He spent 15 years turning a 2008 philanthropic bet on African food security into the world's first commercial green ammonia system. Now Iowa corn grows on it.
In 2008, Hiro Iwanaga was working as a hedge fund analyst at Baupost Group in Boston - studying balance sheets, hunting for undervalued assets, running numbers on billion-dollar positions. Quietly, with his own money, he funded a research project at Stanford University. The question: could you make ammonia fertilizer in a small, modular system powered by renewable electricity?
That question took 15 years to fully answer. The answer is yes - and Iwanaga built the company to prove it. TalusAg (under parent company Talus Renewables) produces green ammonia using only air, water, and renewable energy. No fossil fuels. No pipeline dependency. No supply chain that collapses when a ship gets stuck in the Suez Canal.
The talusOne unit - the company's flagship - fits inside a standard shipping container and produces roughly one ton of green ammonia per day. The talusTen produces ten times that. Stack enough of them, point them at a solar array or a hydro grid, and you have a local fertilizer factory that costs farmers 30-50% less than buying imported commodity ammonia.
The technology is not science fiction. It is running. In December 2023, Kenya Nut Company's Morendat farm in Naivasha, Kenya, switched on a talusOne unit connected to a 2.1 megawatt solar farm. The farm locked in a 15-year fixed-price supply agreement. Fertilizer, predictable and local, for a decade and a half.
In February 2025, Landus - a farmer-owned cooperative in Iowa - announced the first locally produced green ammonia in North America, from TalusAg's Boone, Iowa facility. By April 2025, the first American corn crop fertilized with American-made green ammonia was in the ground. The Edison Awards called it Gold-worthy. The judges were not wrong.
Iwanaga's background is unusual for a cleantech founder. Most clean energy CEOs come from engineering labs, government agencies, or climate-focused VC firms. Iwanaga came from the long-short equity world - Baupost Group, Silver Point Capital, PFM. He learned to think in terms of durable competitive advantage, capital efficiency, and asymmetric risk. When he finally founded TalusAg in 2017 with veteran engineer David Toyne, he brought that framework with him.
The result is a company that is neither a moonshot nor a science project. It is an industrial manufacturing business with real deployments, real customers, real cost advantages. The $22 million Series A in November 2023 - co-led by Material Impact and Xora Innovation (Temasek's deep tech platform) - brought in investors who back that kind of rigor.
I believe that humans have phenomenal capacity and can overcome most any obstacle they face.- Hiro Iwanaga, Co-Founder & CEO, TalusAg
Global ammonia production accounts for roughly 2% of all CO2 emissions on the planet. The Haber-Bosch process - invented in 1909, refined since, still dominant - runs on natural gas. Every ton of conventionally produced ammonia generates roughly 2-3 tons of CO2. Talusag's process, powered by clean electricity, avoids 8 tons of emissions per ton of ammonia produced compared to conventional methods. The math on scale is significant.
There is also a food security dimension that Iwanaga has never stopped emphasizing. Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa pay double the world market price for fertilizer, because the supply chains are thin and the logistics are brutal. Crop yields there are a quarter to a fifth of what developed-world farmers achieve, largely because fertilizer is out of reach. A modular system that can be shipped anywhere and powered by whatever renewable energy is locally available is not just a decarbonization play. It is a food system intervention.
Iwanaga serves on the board of The Leo Project, a Kenyan nonprofit providing free programs in art, coding, and counseling to youth. He sits on the Stanford LEAD Council. The philanthropic thread that started with a 2008 Stanford research grant is still woven through everything he does.
Next up: Angola. Talus Renewables has signed an agreement with Minbos Resources to develop the Capanda Green Ammonia Project, using hydroelectric power at 1.1 cents per kilowatt-hour - some of the cheapest clean electricity in the world. First sales are targeted for Q1 2028. Minnesota is also in the pipeline for 2025 expansion.
Iwanaga is not a headline chaser. He does not post daily on X. His LinkedIn is sparse. What he does do is ship - literally. Containerized ammonia units, from a 75,000-square-foot facility in Boone, Iowa, to farms and food producers across three continents. That is a different kind of attention economy.
The original Haber-Bosch process (1909) made ammonia from natural gas. TalusAg's process keeps the chemistry, strips out the fossil fuels, and makes it modular enough to ship anywhere on earth.
Recognized in the Community-Based Sustainable Resources category for making green ammonia production local, affordable, and scalable.
TalusAg's talusOne is the world's first commercially deployed modular green ammonia production unit - a category Hiro Iwanaga's team created.
February 2025: Landus and TalusAg delivered the first locally produced green ammonia in North American history, at Boone, Iowa.
April 2025: The first corn crop in the United States grown with domestically produced green ammonia fertilizer was planted at Landus cooperative farms.
December 2023: Kenya Nut Company's Morendat farm became the first site in Africa to produce green ammonia on-site for agricultural use.
Material Impact, Xora Innovation (Temasek), Cavallo Ventures (Wilbur-Ellis), and Rice Investment Group backed the round - a vote of confidence in both the technology and the team.
$22M Series A • November 2023