A second shot at killing the diesel generator
Start with the number that should have ended the story: more than four hundred people, laid off in a single climate-tech autumn. Moxion Power, the company Paul Huelskamp co-founded and ran, had raised over $110 million to swap diesel generators for quiet battery boxes at festivals and construction sites. In 2024 it ran out of road, filed for bankruptcy, and watched its assets get liquidated. That is usually where a founder's chapter closes.
Huelskamp opened a new one instead. Quietly, in 2023, he had already begun assembling a small group of former Moxion engineers under a new name: Anode Technology Company. When it emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $9 million in seed funding led by Eclipse Ventures, his pitch was almost defiant in its simplicity. "We started Anode with that goal to kind of finish what we started," he told TechCrunch.
What they started, and what he is still chasing, is a world where clean, on-demand electricity shows up wherever the grid can't - a job site, an EV depot, a stage, a data center that needs power yesterday. Anode builds mobile battery energy storage systems and wraps them in AI software that decides when to charge, when to discharge, and how to wring every cent out of a kilowatt-hour.
The lesson that cost $110 million
The most interesting thing about Anode is what Huelskamp decided not to do again. Moxion had built its own batteries, vertically integrated, hardware-heavy, capital-hungry. Anode hands cell manufacturing to contract partners and keeps its own focus on software and AI. He is blunt about why.
"One of the main lessons learned is it's really tough as a startup to take on that part of the manufacturing," he said. And on the unglamorous, expensive realities of selling power into the real world: "There's a lot of those types of requirements that, frankly, we just didn't appreciate at Moxion." It is a rare thing for a founder to itemize his own past blind spots in print. Huelskamp does it without flinching, because the tuition has already been paid.
The counterintuitive math of a flatbed truck
Anode's design philosophy hides a small riddle. The new units are smaller than Moxion's - under 600 kilowatt-hours - and that, Huelskamp argues, is a feature, not a compromise. "A smaller footprint, less energy, might mean more energy on the back of a single flatbed truck. It's a little counterintuitive," he said. Lighter boxes move more easily, load faster, and stack better. Logistics, it turns out, is part of the product.
Then there is the economics that makes the whole thing hum. By charging when power is cheapest and letting software hunt for the best rates, Anode claims it tops up its batteries for almost nothing. "We're charging our batteries at three, four, five cents per kilowatt hour," Huelskamp said - a fraction of what diesel costs once you count the fuel, the trucking, and the noise.
Why now
The timing is not an accident. AI data centers are devouring electricity. EV and AV fleets need to charge somewhere, and depots aren't built for it. Industrial electrification keeps adding load to a grid that was never designed for this decade. Eclipse partner Jiten Behl, formerly Rivian's chief growth officer, put the gap plainly: you need a mini power plant to charge 150 vans, and that infrastructure does not exist at the depots. Anode's bet is to bring the power to the parking lot instead of waiting years for a substation upgrade.
Anode's customer list reads like a map of the energy crunch: utilities, data center operators, general contractors, EV and AV fleet operators. The founding team spans autonomous vehicles, EV powertrain engineering, battery manufacturing, and renewable-energy project finance - which is to say, it is built from people who have already shipped hard things.
The man who got here before he built hardware
Huelskamp didn't start in batteries. He started in spreadsheets. A Dartmouth economics graduate, he cut his teeth in renewable-energy finance: an associate role at SunPower, then co-founding White River Solar, which sold a portfolio of solar PV projects to SunEdison in 2012. At EverStream Energy Capital Management he was a founding team member of EverStream Yield, sold to SunEdison and taken public as TerraForm Power in 2014. Fifteen years of sourcing deals and managing money in clean energy taught him exactly how power gets financed - which may be why he keeps returning to the cost-per-kilowatt-hour the way other founders quote user growth.
He is a Y Combinator alum from 2021, which lands somewhere between his financier years and his hardware years. The throughline is consistent: a decade and a half of trying, by different means, to make clean energy cheaper and more available than the dirty kind. Moxion was the boldest version of that attempt. Anode is the chastened, sharper one.
Failure as a design input
Plenty of founders survive a failure. Fewer fold the post-mortem directly into the next architecture. Huelskamp treats the Moxion collapse less as a wound to hide than as a spec sheet for what to avoid - outsource the hard manufacturing, shrink the box, let software do the heavy lifting, respect the boring requirements. The result is a company that looks like its founder's hard-won list of corrections, rendered in steel and code.
Whether Anode clears the same valley that swallowed Moxion is an open question, and Huelskamp is too seasoned to pretend otherwise. But there is a stubborn coherence to the man. He sold solar before he built batteries, raised nine figures before he raised seven again, and laid off a company before he rehired its best people under a new flag. Same mission, leaner machine. He is, by his own account, just trying to finish what he started.