electrolyzer
(5)
Lukas Hackl
Lukas Hackl is the co-founder and CEO of Aepnus Technology, an Emeryville, California startup building electrolyzers that turn sodium sulfate waste - a salty byproduct piling up across the EV battery supply chain - back into the sulfuric acid and caustic soda that battery makers have to buy. The technology grew out of his UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory PhD work on electrochemical water desalination. After hearing the same waste complaint on road trips from California to Canada, he and co-founder Bilen Akuzum turned a laboratory curiosity into a company that emerged from stealth in 2024 with $8 million in seed funding led by Clean Energy Ventures.
Molly Yang
Molly Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Hgen, a Los Angeles climate-tech company building modular, mass-manufacturable alkaline electrolyzers to make clean hydrogen cheap enough for heavy industry. A former energy product lead at Tesla, she teamed up with childhood friend and ex-SpaceX engineer Colin Ho to shrink the electrolyzer roughly twentyfold and package it into shipping containers that need only water and electricity. Hgen has raised $7M total from Founders Fund, Seven Seven Six, and Fontinalis Partners, and Yang was named a 2022 Breakthrough Energy Fellow.
Ryan DuChanois
Ryan DuChanois is the co-founder and CEO of Solidec, a Houston climate-tech startup that spun out of Rice University in 2024. Solidec builds modular reactors that pull molecules from air and water and, using only electricity, make industrial chemicals like hydrogen peroxide on-site - no centralized plants, no long supply chains, no carbon-heavy inputs. A Gates Cambridge Scholar with a Yale PhD and 20 peer-reviewed papers in membrane science, DuChanois traded the academic bench for the factory floor, aiming to abate over a gigaton of carbon emissions a year by reinventing how the world's chemicals are made.
Sarah Lamaison
Sarah Lamaison is the co-founder and CEO of Dioxycle, a Paris- and Bay Area-based climate-tech company building electrolyzers that turn industrial CO2 into ethylene and other chemicals using only water, electricity, and waste carbon. A chemist trained at Ecole Polytechnique, Cambridge, College de France, and Stanford, she turned her PhD on artificial photosynthesis into a company aiming to decarbonize one of the planet's dirtiest industries while staying cost-competitive with fossil feedstocks. She raised $17M in Series A funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital, won the L'Oreal-UNESCO Young Talent award, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30.
Siva Yellamraju
Siva Yellamraju is the co-founder and CEO of Fourier, a Palo Alto hydrogen startup building modular, software-controlled electrolyzers no bigger than two server racks. A four-time founder whose previous companies were acquired by Apple, Google, and Polycom, he spent a career in cameras and video before turning a 10-15% side exploration into a clean-energy company. Fourier treats hydrogen production as a data-optimization problem, aiming to deliver on-site hydrogen at $6-7/kg. The company raised an $18.5M Series A led by General Catalyst and Paramark Ventures in April 2025.