Exclusive: Ayrton Energy mimics margarine to store hydrogen safely

by with No Comment Tech

Overhead shot of a tub of margarine

Image Credits: Kevin Brine / Getty Images

As a fuel, hydrogen has a lot going for it. You can burn it for heat to replace coal, you can run it through an electrolyzer to generate electricity, and you can use it to refuel a vehicle as quickly as gasoline or diesel. But it’s challenging to get hydrogen to where it’s needed.

As the universe’s lightest gas, hydrogen is tricky to contain. It leaks through tiny cracks, and it can diffuse into certain metals, breaking them down. To transport the stuff usually requires compression or liquefaction, both of which require a lot of energy. But there’s an alternative: attaching hydrogen atoms to a carrier molecule that’s easier to move.

The idea isn’t new: So-called liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHC) have been around for decades, and most rely on volatile organic compounds like toluene and methylcyclohexane. Those chemicals play nice with hydrogen, but little else given their toxicity and how much heat and pressure they need to release the gas. 

A new startup, Ayrton Energy, says it has an alternative: an LOHC that can be transported and processed at room temperature and pressure. And it’s nontoxic.

“It actually looks like water,” Natasha Kostenuk, co-founder and CEO of Ayrton Energy, told TechCrunch. “It’s a safe, non-toxic liquid. I wouldn’t drink it, but it wouldn’t kill you.”

Kostenuk and her co-founder, Brandy Kinkead, didn’t set out to upend how hydrogen is transported. Initially, they had a vision of replacing diesel generators with ones that run on clean hydrogen. 

“We needed a hydrogen storage solution,” she said. “First we thought, well, we’ll just find one. We were just going to integrate pieces from the industry. But we could not find a hydrogen storage solution that made any sense to us. So we came up with a solution.”

Kostenuk wouldn’t disclose which oil her company is using, but said it stores hydrogen similar to how canola oil is turned into margarine, which is made from vegetable oils. Unlike the animal fats that make up butter, vegetable oils are liquid at room temperature. To make margarine, producers expose vegetable oils to hydrogen gas in the presence of a catalyst (which helps facilitate the reaction). As the oils are hydrogenated, they solidify.

Ayrton takes a similar approach. “It’s hydrogenation,” Kostenuk said. “We’ve just found a novel way of doing the hydrogenation and dehydrogenation compared to traditional LOHC.” The equipment that adds and releases the hydrogen to and from the oil is similar to electrolyzers that are used today to produce hydrogen from electricity. As a result, the company can use commercially available equipment for a large part of its operations, and scaling will just require building more modules, not bigger parts.

Transporting Ayrton’s oil doesn’t require anything special, either. “People who are already using liquid fuels, for example, we can reuse a lot of that infrastructure. Pipelines, rail cars, trucks,” she said. “I’ve spoken to pipeline companies that have excess lines that aren’t being used they’re trying to find ways to reuse older infrastructure.”

Kostenuk envisions using tanker trucks to deliver hydrogenated LOHC to an industrial facility. Once empty, it’ll take dehydrogenated LOHC back to the processing plant so it can be reused.

Ayrton’s process requires less energy round trip than liquefied hydrogen, ammonia, or methanol, Kostenuk said, and a little bit more than compressed hydrogen. The advantage, though, is that the LOHC can carry twice as much hydrogen per liter than compressed hydrogen and has lower up-front costs because it can reuse existing trucks, pipes, and pumps.

The company recently raised a $6.8 million seed round led by Clean Energy Ventures and BDC Capital, with participation from Antares Ventures, EPS Ventures, SOSV, The51, and UCeed Investment Funds. With the funding, Ayrton plans to scale its technology to the point where it’s making two to three tons of hydrogen per day by 2027.

Bill Gates-backed Type One Energy lands massive seed extension to commercialize fusion power

by with No Comment Tech

An engineer works on the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator.

Image Credits: MPI für Plasmaphysik, Jan Michael Hosan

Ever since a government experiment proved in 2022 that fusion isn’t as far-fetched as it once seemed, physicists, engineers, and investors have been growing increasingly bullish on the technology’s ability to deliver on its long-held — if frequently delayed — promise of providing nearly limitless amounts of emission-free power.

The latest exhibit of that exuberance is Type One Energy, which today announced a fresh $53.5 million in funding. The company had previously raised $29 million in 2023, and the current extension brings the total to around $82.5 million. Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the extension, with Australia-based Foxglove Ventures and New Zealand-based GD1 participating.

The company is betting that it can bring its fusion technology to market at a breakneck pace by leaning heavily on partners, CEO Christofer Mowry told TechCrunch. The goal is to finalize its reactor design by the end of the decade so a third party can start building it.

“Given the rate at which we want to accelerate, we needed a larger quantum of capital,” Mowry said. “We weren’t going to get there with your prototypical $20 million, $30 million, $40 million seed round.”

The other goal of the funding round, Mowry said, was to bring in partners who are more familiar with Southeast Asia, where a large portion of the world’s population lives. “In the last five years, China built more coal plants than the total installed base of North American coal plants. If we don’t find a way to decarbonize the region, we might as well fold up the tent and go home,” he said

Type One’s reactor is what’s known as a stellarator, a twist on the more common tokamak design. If a tokamak looks like a doughnut, some people have described a stellarator as a cronut; it’s still a circle, but one that’s warped and bulging. The physical shape of the stellarator is defined by magnets that exert the specially shaped field that confines the super-heated plasma necessary for fusion reactions. Within the magnetic field, the plasma’s hydrogen atoms collide, fusing and releasing intense amounts of energy in the process.

Plasma burns inside a Type One stellarator in this illustration.
An illustration of Type One Energy’s stellarator design.
Image Credits: Type One Energy

The concept behind the stellarator isn’t new, but it takes a tremendous amount of computing power to fine-tune the design to make it work. The world’s largest stellarator is currently in Germany, and it can operate for minutes on end. Another operates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Type One was spun out.

