Paul Barrett and
the price of a bubble

For Hysata’s fifth birthday, Paul Barrett described a celebration involving cake, a resident DJ and a Claude hackathon. Tom Campey, his fellow co-founder, supplied the music. The engineers and their colleagues supplied the experiments with AI. Even a birthday, apparently, offered an opportunity to make something run a little better.

It is a revealing detail for a business built around efficiency. Barrett spends much of his public working life explaining why the amount of electricity required to make a kilogram of hydrogen matters. His anniversary account brought the same appetite for improvement down to office scale, alongside the cake. Industrial decarbonisation can be a rather solemn occupation. A DJ helps.

By then, Hysata had reached a milestone with rather more consequence than a birthday: its first commercial order. Five years after the company’s launch, the work was moving toward supplying an industrial customer. For Barrett, who had helped finance the business before committing himself to running it, that progression gave an old investment case a delivery date.

The investor changes seats

Barrett was born and raised in Dublin and earned a doctorate in chemical engineering at University College Dublin. His first job was with an American company developing tools and methods for chemical separation. It took him around the world, working with customers on their processes. He has described that experience as an education in the business side of developing technology.

A customer’s process is a useful corrective to an engineer’s enthusiasm. The invention has to do something valuable in someone else’s operation. Barrett’s subsequent career brought that question into electrolysis and then investment. He worked as the chief technology officer of an electrolyser company before becoming a partner at IP Group Australia.

He was consequently able to examine a hydrogen invention from several directions: the science, the equipment, the customer and the capital required to join them up. Those interests met at the University of Wollongong. In 2019, while working at IP Group, he encountered research into a different way of feeding water to an electrolysis cell.

The connection with Professor Gerry Swiegers already existed. The two had worked together on hydrogen technology before Hysata. Barrett recognised the commercial possibility in the university research, and IP Group helped develop the business case and form the company. This was an investment built partly on familiarity with the people doing the work.

Hysata launched in 2021. Barrett led the seed funding effort and served as interim chief executive from the company’s inception. After the Series A round, he moved into the business full-time. The person helping assess the opportunity had accepted responsibility for executing it. His desk had effectively moved to the other side of the investment discussion.

A bubble with a running cost

The technical problem behind that decision is easier to picture than its name suggests. Electrolysis uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. In conventional arrangements, gas bubbles can cover parts of the electrodes. Those bubbles interfere with the process, adding losses to a machine whose job already demands substantial electricity.

The Wollongong researchers developed a capillary-fed cell. A porous separator draws liquid upward from a reservoir, supplying the electrodes through capillary action. Gas can leave through a thin liquid layer without the same bubble formation. The arrangement changes how water arrives and gases depart. A familiar chemical reaction gets a different piece of plumbing.

In 2022 laboratory tests, the cell reached 98% energy efficiency under specified conditions, consuming 40.4 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen. That measurement describes the cell. Hysata reports 95% efficiency for its system, including supporting equipment, with consumption of 41.5 kilowatt-hours per kilogram on a higher-heating-value basis. The distinction matters: a component and a complete installation have different boundaries.

Barrett’s commercial argument begins with the electricity bill. Power makes up much of the cost of producing green hydrogen. Reducing consumption changes the operating expense every time the equipment runs. An efficient cell can also reduce waste heat, allowing simpler cooling and liquid-handling equipment around it. The consequences reach beyond the cell itself.

“When it comes to electrolysers, efficiency wins.”

Paul Barrett

His compact phrase is useful because it ties a technical achievement to a buyer’s concern. A steelmaker or chemical producer needs an affordable input, with equipment that fits a workable project. Barrett returns to that relationship repeatedly. He makes the case for the machine by following the money spent on its output.

The company behind the cell

Turning the research into that machine required a company with several kinds of expertise. Swiegers became co-founder and chief technology officer. Campey, another co-founder, is chief product officer, with a background including ARENA, CSIRO and McKinsey. Barrett brought technical experience alongside his knowledge of investment and commercialisation.

The company’s wider connections reach into industry and policy. Former Australian chief scientist Alan Finkel chairs its global advisory council. Claire O’Neill and Michael Liebreich also sit on that council. These are relationships around an engineering business seeking customers in sectors where changing an energy input can affect an entire operation.

