fuel-cells
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The Bloom Box Was Built for Mars. AI Made It Urgent.
Bloom Energy spent a quarter-century turning a NASA-inspired ceramic fuel cell into an onsite power business. Now the grid bottleneck - and AI's appetite for electricity - has made the once-futuristic Bloom Box a very practical machine.
1s1 Energy
1s1 Energy is a materials-science company making green hydrogen cheaper by rethinking the guts of the electrolyzer. Instead of the fluorinated (PFAS) membranes the industry has leaned on for decades, 1s1 builds boron-based proton-exchange membranes and electrochemical components that its partners report can produce a kilogram of hydrogen using roughly 70% of the energy of incumbent devices - already hitting efficiency targets the U.S. Department of Energy set for 2031. Founded in 2019 and run out of Portola Valley, California with labs in Lisbon and Campinas, Brazil, the company sells core components to electrolyzer and fuel-cell makers and runs pilots with utilities and heavy industry.
AvCarb Material Solutions
AvCarb Material Solutions is a Lowell, Massachusetts manufacturer of engineered carbon fiber materials - gas diffusion layers, felts, papers, woven fabrics and molded graphite laminates - built for the toughest electrochemical, thermal and friction jobs. With roots tracing to AVCO in the early 1960s (the same Lowell operation that helped develop Apollo's AVCOAT heat shield), AvCarb now supplies the carbon guts of hydrogen fuel cells, electrolyzers and redox flow batteries, alongside legacy work in automotive wet friction and even fishing-reel drag washers.
Vimano
Vimano is a Bengaluru-based deep-tech startup building PFAS-free, ion-selective nanotech membranes for the electrochemical devices that power the energy transition - redox flow batteries, AEM electrolyzers, and hydrogen fuel cells. Its proprietary membrane platform tackles the ion-crossover problem that limits efficiency in long-duration energy storage and green hydrogen, and it also adapts the same polymer-film science to thermal management films for satellites. The company's stated goal is to sit inside 1 out of every 2 large-scale energy storage devices, electrolyzers and fuel cells on the planet.
Verne
Verne is a San Francisco climate-tech company building high-density cryo-compressed hydrogen (CcH2) storage and power systems. Founded in 2020 by Stanford and UC-Berkeley alumni, Verne developed a method to store hydrogen at up to 73 g/L - roughly 33% denser than liquid hydrogen and 87% denser than 700-bar compressed gas - without the cost of full liquefaction. After proving the technology on the world's first CcH2-powered Class 8 truck in 2024, Verne has expanded into turnkey zero-emission on-site power, targeting data centers, ports, construction sites and EV charging with modular hydrogen-to-power systems.