Those projects convinced Mowry that the stellarator’s time had come, and he joined Type One early in 2023. But there was still work to do. The German stellarator known as Wendelstein 7-X  is a good start, “but to turn that into a power plant, you would have to make it uneconomically large, probably four times bigger than it is,” Mowry said. 

Fortunately, Wendelstein 7-X was designed over 30 years ago. Since then, computing has advanced significantly. Type One, for example, now has access to Summit, an exascale supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with which the startup has a partnership. Summit can perform 250 million times more calculations per second than supercomputers could back in the early 1980s, when Wendelstein 7-X was first being designed.

Thanks to Summit, Mowry said, “We can sharpen the pencil on the design.”

For the reactor magnets, Type One is using a design licensed from MIT, the same one Commonwealth Fusion Systems uses. Type One has modified the cables that make up the magnets to accommodate the twists and turns of a stellarator.

Next year, the startup wants to finalize the core reactor design. Then it’ll start building a prototype reactor called Infinity One, which will happen in tandem with the design process for a pilot reactor. Once the pilot design is finalized, which Type One hopes will happen in 2030, it’ll license it to another company to build.

“When Infinity One operates and we test it, it’s actually verifying the key design aspects of the pilot plant,” Mowry said. The goal isn’t just to prove that it works, but also to validate the assembly and maintenance of the machine.

“If you build a fusion machine, whether it’s a stellarator machine or any other kind, and it takes you two years to shut it down, maintain it, start it back up, you’re gonna sell exactly none,” he said.

Exclusive: Why Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and other investors are scouring universities for founders

by with No Comment Tech

This illustration depicts a sun over university buildings.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

The humble garage is so steeped in Silicon Valley lore it’s almost cliché. Yet that’s exactly how Caleb Boyd and Kevin Bush started Molten Industries: in the garage of the Stanford professor’s on-campus home, where Kevin rented an apartment.

It had everything they needed: space and, most importantly, power. The two wanted to break methane’s back, so to speak, stripping hydrogen from carbon in a way that didn’t emit atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide.

“We call it a garage, but it was really just a carport. We plugged into his EV charger, heated up a methane pyrolysis reactor to around 1,000 Celsius and started cracking methane,” Boyd told TechCrunch.

The professor who lived there “was super helpful,” Boyd said. “He would just come by, help us tinker with things and give us advice.”

While the garage can still be a great place to do basic research, it’s the next step that poses a problem. Climate tech companies often face a “valley of death” between lab experiment and investable company.

Founders have typically had to solve that problem themselves. But increasingly, investors are intervening early.

When Boyd and Bush were still in the garage, they received a visit from Ashley Grosh, vice president at Breakthrough Energy, the climate tech organization founded by Bill Gates that includes a for-profit venture capital arm and various nonprofit programs. Grosh was representing one such program called Breakthrough Energy Discovery, a new division devoted to early-stage companies, the company told TechCrunch.

Discovery is an evolution of Breakthrough’s Fellows program, which has been operating since 2021. Discovery identifies promising first-time founders, who are often fresh out of grad school or a postdoc and provides them with grants of up to $500,000, Grosh said. The organization has also created digital resources for common problems and pays for fellows to attend various conferences and meetings.

To date, the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program has supported 42 companies spanning the gamut of climate tech, from cement and hydrogen to agriculture and fusion power. Altogether, the startups have raised a cumulative $250 million.

Grosh has been overseeing the program since 2020. “The way we have built a thesis around this is there’s government funding, there are programs like ARPA-E, but they’re not really positioned to pick winners. They can do the science, but they’re not really going to go out and pick winners and double down on a company,” Grosh told TechCrunch.

Venture capital has historically been hesitant to commit to companies that it considers too early. “We saw what happened in cleantech 1.0,” she said, referring to the first wave of climate-related investments that peaked about 15 years ago. “People came in a little too early. Now they’ve moved back and figured out where the strike zone is for venture. But I think what we’re seeing is that there’s still a lot of scientific discovery that needs to be done.”

For investors who can stomach earlier stages, the advantage is clear: an early window into the founders of tomorrow. These bets tend to be riskier and because the valuations are lower and the checks are modest, the potential returns can be significant. 

“The term we use internally on this topic is proto-companies,” Johanna Wolfson, co-founder and general partner at Azolla Ventures, told TechCrunch. “It’s not a company yet, but if you squint, you can see how it could become a company.”

Plus, in climate tech, moving earlier in the pipeline is about more than just returns. At Azolla Ventures, in particular, finding companies and opportunities that have been overlooked is part of the organization’s mandate. 

“As time passes, and as we keep missing our emissions targets, the crisis deepens,” Wolfson said. “And so it heightens the stakes to be able to make sure we’re not leaving anything on the table.” 

Funding basic research: Earlier than early

For Breakthrough Energy, the application process alone has helped it identify some promising areas where basic research still needs to be funded.

“We started seeing some ideas that were further upstream. We’d say, ‘Oh, this is interesting. It’s not quite ready to be a fellow, but this research would be really helpful,” Grosh said. “We started to amass a list of those applications, and we then started funding a few as research grants.”

Soon, Grosh and her team realized they’d need to be more systematic about it. Rather than put out the usual request for proposals, Breakthrough Energy Discovery started convening workshops for researchers spanning the spectrum of experience, from grad students to Nobel Prize winners. At a workshop, they would identify the most promising and impactful opportunities. 

“Out of that is where we will start to seed a couple of research projects,” Grosh said.

Azolla Ventures is taking a slightly different tack, bringing on what they call a tech scout fellow. 

“We fund a graduate student to look around for interesting projects and tell us what they’re excited about,” Wolfson said, “because graduate students are going to be the ones who are the most plugged in.”