Capital arrived in stages. In May 2024, Hysata announced a US$111.3 million Series B round, co-led by bp Ventures and Templewater. Each committed US$10 million. Existing investors participated, alongside new backers including POSCO businesses. The money was intended to expand production capacity and continue technology development as Hysata worked toward larger-scale manufacturing.

The investor list also describes the surroundings in which Barrett operates. Energy companies and industrial groups bring a view of possible uses, deployment constraints and customer requirements. A chief executive has to make those perspectives useful without losing sight of the product. For someone who came from investment, the financing discussion is familiar territory; execution makes it considerably more demanding.

In December 2024, Hysata entered two development agreements with POSCO Holdings and POSCO E&C. The work covered materials research and engineering, and collaboration on engineering and construction. Investment had become a working relationship. Those agreements connected the equipment with organisations experienced in the industries it was intended to serve.

Barrett’s public account of growth gives people substantial space. In September 2024, Hysata received the Best Startup Culture award at the StartUp Daily Best in Tech Awards. Chief people officer Leanne Isabella accepted it with colleagues. Barrett said the team had almost doubled since the preceding year’s recognition, requiring a strong focus on culture as it expanded.

That attention is consistent with the anniversary celebration. An electrolyser business needs researchers, engineers, manufacturing specialists and commercial staff to solve different parts of the same problem. Barrett regularly credits the team in his public posts. The music and cake provide a less formal glimpse of the organisation behind the performance figures.

An order, then a production line

The June 2026 order marked a change in the company’s obligations. Hysata announced a megawatt-scale commercial deployment for an industrial customer, with hydrogen offtake already secured. Delivery was scheduled for the first half of 2027. There was now a specific destination for the equipment and a period in which it was expected to arrive.

For Barrett, this connected years of commercialisation work with the practical demands of supply. A purchase commitment brings manufacturing, commissioning and customer expectations into the same timetable. The announcement belongs in the story as a milestone toward delivery. The delivery itself remains the next event, with its own work and its own test of the organisation.

September brought a manufacturing development at Port Kembla. Hysata launched HysataFab and commissioned its first electrode production line. The company describes the platform as combining real-time monitoring, robotics, inline quality testing and AI. It says the approach can yield up to 15% more product from the same physical production equipment.

The launch coincided with an A$49 million ARENA grant supporting a manufacturing project worth close to A$100 million. The first line had opened; other production lines were planned to follow. Barrett’s recurring interest in efficiency had reached another part of the business. Producing the equipment consistently is its own engineering problem, and it shapes the cost of getting it to customers.

On September 24, Hysata announced an engineering collaboration with InterContinental Energy. Its role includes supplying electrolyser design and performance information for a digital optimisation framework used in modular green-fuels projects. The two companies had worked together for almost four years, with developer feedback helping shape Hysata’s product. A six-month operational trial with ACWA Power in Saudi Arabia had also taken place in 2025.

That history returns Barrett to the lesson of his first job: technology develops in conversation with the people expected to use it. Industrial projects have requirements beyond a good laboratory result. Design information must help developers understand cost and performance before construction, while the manufacturer has to learn which details matter in operation.

Cake before delivery

Barrett’s ambitions remain industrial. He argues for hydrogen where a process requires molecules, pointing to uses such as fertiliser, refining and steel. The case puts customer demand ahead of the temptation to attach hydrogen to every conceivable application. His work concentrates on making those existing industrial needs easier to meet with renewable production.

“You use it where you need a molecule, not an electron.”

Paul Barrett

There is a personal continuity here, from Dublin engineering study to international customer work, investment and a factory in the Illawarra. Barrett has spent his career around the boundary where science becomes something another person can use. Hysata has made him responsible for more of that boundary, from the early business case to the company that must manufacture the result.

The fifth birthday allowed a pause. People gathered, Campey played music, and the team tried new tools. Then the operational calendar resumed. An order needs equipment. A production line needs repeatability. Customers need the economics to work. Barrett’s wager now has plenty of machinery around it, but the starting question remains small enough to fit inside a cell: what does a bubble cost?