Sometimes the path to entrepreneurship is clear, even if the founders don't necessarily realize it.
That's certainly the case for Jimmy Rojas, who took the first steps toward founding the startup Evoloh three years ago while working on hydrogen and energy systems as a graduate student at Stanford University. That continued as he was analyzing potential deals with his Baruch Future Ventures.
“I always looked at hydrogen trading,” Rojas told TechCrunch. “I remember them joking that I was a terrible investor because I passed on every deal because I found problems with every company. After all, we started on our own. I decided it was better.”
Hydrogen is already a key feedstock for many chemical manufacturers, and startups and investors alike are betting it can help eliminate carbon pollution in everything from steel and cement to aviation and long-haul trucking. I'm betting. Because of his experience, Rojas felt he had a good understanding of where the hydrogen issues lie. His biggest challenge was building an electrolyzer to produce hydrogen gas.
“Electrolyzers are very expensive. They are very difficult to manufacture, have complex logistics, are very difficult to transport and install, and are often involved in politically and environmentally problematic supply chains.” he stated.
Rojas' company, Eboro, is trying to solve all of these things at once by focusing on manufacturing rather than novel materials, which is typical for hydrogen startups. In the process, he wants to make hydrogen a key part of the world's energy system.
“Clean, cheap hydrogen could become a platform for the development of entirely new industries in the future,” Rojas said.
Many companies spend a lot of time creating specialized membranes, which are one of the key components for separating hydrogen from water. But Rojas suspects that if hydrogen becomes a big enough market, electrolyzers will quickly become a commodity. Even today, membrane development remains a bit of an arms race. “Someone will always develop something better,” he says.
Evoloh manufactures uniquely designed electrolyzers based on alkaline electrolysis. In an alkaline electrolyzer, two electrodes are immersed in an aqueous alkaline solution (usually consisting of highly concentrated potassium or sodium hydroxide). When electricity passes through alkaline water, it splits the water into hydrogen gas and hydroxide on one side, and fuses the hydroxide into water and oxygen on the other side.
Alkaline electrolysis differs in several ways from the other major approach, proton exchange membrane electrolysis. One of the most important things, however, is that alkaline electrolysis does not require expensive and exotic metals like platinum. This gives alkaline electrolysers a cost advantage from the start, which Eboro says is built on by low-cost manufacturing.
Evoloh also designed the core of the system, the electrolyzer stack, around inexpensive materials and components sourced domestically. “We went to our power supply company and asked for the cheapest, easily available power source. We did that for all the other components, pumps, heat exchangers, everything,” Rojas said. Ta.
To further reduce manufacturing costs, Evoloh uses roll-to-roll printing. This technology was developed by printing presses centuries ago and has recently been used to make batteries. His two main components of an electrolyzer, the electrode and membrane, can both be manufactured using roll-to-roll equipment. Once removed from the line, they are cut to size and assembled into the final product.
The result is a compact and efficient electrolyzer that is easy to transport and install, he said. The goal is to “prepare for this scenario,” Rojas said. [electrolyzer] A stack can be a hardware commodity. ”
Evolo is still working out glitches in its manufacturing process, but Rojas expects the company's first factory to be up and running by the end of next year. When fully operational, it will be able to produce 3.75 gigawatts of electrolyzers using domestically produced materials. This is a significant amount considering that global manufacturing capacity in 2022 was just 11 gigawatts, according to the IEA.
Evoloh recently raised an oversubscribed Series A of $20 million led by Engine Ventures with participation from 3M Ventures and NextEra Energy. Rojas said the company will use the funding to improve its manufacturing processes, implement large-scale pilots and sign up paying customers.
The company positions itself as similar to TSMC, a contract semiconductor manufacturer that makes chips for high-tech companies around the world. This is a model that has worked very well for TSMC, but the company's success is also due to the huge size of the global semiconductor market. Eboro's success will likewise depend on how big the hydrogen market becomes. Startups may have limited success if they remain relatively small. But Eboro's bet on manufacturing could pay off big if hydrogen becomes the basis of several industries.