The program is still young. So far, Azolla is working with grad students at Georgia Tech, a research powerhouse that the firm felt was being overlooked by venture capital. 

“If you had to guess how active the venture community is there, you’d probably guess less than MIT, Harvard, Stanford, or Berkeley just based on geography, unfortunately. Georgia Tech is an example of a place where we’re experimenting, we’re saying there’s probably some undervalued opportunities.”

Even among the usual academic suspects, promising research can fall through the cracks and opportunities can be overlooked. It’s why Collaborative Fund gave Harvard University’s Wyss Institute $15 million to start a lab to research sustainable materials. The goal is to identify promising projects and scientists and sharpen them to the point where they’re ready to raise funds, according to partner Sophie Bakalar. 

From lab to real business: How founders benefit

Collaborative gets first dibs on the projects, which have ranged from PFAS detection to addressing air-quality issues, and Bakalar is now also a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute, maintaining a front row seat at the institute. Along the way, Bakalar and Collaborative offer support to help founders bridge the valley of death between lab project and investable startup. Bakalar said she expects the first project to emerge from the lab in the next couple months.

Those sorts of resources can be helpful for the sort of founders that climate tech investors need. Many of them have spent years head down in the lab. Even if they had exposure to the business side through coursework, it’s an entirely different experience from running a startup.

“We’re still based at a university,” said Mattia Saccoccio, co-founder and CTO of NitroVolt, which makes sustainable ammonia for fertilizer. “We sometimes miss the exchanges with other companies or companies that like us are working on climate solutions or on deep tech.”

To counter that isolation, Breakthrough Energy groups its fellows into cohorts and encourages them to stay in touch during their tenure and after, including with the growing alumni network. “We meet regularly with other founders,” Saccoccio said. “I found that one of the most precious parts of the program.”

Founders also said that access to Breakthrough Energy’s business fellows was particularly helpful. The business fellows are a mix of what VCs might consider advisers or operating partners.

“If we need help with IP, we can get help there. If we want to get into the ammonia industry, there’s a fellow who has worked with industry and can help us open doors,” said Suzanne Zamany Andersen, co-founder and CEO of NitroVolt.

For Boyd, the Molten Industries co-founder, the business fellows have been indispensable as his company has evolved. In addition to hydrogen, the company’s process also produces carbon. Initially, “we were like, we’re just going to bury it or put it in concrete or something,” he said. But as the startup went out to fundraise for a Series A, it started considering alternative uses, eventually settling on making graphite for lithium-ion batteries. 

“The whole Breakthrough Fellows team was super supportive during that, helping us not only think through that and what the implications would be, the pros, the cons, but then also just taking it in stride,” Boyd said. “As a founder, you want your investors to be partners alongside you and not freak out or be controlling. That’s something the Breakthrough Energy Fellows team does really well.”

Ted McKlveen, co-founder and CEO of Verne, which is developing a new way to store hydrogen, agreed. “It does help get you from zero to one, from nothing to something that you can take to investors and say, ‘Okay, well, we got it, we’re real.’” 

Crossing the chasm from idea to reality is just the first of many that climate tech startups have to traverse. Not all will make it, but as investors and their affiliates step in to fill the gap, their odds are certainly improving.

Exclusive: Why Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and other investors are scouring universities for founders

by with No Comment Tech

This illustration depicts a sun over university buildings.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

The humble garage is so steeped in Silicon Valley lore it’s almost cliché. Yet that’s exactly how Caleb Boyd and Kevin Bush started Molten Industries: in the garage of the Stanford professor’s on-campus home, where Kevin rented an apartment.

It had everything they needed: space and, most importantly, power. The two wanted to break methane’s back, so to speak, stripping hydrogen from carbon in a way that didn’t emit atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide.

“We call it a garage, but it was really just a carport. We plugged into his EV charger, heated up a methane pyrolysis reactor to around 1,000 Celsius and started cracking methane,” Boyd told TechCrunch.

The professor who lived there “was super helpful,” Boyd said. “He would just come by, help us tinker with things and give us advice.”

While the garage can still be a great place to do basic research, it’s the next step that poses a problem. Climate tech companies often face a “valley of death” between lab experiment and investable company.

Founders have typically had to solve that problem themselves. But increasingly, investors are intervening early.

When Boyd and Bush were still in the garage, they received a visit from Ashley Grosh, vice president at Breakthrough Energy, the climate tech organization founded by Bill Gates that includes a for-profit venture capital arm and various nonprofit programs. Grosh was representing one such program called Breakthrough Energy Discovery, a new division devoted to early-stage companies, the company told TechCrunch.

Discovery is an evolution of Breakthrough’s Fellows program, which has been operating since 2021. Discovery identifies promising first-time founders, who are often fresh out of grad school or a postdoc and provides them with grants of up to $500,000, Grosh said. The organization has also created digital resources for common problems and pays for fellows to attend various conferences and meetings.

To date, the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program has supported 42 companies spanning the gamut of climate tech, from cement and hydrogen to agriculture and fusion power. Altogether, the startups have raised a cumulative $250 million.

Grosh has been overseeing the program since 2020. “The way we have built a thesis around this is there’s government funding, there are programs like ARPA-E, but they’re not really positioned to pick winners. They can do the science, but they’re not really going to go out and pick winners and double down on a company,” Grosh told TechCrunch.

Venture capital has historically been hesitant to commit to companies that it considers too early. “We saw what happened in cleantech 1.0,” she said, referring to the first wave of climate-related investments that peaked about 15 years ago. “People came in a little too early. Now they’ve moved back and figured out where the strike zone is for venture. But I think what we’re seeing is that there’s still a lot of scientific discovery that needs to be done.”

For investors who can stomach earlier stages, the advantage is clear: an early window into the founders of tomorrow. These bets tend to be riskier and because the valuations are lower and the checks are modest, the potential returns can be significant. 

