more sense as a clean energy source. It’s worth noting that HD Hyundai, a construction equipment, refinery and shipping conglomerate that spun out of the parent company in 2002, had one of the larger displays at CES 2024.
“Our goal is build up [an] entire hydrogen energy ecosystem across the whole of the earth, from ocean to land,” Dongwook Lee, president of HD Hyundai, said during a press conference. He said Hyundai wants to incorporate hydrogen power into everything it makes, from shipbuilding to construction machinery, and that it wants to create production and storage solutions, too.
“It’s already part of our short-term roadmap to commercialize alternative clean-hydrogen production methods,” said Chang Hwan Kim, who oversees fuel cell and battery development at Hyundai. The executive said Hyundai is working to turn “sewage sludge and other forms of organic waste” into clean hydrogen.
Suppliers are invested, too. Bosch, which already makes hydrogen fuel cells (like the one Nikola uses in its truck), announced it will make an engine that can combust hydrogen, skipping the process where that energy gets converted to electricity and stored in a battery. Truck-builder PACCAR was also at the show with two of its newest hydrogen-powered trucks, one under the Kenworth brand, and one Peterbilt. The company said this week it has received “more than 150 paid deposits” for hydrogen trucks across those two brands, and that it expects to ship them next year.
Channeling Vegas more than the others, South Korean energy and manufacturing giant SK Group attempted to hype its hydrogen and AI business via a theme park of sorts at CES. The rides included a small train “capable of being powered by hydrogen energy” and an “AI fortune teller.”
Why now?
There’s political will, and money. Federal investments in green hydrogen and refueling infrastructure — two big obstacles to widespread adoption — are giving HFCVs a boost. That’s crucial, since nearly all hydrogen fuel is produced with fossil fuels today, and there’s currently little infrastructure to keep HFCVs running, whether they’re passenger cars or heavy-duty trucks.
For one, the 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law put $9.5 billion toward “clean hydrogen initiatives” to create hydrogen production “hubs” across the U.S. Some of these hubs will create green hydrogen via renewable energy and electrolysis.
Hydrogen transport is also getting a lift from the same legislation that incentivizes battery-electric vehicle sales. Alongside the EV tax credit, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) created a hydrogen production credit, which offers producers as much as $3 per kilogram to offset the higher cost associated with clean hydrogen production.
As part of the IRA, the Federal Highway Administration announced during (though not at) CES hundreds of millions of dollars for new charging and fueling infrastructure — with a huge chunk of it going to hydrogen.
There’s also corporate interest from the fossil fuel industry, which put tens of millions of dollars toward hydrogen lobbying efforts in the first three quarters of 2023. For example, Shell, BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil are all members of a lobbying group called the Clean Hydrogen Future Coalition. Despite its tidy name, the group argues that fossil fuels such as natural gas should play a role in the “clean hydrogen ecosystem” when paired with carbon-capture tech. The trouble is, methane chronically leaks along the supply chain, and though the gas doesn’t stick around long in the atmosphere, it’s “80 times more potent at warming than carbon dioxide,” per the United Nations.
While there’s corporate and political interest, hydrogen-powered vehicles remain relatively scarce. The reasons are complex, but the lack of infrastructure is a critical one.
For one, the U.S. energy grid already exists. Though it’s ancient, it’s the backbone supporting tens of thousands of EV stations across the country. Hydrogen refueling stations, on the other hand, are a lot harder to come by.
Another reason is waste; Light-duty hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are generally less efficient than battery-electric vehicles, according to Gregory Keoleian, who co-directs Sustainable Systems and MI Hydrogen at the University of Michigan. Around 30% of the energy required for electrolysis is lost, and further losses come from transporting, compressing and converting hydrogen back into electricity via a fuel cell. “So, if you have limited renewable electricity, putting it into battery electric vehicles is going to be much more effective to decarbonize,” Keoleian said in a call with TechCrunch.
And yet, as Hyundai, Nikola and other hydrogen-focused firms argue, the advantages of battery-electric vehicles aren’t as pronounced in some areas. Keoleian explained, “For medium and heavy duty trucks, aviation, and ships, hydrogen can play a decarbonization role, especially where battery electric vehicles are problematic due to heavy loads, range, and fueling time requirements.”
To his point, EV batteries are many times heavier than fuel cells, and they take hours to fully recharge. Refueling a hydrogen-powered vehicle, on the other hand, is about as time consuming as filling up a conventional gas tank. The catch is, companies need to actually make the fuel affordable and accessible, without prolonging our dependence on fossil fuels.
Production and distribution remains one of the biggest bottlenecks, according to Niklas Wahlberg, head of Partnerships and System Solutions at Volvo. But he says interest in the energy source is growing. “Hydrogen is becoming more and more of a tangible alternative,” Wahlberg says.
And while Nikola became something of a bad poster child for hydrogen power over the last few years, Wahlberg says he doesn’t think that really set the industry back. “Of course there will be companies who have difficulties,” he says. “Things are progressing very well. And this is an area that we and others are very, very keen on developing.”
Updated January 12, 2024 with additional context from Gregory Keoleian.
