Trawa simplifies energy purchasing and management for SMEs by leveraging an AI-powered platform and downstream data from customers.
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Platform is a word that gets tossed around a lot in technology circles, so much so that it’s often misused. But here’s the basic business school definition: a platform is a company or business model that creates more value for participants than it captures for itself.
Consider that some of the most successful companies in tech have helped other businesses make more money in aggregate than they make for themselves. A couple decades ago, Microsoft made lots of money facilitating the PC revolution. More recently, Apple said that developers which used its App Store generated $1.1 trillion in sales in 2022, nearly triple what the company made itself that year.
Serial startup veteran Sanjiv Sanghavi, who has logged experience as the co-founder of ClassPass and chief product officer at Arcadia, thinks it’s high time the energy transition birthed its equivalent. In fact, he spent years as a venture partner at Day One Ventures looking in vain to invest in such a company. “So I decided to go and build it,” he told TechCrunch.
Sanghavi’s newest company, Texture, seeks to become a common data collection and sharing platform for renewable power sources like wind, solar, and batteries. “We’ve done a really exceptional job of distributing hardware over the energy grid in the last decade. Making solar affordable, making batteries affordable, getting EVs out there,” he said. Each solar array or battery installation doesn’t have the power to bring clean, affordable power to the grid on its own. In aggregate, though, they have a much better chance at displacing fossil fuels.
But many of those systems come from different manufacturers, making basic communication between them challenging, let alone anything that looks like interoperability. “If there’s a lack of standards, there’s a lot of walled gardens being built,” Sanghavi said. “Our view is that Texture can provide the technology stack that should accelerate everybody on top of it.”
The company is incorporating data directly from the equipment itself. When manufacturers have APIs available, it connects with those directly, similar to how Plaid connects with banks. For those that don’t, it will work to build the necessary software to make the connections possible. Battery manufacturers, for example, may not prefer to maintain an API themselves since it’s not one of their core competencies.
In other cases, where a solution already exists, it works with a third party. “One of the tenets of Texture really is not to rebuild everything. There are companies out there that are tracking electricity usage, grid status, and their meter data, tariff data,” Sanghavi said. “Why don’t we work together?”
On the other end of the equation, target customers for Texture’s product include installers, who might sell monitoring and maintenance plans, and virtual power plant operators, who would benefit from being able to include batteries from a range of manufacturers. By having more data, each of these would be able to sell more of their product. Texture charges customers by how many megawatts they have under management.
The company recently raised a $7.5 million seed round from Abstract Ventures, Day One Ventures, Equal Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, and a handful of angels, including Kiran Bhatraju, CEO of Arcadia. It plans to use this money to further develop and test the product with the first set of customers.
Not every supplier has opened their products to Texture yet, but Sanghavi is obviously hoping they will. Sure, they could charge for API access now, he said, but he thinks Texture’s pitch to them will resonate: “If you play as part of the ecosystem, you expand the market an exponential amount of times. Even if your market share remains the same, your business becomes five times bigger.” If Texture succeeds in deriving on that promise to customers, then it will truly be a platform for the energy transition.
Found Energy doesn’t have the typical startup origin story: It began with a space robot that was supposed to eat itself. Now, the company is developing that same technology with an eye toward powering aluminum smelters and long-haul shipping.
Nearly a decade ago, Peter Godart, Found Energy’s co-founder and CEO, was a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He and some colleagues were brainstorming how to power a probe that might visit Jupiter’s moon, Europa. The team was debating the energy density of batteries that might be suitable when a stray thought landed in Godart’s head. The aluminum used to make the spacecraft held more than 10 times the energy of any cutting-edge battery. Why not use the spacecraft’s parts to power itself?
“They gave me a bunch of money to start a program that I lovingly called the ‘self-cannibalizing robot lab,’” Godart told TechCrunch. “We looked at giving robots the ability to consume their vestigial aluminum components for fuel.”
But as he continued his research, Godart had another thought. “I had a moment where I realized my time would be better spent solving Earth problems,” he said. His timing couldn’t have been better. Congress cut some of the funding for the Europa missions, and JPL let Godart take the intellectual property to MIT where he continued to work on the problem during his doctorate.
To Godart, aluminum had several obvious upsides: It’s the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust, it can store twice as much energy per unit volume as diesel without being volatile, and it’s possible to recover as heat 70% of the original electrical energy used to smelt it. “I was like, oh my god, we got to do something with this,” he said.
To release the energy embodied in refined aluminum, Godart had to figure out how to get past the metal’s defenses, so to speak. “If you throw a chunk of aluminum in water and try to oxidize it using water, it would take thousands of years,” he said.
Godart’s process is much, much faster. Once water is dropped on aluminum coated in Found Energy’s catalyst, the metal’s surface quickly starts bubbling as the reaction releases heat and hydrogen gas. Within seconds, the aluminum starts expanding as the hydrogen bubbles force it to exfoliate. That allows water to penetrate further into the metal, repeating the process over and over again until all that’s left is a gray powder. “We actually call it fractal exfoliation,” Godart said.
Found Energy harvests the resulting steam and hydrogen, each of which can be used for a range of industrial processes. “One of the hardest elements of heavy industry to decarbonize is the heat,” Godart said. “And now here we have this really flexible way of providing heat across a very wide range of temperatures, all the way down from 80 to 100 degrees Celsius all the way up to 1,000 degrees Celsius.” In total, about 8.6 megawatt-hours of energy can be recovered per metric ton of aluminum.
What’s left isn’t waste, either. The catalyst can be recovered, and the powder is aluminum trihydrate, which can be smelted once more to create metallic aluminum. Any contaminants, including food waste, plastic soda can liners and mixed alloys, remain larger than the aluminum trihydrate powder and can be easily filtered out.
“All of that stuff works in our process, because our catalyst just eats aluminum and basically leaves everything else untouched,” Godart said.
Found Energy recently raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Investors in the round include the Autodesk Foundation, GiTV, Glenfield Partners, Good Growth Capital, J-Impact, Kompas VC, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and Munich Re Ventures.
When using scrap aluminum, which is Found Energy’s initial plan, the process is carbon negative. The startup is targeting industrial heat in its go-to-market strategy, but Godart also sees applications in marine shipping and long-haul trucking. Aluminum is slightly heavier than diesel or bunker fuel, but its energy density could be game changing for those industries.
One could imagine future ships powered by aluminum dropping their waste powder off at a smelter to be refueled for a return voyage. “Just sip a little bit of that energy as you go, and then you’ve essentially come up with a new maritime shipping fuel as well,” he said. “In a weird way, we’re sort of revamping the concept of a solid fuel.”
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 over 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 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. Over 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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