“The term we use internally on this topic is proto-companies,” Johanna Wolfson, managing partner at Azolla Ventures, told TechCrunch. “It’s not a company yet, but if you squint, you can see how it could become a company.”

Plus, in climate tech, moving earlier in the pipeline is about more than just returns. At Azolla Ventures, in particular, finding companies and opportunities that have been overlooked is part of the organization’s mandate. 

“As time passes, and as we keep missing our emissions targets, the crisis deepens,” Wolfson said. “And so it heightens the stakes to be able to make sure we’re not leaving anything on the table.” 

Funding basic research: Earlier than early

For Breakthrough Energy, the application process alone has helped it identify some promising areas where basic research still needs to be funded.

“We started seeing some ideas that were further upstream. We’d say, ‘Oh, this is interesting. It’s not quite ready to be a fellow, but this research would be really helpful,” Grosh said. “We started to amass a list of those applications, and we then started funding a few as research grants.”

Soon, Grosh and her team realized they’d need to be more systematic about it. Rather than put out the usual request for proposals, Breakthrough Energy Discovery started convening workshops for researchers spanning the spectrum of experience, from grad students to Nobel Prize winners. At a workshop, they would identify the most promising and impactful opportunities. 

“Out of that is where we will start to seed a couple of research projects,” Grosh said.

Azolla Ventures is taking a slightly different tack, bringing on what they call a tech scout fellow. 

“We fund a graduate student to look around for interesting projects and tell us what they’re excited about,” Wolfson said, “because graduate students are going to be the ones who are the most plugged in.”

The program is still young. So far, Azolla is working with grad students at Georgia Tech, a research powerhouse that the firm felt was being overlooked by venture capital. 

“If you had to guess how active the venture community is there, you’d probably guess less than MIT, Harvard, Stanford, or Berkeley just based on geography, unfortunately. Georgia Tech is an example of a place where we’re experimenting, we’re saying there’s probably some undervalued opportunities.”

Even among the usual academic suspects, promising research can fall through the cracks and opportunities can be overlooked. It’s why Collaborative Fund gave Harvard University’s Wyss Institute $15 million to start a lab to research sustainable materials. The goal is to identify promising projects and scientists and sharpen them to the point where they’re ready to raise funds, according to partner Sophie Bakalar. 

From lab to real business: How founders benefit

Collaborative gets first dibs on the projects, which have ranged from PFAS detection to addressing air-quality issues, and Bakalar is now also a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute, maintaining a front row seat at the institute. Along the way, Bakalar and Collaborative offer support to help founders bridge the valley of death between lab project and investable startup. Bakalar said she expects the first project to emerge from the lab in the next couple months.

Those sorts of resources can be helpful for the sort of founders that climate tech investors need. Many of them have spent years head down in the lab. Even if they had exposure to the business side through coursework, it’s an entirely different experience from running a startup.

“We’re still based at a university,” said Mattia Saccoccio, co-founder and CTO of NitroVolt, which makes sustainable ammonia for fertilizer. “We sometimes miss the exchanges with other companies or companies that like us are working on climate solutions or on deep tech.”

To counter that isolation, Breakthrough Energy groups its fellows into cohorts and encourages them to stay in touch during their tenure and after, including with the growing alumni network. “We meet regularly with other founders,” Saccoccio said. “I found that one of the most precious parts of the program.”

Founders also said that access to Breakthrough Energy’s business fellows was particularly helpful. The business fellows are a mix of what VCs might consider advisers or operating partners.

“If we need help with IP, we can get help there. If we want to get into the ammonia industry, there’s a fellow who has worked with industry and can help us open doors,” said Suzanne Zamany Andersen, co-founder and CEO of NitroVolt.

For Boyd, the Molten Industries co-founder, the business fellows have been indispensable as his company has evolved. In addition to hydrogen, the company’s process also produces carbon. Initially, “we were like, we’re just going to bury it or put it in concrete or something,” he said. But as the startup went out to fundraise for a Series A, it started considering alternative uses, eventually settling on making graphite for lithium-ion batteries. 

“The whole Breakthrough Fellows team was super supportive during that, helping us not only think through that and what the implications would be, the pros, the cons, but then also just taking it in stride,” Boyd said. “As a founder, you want your investors to be partners alongside you and not freak out or be controlling. That’s something the Breakthrough Energy Fellows team does really well.”

Ted McKlveen, co-founder and CEO of Verne, which is developing a new way to store hydrogen, agreed. “It does help get you from zero to one, from nothing to something that you can take to investors and say, ‘Okay, well, we got it, we’re real.’” 

Crossing the chasm from idea to reality is just the first of many that climate tech startups have to traverse. Not all will make it, but as investors and their affiliates step in to fill the gap, their odds are certainly improving.

Bill Gates-backed Type One Energy lands massive seed extension to commercialize fusion power

by with No Comment Tech

An engineer works on the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator.

Image Credits: MPI für Plasmaphysik, Jan Michael Hosan

Ever since a government experiment proved in 2022 that fusion isn’t as far fetched as it once seemed, physicists, engineers, and investors have been growing increasingly bullish on the technology’s ability to deliver on its long held — if frequently delayed — promise of providing nearly limitless amounts of emission-free power.

The latest exhibit of that exuberance is Type One Energy, which today announced a fresh $53.5 million in funding. The company had previously raised $29 million in 2023, and the current extension brings the total to around $82.5 million. Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the extension, with Australia-based Foxglove Ventures and New Zealand-based GD1 participating.

The company is betting that it can bring its fusion technology to market at a breakneck pace by leaning heavily on partners, CEO Christofer Mowry told TechCrunch. The goal is to finalize its reactor design by the end of the decade so a third-party can start building it.

