YesPress Dossier - Climate / Energy
Renewance,
Renewance,
Inc.
The company you call when the clean-energy revolution leaves a few thousand tons of dead battery behind.
The company you call when the clean-energy revolution leaves a few thousand tons of dead battery behind.
In an office park on West Lake Street in Elmhurst, Illinois, screens glow with the vital signs of batteries scattered across thirty states. Voltage. Temperature. State of charge. Somewhere, a battery energy storage system is quietly drifting out of spec, and the people in this room know before its owner does. This is the Renewance Remote Monitoring Center, and it is the unglamorous nerve center of the clean-energy transition.
Renewance, Inc. is not in the business of making batteries. It is in the business of everything that happens to a battery after it is made - installing it, watching it, fixing it, and eventually, when the time comes, taking it apart responsibly. The world has spent a decade racing to deploy energy storage. Renewance is one of the few companies that asked the obvious follow-up question: then what?
"Our customers are deploying batteries to power the future - but many don't have the in-house capability to manage lifecycle risks."
Numbers Renewance reported around its 2025 ten-year mark. Each one represents a battery somebody else would rather not think about.
Here is the inconvenient truth about the grid-scale battery boom: a lithium-ion battery is a marvel for about a decade, and then it is a hazardous-waste problem with your company's name on it. It can catch fire. It is heavy, toxic, and regulated. And it does not politely dispose of itself.
Most battery owners - utilities, developers, EV and industrial operators - are experts at deploying power, not at managing decline. They are very good at the first day of a battery's life and almost entirely unequipped for the last one. The gap between those two days is where environmental disasters, compliance violations, and stranded capital quietly accumulate.
Renewance exists in that gap. The whole company is an answer to a question the industry preferred to postpone.
"Every battery we decommission or repurpose is one less environmental liability."
In 2015, Jamal Burki, Sander Jacobs, and Tom Newhall left the comfortable orbit of General Electric's Energy Storage business with a thesis that sounded, at the time, slightly pessimistic: the batteries everyone was so excited to install would all, eventually, need managing and retiring. Someone should build the company for that. They decided it should be them.
Burki had spent the 1990s at Motorola before moving into energy storage leadership roles at IHI and GE. Jacobs took the commercial strategy. Newhall took operations. Between them they had seen enough of the battery supply chain to know that the back end of it was a wide-open, deeply unsexy, completely necessary market.
Being early to an unglamorous market is a lonely place to be. It is also, occasionally, exactly the right place.
"By helping our customers manage their battery systems through every stage of use, we enable them to stay on mission."
Co-Founder & CEO. Motorola in the '90s, then energy-storage leadership at IHI and GE. Led the 2024 Series A.
Co-Founder & CCO. Owns commercial strategy; steered Renewance toward eight-figure revenue.
Co-Founder & COO. Runs the field-services and decommissioning machine that makes the promises real.
All three came out of GE Energy Storage - which is why the company speaks fluent battery, not just software.
The founding trio: less a startup origin story, more three engineers who refused to leave the cleanup to someone else.
The visible half of Renewance is RenewanceConnect, a SaaS platform that does the boring, indispensable work of remembering everything about a battery: where it is, what warranty covers it, when it needs maintenance, whether it is compliant, and how it is performing right now. Dashboards turn a fleet of opaque steel cabinets into something a manager can actually see.
The invisible half is people. Renewance pairs the software with field technicians who install, commission, diagnose, and repair - and, when a system reaches end of life, decommission, collect, and route it through a network of certified partners for repurposing or recycling. The Remote Monitoring Center stitches the two halves together, turning sensor data into a phone call before a problem becomes a fire.
It is, in effect, cradle-to-grave-to-cradle service. The grave part is the bit nobody else wanted.
Asset tracking, warranty admin, maintenance scheduling, compliance, and real-time analytics in one platform.
The Elmhurst control center watching batteries across the country, predicting failures before they happen.
Install, commission, diagnose, repair, and maintain state of charge - hands on hardware, not just dashboards.
Decommissioning, logistics, remanufacturing, repurposing, and recycling through certified partners.
A timeline measured not in launches but in things safely taken apart. Refreshingly honest, for a startup.
Skepticism is fair. Plenty of climate companies talk a good circular-economy game and recycle mostly press releases. Renewance has a different problem: its proof is genuinely hard to make exciting, because it consists of disasters that did not happen and waste that did not pile up.
Still, the figures are real. More than 100 industry customers and partners. Over 320 MWh of battery systems decommissioned without incident. Over 3,000 metric tons of materials recycled. A $1 million Department of Energy prize, earned over three years, before battery recycling was a fashionable category. And in 2024, investors agreed: an $18M Series A led by RockCreek's Smart Futures team, with IMM Investment and Evergreen Climate Innovations.
Bars are scaled for readability, not drawn to a single unit - the point is the shape of a company that does a lot of quiet, heavy work.
Renewance's stated mission is to enable the safe, sustainable, and compliant management of industrial batteries across their full life cycle. Translated out of the press release: keep batteries useful for as long as possible, and when they finally die, make sure their materials live again instead of leaching into a landfill.
That is the circular-economy idea in its least abstract form. A battery is not trash; it is a temporarily inconvenient pile of lithium, nickel, and cobalt waiting for a competent adult to deal with it. Renewance volunteered to be the adult.
"A battery is not waste. It is materials between jobs."
The batteries installed during the great energy-storage build-out of the late 2010s and early 2020s are aging on a predictable schedule. The first big cohort is heading for end of life. The EV fleet behind it is larger still. The retirement wave is not a question of if; it is a question of who is ready, and very few are.
Renewance spent ten years building the boring infrastructure - the software, the technicians, the recycler relationships, the compliance know-how - for exactly this moment. The company that looked early in 2015 looks, in hindsight, simply on time.
So picture the control room in Elmhurst again. The screens still glow. But now the batteries they watch number in the thousands, across thirty states and growing, each one tracked from the day it is switched on to the day its materials are reborn as something new. The clean-energy revolution always had a back end. Renewance is the company that decided to build it - and then stayed to run it.
Tip: the YouTube links are searches, not guarantees. Even press dossiers have to admit what they can't promise.