1s1 Energy

Here is a fact about green hydrogen that does not fit on a bumper sticker: the expensive part is the electricity. You take water, you run a current through it, and you split it into hydrogen and oxygen. This is elegant chemistry and terrible economics, because a lot of that current gets wasted as heat instead of hydrogen, and electricity costs money whether it becomes fuel or not. So the entire game of making green hydrogen affordable comes down to a boring-sounding question - how much energy do you lose crossing the membrane in the middle of the cell - and most people have decided the answer is "a fixed amount, because that's just how the membrane works."

1s1 Energy decided the answer was negotiable. The company, founded in 2019 and headquartered in Portola Valley, California, builds proton-exchange membranes and electrochemical components out of boron chemistry instead of the fluorinated polymers - the PFAS "forever chemicals" - that the industry has leaned on for roughly thirty years. That is a nerdy substitution, and it is also the entire pitch. Boron, in their materials, takes a negative charge. Hydrogen ions - which are, physically, just protons looking for somewhere to be - bond to it more readily and slip through faster, while the material shrugs off the corrosion that degrades conventional membranes. Do that well enough and you lose less energy, which is another way of saying you spend less money, which is the only sentence that matters if you are trying to decarbonize a steel mill.

The number that matters

In tests with partners, 1s1 reports that electrolyzers using its membranes need only about 70% of the energy to produce each kilogram of hydrogen compared with incumbent devices. Numbers like this are easy to say and hard to earn, so it helps to have a yardstick that isn't the company's own marketing. The U.S. Department of Energy has published efficiency targets for electrolyzers, and one of them - 77% electrical efficiency - is pinned to the year 2031. 1s1 says it is already there. In 2026. That is the kind of claim that either falls apart under a pilot or turns into a business, and the interesting thing about 1s1 is that it has spent its short life trying to find out which.

To validate that, the company did the unglamorous thing and handed its parts to people paid to be skeptical. It ran its components through the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and UC Merced, met the EU's 2030 performance target, and survived the DOE's Accelerated Stress Testing durability protocol - the treadmill test that tells you whether a membrane will still be working in a decade or dissolve in a season. A Tier-1 fuel-cell manufacturer took the same materials, because it turns out that a membrane good at making hydrogen is also good at consuming it, and 1s1 now sells core components into the fuel-cell market as a second front.

The founders, and the joke in the name

The name is a chemistry pun that rewards the people who get it and quietly explains the company to the people who don't. Hydrogen has one electron, and that electron lives in the 1s orbital: electron configuration 1s¹. The whole thesis of the business is compressed into a superscript. Behind it are four founders who did not assemble at a hydrogen conference. Daniel Sobek, the CEO, is an MIT-trained serial entrepreneur on his fourth startup, with three MIT degrees spanning aeronautics, mechanical engineering, and computer science. Sukanta Bhattacharyya, the CTO, is a materials chemist trained at the Max Planck Institute. Thiago Figueiredo, the chief business officer, came from impact investing and life-sciences venture capital. And Professor T. Don Tilley, a UC Berkeley organometallic-chemistry faculty member and Lawrence Berkeley senior scientist, rounds out the bench with the catalysis expertise that makes the boron work plausible rather than aspirational.

That last quote is worth reading twice, because it tells you 1s1 does not think of itself as a hydrogen company. It thinks of itself as a boron-materials company that happens to have hydrogen as its first, best application. Once you have a material with useful electrochemical properties, the market map gets wide fast. The company has a joint project with a firm called Nitrofix to make green ammonia, co-funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Israeli Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure. It is working on extracting niobium from a large Brazilian mine. It is poking at solid-state batteries and precious-metal extraction. This is either admirable range or a focus problem, and which one it turns out to be is the central bet of the whole enterprise.

Small company, three continents

1s1 is roughly thirteen people. It runs headquarters in Portola Valley with research labs in Lisbon, Portugal and Campinas, Brazil - a footprint that would be ambitious for a company ten times the size and is faintly absurd for one this small. The Brazil connection is not decorative. The company has a $2.3 million electrolysis-stack project with the utility CEEE-G through Brazil's Aneel research-and-development program, backed by CSN, the country's largest steel producer. It has run pilots with the electrical utility owned by a large Brazilian steel company. And in 2023 it was selected into Enel Green Power's NextHy Booster accelerator, the kind of program where a startup's membrane meets an actual industrial deployment and either holds up or doesn't.

The funding, by climate-hardware standards, is modest: a $1.4 million seed round closed in October 2024, led by Faber Ventures and Asiri LLC with Rumbo Ventures, City Light, and Gibson Lane GmbH participating, on top of an earlier seed round from 2022 - roughly $3.55 million total. In a field where competitors raise nine figures to build gigafactories, 1s1 is trying to change the chemistry rather than out-spend the incumbents, and stretching a lean round across two continents of lab space by leaning on grants and co-funded industrial projects. It is a capital-efficiency story dressed as a chemistry story, or maybe the other way around.

Why the PFAS detail is not a footnote

There is a second, quieter reason the boron approach matters, and it has nothing to do with efficiency. Conventional PEM membranes are built on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances - PFAS - the "forever chemicals" that regulators around the world are steadily writing rules against. An electrolyzer industry that depends on a chemistry class heading toward restriction has a problem it mostly isn't talking about. 1s1's membranes are PFAS-free by design, which means the same decision that improved performance also removed a regulatory landmine. When your compliance risk and your performance win are the same door, you walk through it. That is the sort of two-birds outcome that makes a materials company interesting to both a sustainability officer and a procurement officer, who normally agree on nothing.

Who else is in the room

1s1 is not alone in wanting cheaper hydrogen, and it is comically outgunned on capital. The incumbents are names like Chemours, whose Nafion membranes are the fluorinated standard 1s1 is trying to replace, and the big electrolyzer builders - Plug Power, Nel Hydrogen, Cummins' Accelera unit, ITM Power - who raise sums that make a $1.4 million seed look like a rounding error. Most of those companies are competing on scale: bigger factories, bigger orders, lower unit cost through volume. 1s1's wager is orthogonal. It is not trying to build the biggest electrolyzer; it is trying to change what the electrolyzer is made of, and then sell that improvement as a component to the people building the big machines. If the boron chemistry is as good as the pilots suggest, being a supplier to your competitors is a better position than racing them. If it isn't, thirteen people on three continents is a lonely place to find out.

What you can actually do with it

If you make electrolyzers or fuel cells, 1s1 wants to sell you core components - membranes and electrochemical parts that raise efficiency and durability without asking you to rebuild your machine. If you are a utility or a heavy industry trying to decarbonize something stubborn - steel, ammonia, chemicals - 1s1 wants to run a pilot and show you a lower cost per kilogram of hydrogen than you thought was available. And if you are watching the space, the thing to watch is whether the lab numbers survive contact with industrial deployment at scale, because that is the gap where most promising membranes quietly die. 1s1's whole strategy is to close it one validated pilot at a time. The company is not promising to save the planet by Tuesday. It is promising a membrane that loses less energy, and betting that in a business built on wasted electricity, that is the only promise worth making.