“Given the rate at which we want to accelerate, we needed a larger quantum of capital,” Mowry said. “We weren’t going to get there with your prototypical $20 million, $30 million, $40 million seed round.”

The other goal of the funding round, Mowry said, was to bring in partners who are more familiar with Southeast Asia, where a large portion of the world’s population lives. “In the last five years, China built more coal plants than the total installed base of North American coal plants. If we don’t find a way to decarbonize the region, we might as well fold up the tent and go home,” he said

Type One’s reactor is what’s known as a stellarator, a twist on the more common tokamak design. If a tokamak looks like a doughnut, some people have described a stellarator as a cronut; it’s still a circle, but one that’s warped and bulging. The physical shape of the stellarator is defined by magnets that exert the specially shaped field that confines the super-heated plasma necessary for fusion reactions. Within the magnetic field, the plasma’s hydrogen atoms collide, fusing and releasing intense amounts of energy in the process.

Plasma burns inside a Type One stellarator in this illustration.
An illustration of Type One Energy’s stellarator design.
Image Credits: Type One Energy

The concept behind the stellarator isn’t new, but it takes a tremendous amount of computing power to fine tune the design to make it work. The world’s largest stellarator is currently in Germany, and it can operate for minutes on end. Another operates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from where Type One was spun out.

Those projects convinced Mowry that the stellarator’s time had come, and he joined Type One early in 2023. But there was still work to do. The German stellarator known as Wendelstein 7-X  is a good start, “but to turn that into a power plant, you would have to make it uneconomically large, probably four times bigger than it is,” Mowry said. 

Fortunately, Wendelstein 7-X was designed over 30 years ago. Since then, computing has advanced significantly. Type One, for example, now has access to Summit, an exascale supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with which the startup has a partnership. Summit can perform 250 million times more calculations per second than supercomputers could back in the early 1980s, when Wendelstein 7-X was first being designed.

Thanks to Summit, Mowry said, “We can sharpen the pencil on the design.”

For the reactor magnets, Type One is using a design licensed from MIT, the same one Commonwealth Fusion Systems uses. Type One has modified the cables that make up the magnets to accommodate the twists and turns of a stellarator.

Next year, the startup wants to finalize the core reactor design. Then it’ll start building a prototype reactor called Infinity One, which will happen in tandem with the design process for a pilot reactor. Once the pilot design is finalized, which Type One hopes will happen in 2030, it’ll license it to another company to build.

“When Infinity One operates and we test it, it’s actually verifying the key design aspects of the pilot plant,” Mowry said. The goal isn’t just to prove that it works, but also to validate the assembly and maintenance of the machine.

“If you build a fusion machine, whether it’s a stellarator machine or any other kind, and it takes you two years to shut it down, maintain it, start it back up, you’re gonna sell exactly none,” he said.

A drilling rig bores into the Earth to tap geothermal energy.

Geothermal startup Fervo Energy is tapping fresh $221M round, filing reveals

by with No Comment Tech

A drilling rig bores into the Earth to tap geothermal energy.

Image Credits: Fervo Energy

Hot on the heels of the successful completion of its grid-connected geothermal power plant in Nevada, Fervo Energy is raising $221 million per SEC documents, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

The Houston-based company is one of several enhanced geothermal startups that are racing to tap heat deep in Earth’s crust. Previous geothermal plants have only scratched the surface by accessing hot springs or shallower rock formations.

Fervo uses directional drilling techniques pioneered by the oil and gas industry to extend its wells far beyond their surface footprints. No surprise: The company’s executive team is packed with veterans of the sector.

Once those wells are drilled, Fervo then strings them with fiber-optic cables connected to a range of sensors. Those sensors then feed data to teams on the surface, who use them to map subsurface heat patterns and monitor the performance of each well.

The startup has rung up a string of successes of late. Earlier this month, it reported that it had completed a horizontal well at a project in Utah in 21 days, a 70% reduction from the first well the company drilled in 2022, while also cutting the cost in half. At $21 million per well, it’s still not cheap, but the rate of advancement is ahead of the Department of Energy’s expectations, Fervo said.

Also this month, the company received a $25 million grant from the Department of Energy. It last raised a $138 million Series C in July 2022 at a $308 million valuation, according to PitchBook data. Previous investors include BHP Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Congruent Ventures, DCVC, and Prelude Ventures. Early angel investors include Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Masayoshi Son.

In November, Fervo connected the 3.5-megawatt Project Red power plant to the Nevada grid, the first of its kind. The electrons from the facility will power Google’s data centers in the state, and unlike many other renewable sources, will do so 24/7 as a so-called firm power source — no battery required.

Geothermal has the potential to provide up to 90 gigawatts of electricity in the U.S. annually by 2050, according to the Department of Energy. Proponents have touted the technology as a way to not only provide carbon-free power to the grid, but also to employ oil and gas workers as oil demand tapers off.

Fervo did not reply to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Given the high cost of geothermal drilling, which has to contend with harder rock than that encountered by oil and gas rigs, it’s likely that Fervo will use its new proceeds to continue drilling more wells to improve its speed and drive down costs.

AirMyne employees inspect a direct air capture prototype.

AirMyne taps geothermal energy to scale direct air carbon capture

by with No Comment Tech

AirMyne employees inspect a direct air capture prototype.

Image Credits: AirMyne

Sometimes insurance isn’t just money. Sometimes it’s equipment.

That’s one way to think about direct air capture, a technology which uses machines to pull carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere. The idea has been floating around for years, but it received a surge of interest in the wake of a 2022 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said that DAC, as the technology is known, would be essential to achieving net zero carbon emissions.

Several companies are working on the problem, but the hurdles are numerous. Startups have to find suitable places to stash the CO2 or customers to buy it. They also need to make their devices cheap to build and inexpensive to operate.

