A Harvard spinout storing grid electricity in water and quinone molecules - the same chemistry that colors clothing dye - at roughly a quarter the cost of vanadium.
In a pilot building near Buffalo, a pump moves rust-colored liquid between two tanks. There is no whir of cooling fans, no warning placards about thermal runaway, no shipment of mined cobalt waiting on a dock. The liquid is mostly water. The thing dissolved in it is a quinone - a humble organic molecule, cousin to the dyes that color a pair of jeans. And it is holding electricity, waiting to give it back. This is what Quino Energy thinks the grid's long nights should look like.
Who they are nowQuino Energy makes the part of a flow battery that usually decides whether the whole thing is affordable: the electrolyte, the active liquid that actually stores the charge. Most flow batteries use vanadium, a metal whose price chart looks like a seismograph. Quino's version uses organic quinone molecules dissolved in water, produced from cheap coal-tar dyestuff chemicals through a zero-waste, continuous-flow process. The pitch is unsentimental - same job, lower cost, fewer ways to catch fire.
By late 2025 the company had pulled together about $31.85 million in equity and grants, reached Manufacturing Readiness Level 7, and run pilot systems from 6 kWh up to 100 kWh. Small numbers, for now. The ambition is not.
"There won't be just one winner since there are so many different battery chemistries for different use cases; lithium-ion won't solve everything."
Solar and wind have a scheduling problem. They make electricity when the weather cooperates, not when people want it. The grid's answer is storage - somewhere to park midday sunshine until the evening demand spike. Lithium-ion is excellent at short bursts but ages every time it cycles, and stacking enough of it for many hours of duration gets expensive and, occasionally, flammable. Vanadium flow batteries solve the longevity problem but lean on a metal that can swallow up to 70% of the system cost.
So the long-duration question hardens into one stubborn line: who can store many hours of energy, cheaply, safely, for decades, without betting the farm on a volatile mined commodity? That is the tension Quino exists to resolve - and the reason a chemistry lab became a company.
"Because our organic electrolyte can be used in vanadium flow battery hardware with minimal modification, we will be able to scale rapidly."
The chemistry came out of Harvard, where the labs of Michael Aziz and Roy Gordon spent a decade coaxing organic molecules into doing a metal's job. Eugene Beh was an undergraduate, then a postdoc, in those labs before a five-year detour at Xerox PARC, where he was once named the most prolific inventor of the year. In 2021 he and Meisam Bahari took an exclusive worldwide license to the quinone chemistry and founded Quino Energy, with Aziz and Gordon as scientific co-founders.
The bet was specific. Not "invent a new battery from scratch," but make a better liquid for a battery that already exists. If the electrolyte drops into standard vanadium flow hardware - even standard carbon steel tanks - then scaling doesn't require reinventing an industry. It requires out-pricing one ingredient.
Quino's electrolyte is a mildly alkaline, chloride-free solution of quinones. The molecules pick up and release electrons as the battery charges and discharges, and they do it without producing hydrogen gas or wearing themselves out quickly. The company quotes a degradation rate near 0.17% per year - roughly ten times slower than lithium iron phosphate - and a cost that lands about 30-40% under LFP and a quarter of vanadium.
The manufacturing trick is its own story: a single-step, continuous-flow process that turns inexpensive dyestuff feedstock into finished active material with, the company says, zero chemical waste. It is the rare industrial process that sounds almost tidy.
Built from coal-tar dye chemicals - the ingredient vanadium systems spend most of their budget avoiding.
~0.17%/year degradation means a battery that is still mostly itself decades after install.
Mostly water, no PFAS, no critical minerals, no thermal-runaway theatrics.
Skepticism is the correct posture toward any battery startup - the graveyard is well populated. So look at who is writing checks. The U.S. Department of Energy backed Quino early and again with $5 million under its CiFER program toward a 5 MWh Southern California deployment. The California Energy Commission added $10 million for an 8 MWh project. In November 2025, India's Atri Energy Transition led a $10 million Series A, with $6 million more on call, and a plan to build a 150-200 MWh electrolyte plant.
The cost argument is the whole game, so it deserves a chart.
There is a clever wrinkle in the go-to-market. Because the electrolyte is backward-compatible with vanadium hardware, Quino can sell liquid to other manufacturers instead of fighting them - and can target customers who cycle hard, like data centers, which need storage that can charge and discharge several times a day without quietly dying.
"Quino Energy's organic electrolyte can revolutionize the energy storage sector by enabling large scale deployment of commercially-viable LDES solutions."
Quino's stated mission is almost defiantly practical: water-based flow batteries that store energy in organic quinone molecules for commercial and grid use, so the grid can lean harder on wind and solar. The subtext is a supply-chain argument. Quinone feedstock is abundant and producible domestically; it does not require a mine in a geopolitically awkward place. The company's pitch isn't that its battery is exotic. It's that the ingredients are not.
Go back to that pilot building near Buffalo. The pump is still moving rust-colored water between two tanks, still doing it quietly. What's changed since 2021 isn't the picture - it's the price tag pinned to it, and the number of people now willing to bet that this unglamorous liquid is how the grid gets through the dark hours. If long-duration storage is going to be cheap enough to actually deploy at scale, somebody has to make the boring part affordable. Quino Energy is wagering that the boring part is the whole point.