One company, AirMyne, is betting that its proprietary liquid is the key to overcoming those hurdles. Other companies use liquids to absorb CO2 as well, but when it comes time to release the gas, they have to use high-temperature heat.

Because of the quirks of the chemical reaction involved, high-temperature regeneration cycles can be more efficient. But heat that intense can be hard to come by, which is why AirMyne developed its liquid to regenerate, or release its CO2, using low-temperature heat that’s just 100-130 degrees C (212-266 degrees F).

AirMyne’s low-temperature heat requirements mean its overall process could prove to be less efficient than a high-temperature approach, but co-founder and COO Mark Cyffka believes it gives his company a better chance to grow and scale.

“It’s flexible. When you’re at that pilot stage and you’re trying to make your first pilot, now you can use low-temperature heat from electricity, you can use it from industrial waste heat, you can use it from geothermal,” he told TechCrunch.

The company is exploring different configurations for the entire system. The collectors will likely be modular, and from those, the liquid will flow to a large, centralized column for regeneration, similar to the type used in large chemical plants, the sort that Cyffka worked on when he was at BASF. The Y Combinator alumnus is currently testing around 30 prototypes, he added.

The key component in AirMyne’s liquid appears to be one or more variants of quaternary ammonium compounds, according to patents the company has been granted. Quaternary ammonium is a class of compounds that are widely used in a range of applications, including hand sanitizers, hair care products and fabric softeners. Interest in them as a CO2 sorbent has surged recently, in part because they’re widely available, relatively stable and don’t require high heat to release the captured CO2. In some preparations, they also release CO2 when they encounter near saturating humidity, offering another way to control regeneration of the liquid.

The AirMyne team poses for a photograph.
The AirMyne team. Image Credits: AirMyne

The ability to use heat from geothermal energy, Cyffka said, is helpful. “It also critically gives you this path to big scale, which I think a lot of the other approaches are going to have a hard time with if they stick with electricity. Geothermal is a really promising pathway for where DAC needs to go.”

Along those lines, the company is working with Fervo, pairing its carbon capture system with the geothermal startup’s advanced geothermal project in Utah. With the CO2 that it has captured in its lab so far, it has sent samples to CarbonBuilt, the low-carbon concrete company, and Rubi, which makes textiles from CO2.

In 2026, AirMyne is planning to deploy its carbon capture technology to a sequestration site in San Joaquin County, California, where it will be injected underground. To get there, the company recently raised a $6.9 million seed round, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

AirMyne’s use of low-temperature heat could open the door for its technology to be used at a wide range of sites, from geothermal installations to chemical refineries, breweries and more, though the final tally might be limited by the ultimate size of its regeneration column. The liquid-based system will also require large amounts of water — from one to seven tons per ton of carbon captured — as some of it inevitably evaporates when it contacts the atmosphere. That might preclude its use in dry regions like the American Southwest.

Still, the demand for carbon capture is likely to be so large that the market will have space for several different companies. AirMyne’s inherent compatibility with geothermal might be what helps it carve out a decent-sized niche.

Investors in the round included Alumni Ventures, Another Brain, Liquid 2 Ventures, EMLES, angel investor Justin Hamilton, Impact Science Ventures, Soma Capital, Wayfinder and Y Combinator.

Update 4:29 pm ET: After publication, Cyffka clarified that AirMyne is not using quaternary ammonium compounds, instead the company’s chemistry uses “inorganic ionic base, promoters, and a phase transfer catalyst.”

Photoncycle storage

Photoncycle targets low-cost energy storage with a clever hydrogen solution

by with No Comment Tech

Photoncycle storage

Image Credits: Photoncycle (opens in a new window)

For years, the solar energy sector has grappled with interseasonal energy storage. The ability to harness the surplus solar energy of summer months for use during the winter has remained an elusive goal, with existing solutions like batteries falling short due to prohibitive costs and limited lifespans. Hydrogen, meanwhile, despite its clean-burning properties, has been sidelined due to inefficiency and high costs.

Photoncycle — a startup emerging from the depths of an accelerator in Oslo Science Park in Oslo, Norway — has been working on a solution. With a vision as bright as the summer sun, the startup claims its solid hydrogen-based technology can store energy more efficiently in an ammonia synthesis reactor. The claim is this tech does the storage more cost-effectively than any battery or liquid hydrogen solution on the market.

 

A schematic of how Photoncycle envisions its full system when installed at a house. Image Credits: Photoncycle

“Lithium-ion batteries use costly metals. Our material is super cheap: To store 10,000 kilowatt-hours, it costs around $1,500, so it’s almost nothing. In addition, our storage solution is 20 times the density of a lithium-ion battery, and you don’t lose the current,” founder and CEO Bjørn Brandtzaeg explains in an interview with TechCrunch. “That means we have a system where you can contain energy over time, enabling seasonal storage. It’s a completely different thing than traditional batteries.” 

Photoncycle employs water and electricity to produce hydrogen. That in itself isn’t uncommon if you’ve been following fuel cell vehicle technology. However, the company’s approach incorporates an innovative twist: a reversible high-temperature fuel cell. This advanced fuel cell can produce hydrogen and generate electricity within the same unit. 

The core of Photoncycle’s innovation lies in its treatment of hydrogen. They process the hydrogen and then utilize its technology to convert and store it in a solid form. The company claims this storage method is not only safe, owing to the non-flammable and non-explosive nature of the solid state, but also highly efficient. It enables hydrogen storage at densities approximately 50% greater than liquid hydrogen, presenting a significant advancement in hydrogen storage solutions. These innovations form the cornerstone of Photoncycle’s system, facilitating safe and dense hydrogen storage, which the company says is a huge step forward in energy technology.

Current clean energy solutions such as rooftop solar power are limited by inconsistent supply due to the unpredictable nature of weather conditions. A robust, reusable energy storage solution could bridge these timings, ensuring a stable energy supply when these renewable sources encounter unavoidable intermittent periods. 

Great in theory, but not without its own challenges.

“The Netherlands is the country in Europe with the highest density of rooftop solar. We are seeing a massive ramp now because of high energy prices; everyone wants solar on the roof,” Brandtzaeg says. He adds, however, that this method can backfire for homeowners: “In July last year, in the Netherlands, in the middle of the day, you had to pay €500 a megawatt hour to export your electricity.”

Putting the energy storage along with the house generating the power effectively lets houses go off-grid. Photoncycle says it has tested and worked the main components of its solution — the next step is to integrate it into a system. If successful, the company says it can seriously challenge Powerwall, Tesla’s lithium-ion battery solution.

David Gerez, CTO at Photoncycle, and Ole Laugerud, who is a Photoncycle chemist, in Photoncycle’s purpose-built lab, which has been operational for close to two years. Image Credits: Photoncycle

“This is a relatively complex system — that’s why we have so many PhDs in different disciplines working on this. The reason why Elon Musk said that hydrogen is stupid, is that when you convert electricity to hydrogen and back, you are losing quite a bit of energy,” Brandtzaeg says. He believes his company can turn this bug into a feature. “In a residential setting where 70% of energy needs are heating, there is an opportunity to use that excess heat to provide hot water. We will target markets where people are using natural gas for heating at the moment and then replace the gas boiler in the house using the existing water-based infrastructure.”

Brandtzaeg’s confidence regarding the concept’s operational framework is compelling. He gestured toward a small mock-up of their operations plant within their labs, scaled down to the size of a car battery. Brandtzaeg believes this scaling should be problem-free, citing it as the primary reason they felt confident moving forward with the project. 

When it comes to power delivery, it takes a little while for the hydrogen to generate electricity, so while it is spooling up, the company relies on an intermediary, more conventional, battery for load balancing. The firm certainly has investors’ attention: Photoncycle just raised $5.3 million (€5 million) to build its first few power storage devices in Denmark, which Photoncycle has chosen as its test market. 

“We could have raised 10 times as much as we did, given the interest. But after this raise, I’m still a majority owner,” Brandtzaeg says. “I wanted to keep control over the business as long as possible and not raise more capital than we need to bring this service to market.” 

Exponent Energy and Omega Seiki Mobility launched an electric three-wheeler passenger vehicle in India with 15-minute charging

India's Exponent Energy brings 15-minute charging to passenger three-wheelers

by with No Comment Tech

Exponent Energy and Omega Seiki Mobility launched an electric three-wheeler passenger vehicle in India with 15-minute charging

Image Credits: Exponent Energy

India is getting an electric three-wheeler passenger vehicle that charges from 0 to 100% in 15 minutes. The launch of the new EV — a collaboration between auto manufacturer Omega Seiki Mobility and battery-tech startup Exponent Energy — comes amid India’s ambition to electrify 80% of all its three-wheelers by 2030 in an effort to reduce emissions.

The new three-wheeler, called the Stream City Qik and priced at $3,900 (324,999 Indian rupees), launched Friday and will go on sale from May 15 in Delhi and Bengaluru. It’s a take on the previous Omega Stream City and carries an 8.8kWh proprietary battery pack to deliver more than 86 miles (126 kilometers) of range. It is equipped with Exponent Energy’s charging tech, which the startup claims fully charges a battery in 15 minutes when connected at the startup’s charging station (dubbed e^pump).

Currently, Exponent Energy has 60 charging stations in six cities: Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Hyderabad. It plans to have 100 charging stations in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru in 2024 and 1,000 stations in total by 2025, all of which will be available to drivers of the Stream City Qik, according to the company.

The partnership signifies an expansion for Exponent Energy into the new territory, as the Bengaluru-based startup previously only offered its rapid charging tech for three-wheelers to cargo and fleet operations. India’s passenger three-wheeler segment is over 4x the number of cargo three-wheelers, per government data. The segment grew by more than 43%, with over 45,000 three-wheeler passenger vehicles sold in January alone.

Three-wheeler vehicles are popular with gig workers in India who use them to transport ride-hail passengers and deliver packages. The Indian government has been incentivizing companies to spur electric three-wheeler manufacturing and has subsidized their sales to attract customers.

The partnership between Exponent Energy and Omega Seiki Mobility builds on the former’s previous partnerships. In 2022, Exponent worked with Reliance Industries-backed Altigreen and Indian conglomerate Murugappa Group-owned Montra Electric to launch cargo three-wheelers equipped with its fast-charging tech. The startup also partnered with Magenta Mobility, funded by Morgan Stanley and BP Ventures, and Fyn Mobility to offer rapid charging on their fleet. More than 1,000 vehicles, completing over 100,000 charging sessions, presently have Exponent Energy’s tech, which the startup aims to grow to 25,000 by 2025.

“We started with cargo to prove out the tech,” Arun Vinayak, co-founder and CEO of Exponent Energy, told TechCrunch in an interview. “As we scaled, we realized that individual drivers really love rapid charging because these guys can’t charge their vehicles at home. And they are far more hungry to do more kilometers… they need to keep running, keep going wherever the demand is and go wherever the passenger needs to go.”

Exponent Energy and Omega Seiki Mobility ran close controller pilots for the last couple of months to test consumer behavior. They found three-wheelers carrying up to three passengers sometimes run for up to 22 hours a day, with two drivers using them sequentially to milk intra-city demand. This makes it crucial for the passenger three-wheelers to access fast charging. The other alternative to rapid charging in this case could be battery swapping, but that does not work at scale, according to Vinayak.

“Unless you rapidly charge a swap battery, you run out of batteries. And because these are swappable batteries, you are limited in the size of batteries and have a fairly limited range,” he said.

The tech behind the three-wheeler upgrade

Exponent Energy’s battery tech involves lithium-ion batteries along with its in-house battery management system, which monitors every cell in real time when on charging. Additionally, the startup has its own charging stations that use an off-board thermal management system, which transfers refrigerated water through the charging plug. This helps maintain the temperature of every battery cell while charging and makes 0-100% charging possible in 15 minutes, along with a 3,000-cycle life warranty.

Vinayak told TechCrunch that Exponent Energy’s charging stations offer 10x efficiency by charging 20 to 30 vehicles daily, whereas other EV charging stations typically charge two vehicles. Similarly, setting up an Exponent charging station costs nearly $6,000 (500,000 Indian rupees), while a CNG station demands hundreds and thousands of dollars. This has restricted the availability of CNG to around 60 stations in Bengaluru, while Exponent Energy already has 40 charging stations in the city, the executive said.

Omega Stream City Qik
Image Credits: Omega Seiki Mobility

“If you give people very rapid refueling capability, very rapid recharging capability, a reliable and dense enough network, people actually stop caring about range,” he stated.

The Stream City Qik will be initially available in Delhi and Bengaluru, with plans to enter new cities later this year. Omega Seiki Mobility is also optimistic about taking its rapid-charging three-wheeler to markets beyond India once it gains enough traction.

“I can open up markets all across the globe. We have testing going on all across Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, Africa,” Uday Narang, founder and chairman of Omega Seiki Mobility, told TechCrunch.

New Delhi-based Omega Seiki Mobility has an annual capacity of producing 20,000 vehicles, with three factories in North India and one in the eastern state of Jharkhand. Exponent Energy, on the other hand, has a monthly capacity of building 500 charging units, which it plans to increase to 3,000 by July-August.

At $3,900 (324,999 Indian rupees), the Stream City Qik is competitively priced with other electric and gas-powered three-wheelers on the market in India. Vinayak and Narang said they are not looking to beat the competition on the pricing but want to help eradicate the charging anxiety among three-wheeler drivers and increase their monthly income by up to 30%.

Founded in 2020, Exponent Energy, which counts Eight Roads Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and TDK Ventures among its key investors, has raised $44.4 million so far. The startup generated an annual recurring revenue of $6 million in 2023 and aims to reach about $72 million by 2025. It is also looking to deploy its charging tech on electric buses in India later this year.

Special mud helps XGS Energy get more power out of geothermal wells

by with No Comment Tech

Steam rises from a geothermal power plant in Iceland.

Image Credits: Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo / Getty Images

Young geothermal energy wells can be like budding prodigies, each brimming with potential to outshine their peers. But like people, most decline with age. In California, for example, the amount of electricity generated by geothermal power plants declined by 15% between 2001 and 2018, partly because existing wells degraded.

“The history of geothermal has been this notion of degradation,” said Josh Prueher, CEO of XGS Energy, a geothermal startup. “This is happening all over the world.” 

Many geothermal power plants inject water underground, where it flows through cracks in the rock to absorb the heat generated deep in the Earth. When it’s brought to the surface, it’s used to produce steam to drive turbines and generate power. But as geothermal wells age, the cracks might absorb too much water, or maybe they start to close, cutting the well bore off from some of the hot rock it had previously been in contact with.

Prueher’s company thinks there are a lot of old geothermal wells around the world that can be rehabilitated and a lot of other previously ignored places that could provide heat if only they could tap into it with the right technology. That technology, he said, is basically a specialized mud that fills the cracks around a well with minerals that are really good at conducting heat.

The result is wells that are not only more productive, but also more predictable. “We know within 30 days where we’re going to be in 30 years” in terms of power production, Prueher said.

XGS Energy’s technology can work with either existing wells or new ones. New boreholes themselves can be simple, vertical holes that don’t require expensive drilling equipment. Whether old or new, the startup lines each borehole with a metal casing. Between the casing and the rock, it adds a slurry of water and proprietary additives that settle into the cracks around the borehole, at most a few feet away from the casing. 

The slurry is a mix of water and minerals suspended by a surfactant, Prueher said. (Surfactants are also known as emulsifiers, and they keep insoluble things suspended in water, like mustard does with oil in salad dressing or soap does with dirt.) When the slurry hits a certain depth (and therefore temperature), the surfactants “break” and release the minerals so they can settle into the cracks. Prueher wouldn’t go into specifics, but according to a patent filing, the conductive components could be a mix of graphite-like materials with some mineral like silica.

XGS Energy only needs one borehole to produce heat, which saves on drilling costs. Other companies might inject water down one hole, allow it to flow through cracks in the rock, and draw it up another hole drilled some distance away. Along the way, those rocks might absorb some of the water, requiring the company to add more. The water that does make it to the surface has probably picked up minerals and some bacteria, which can settle equipment that moves heat from the water to the steam turbine. All of that makes a well more expensive to operate. XGS Energy, on the other hand, never lets its water leave the metal-cased borehole, another cost savings.

Because the water is isolated, XGS Energy can use cheaper equipment to extract heat. It doesn’t have to worry about minerals or bacteria that sit in the surrounding rock. “We can turn the page and access a whole host of very low-cost, high efficiency heat exchangers that historically geothermal has not been able to access,” Prueher said.

XGS Energy is starting construction on a commercial-scale prototype at an existing geothermal field in California in July. To help fund the project, it recently raised an additional $20 million Series A financing led by Val Ventures and VoLo Earth Ventures, with participation from B Current Impact Investment, MIH Capital and Thin Line Capital, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

In the near future, XGS Energy is planning to develop a version of its technology that will work in old oil and gas wells. They won’t all be suitable, since most drillers try to avoid too much heat, but there are a number of regions in the U.S. where oil and gas wells are hot enough to support geothermal power. 

“That is a huge opportunity because you’re very effectively avoiding the plugging and abandonment costs,” Prueher said. “This is a very appropriate technology to re-power those wells.”