hydrogen
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The Climate Fund Betting the Future Still Runs Through a Pipe
Energy Capital Ventures built a narrow venture thesis around an unfashionable premise: decarbonization will have to work with existing gas infrastructure, not merely wish it away. Now data centers, industrial demand and a portfolio of strange machines are putting that bet to work.
The Company That Pumps One of Every Nine Barrels on Earth
It struck oil at a well called Dammam No. 7 in 1938. Nearly a century later, Aramco still moves roughly one of every nine barrels the world burns - and is quietly betting billions that its next act runs on gas, chemicals and code.
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.
錫力科技 YC Synergy
錫力科技 (YC Synergy) is a Taiwan-based clean-energy company building hydrogen fuel cell power systems and end-to-end hydrogen infrastructure - electrolysis-based green hydrogen production, storage, and refueling. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Xindian, New Taipei City, the firm designs and integrates fuel cell systems for stationary power, maritime vessels, and road transport, working with partners such as Germany's EKPO Fuel Cell Technologies and Stan Shih's zero-carbon ship venture Porrima. It was named Asia-Pacific Fuel Cell System Company of the Year by Energy Tech Review in 2024.
Continuum Industries
Continuum Industries is an infrastructure-technology company behind Optioneer, an AI-powered platform that helps utilities, developers and engineers plan large linear infrastructure - power lines, cables, water networks and pipelines. Optioneer analyses geospatial data and tests millions of routing alternatives against environmental, social, cost and technical criteria, producing a shortlist of viable options in hours rather than months. Founded in 2018 and headquartered across Edinburgh, London and New York, the company raised a $10M Series A in 2023 to accelerate the build-out of grid and water infrastructure needed for the energy transition.
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.
Hgen
Hgen is a Los Angeles-area climate-tech company building higher-efficiency alkaline electrolyzers that convert water and renewable electricity into clean, low-cost hydrogen for heavy industry. Founded in 2021 by former Tesla and SpaceX engineers, Hgen redesigned the electrolyzer cell to shed hydrogen bubbles faster, claiming roughly 20x higher power density and a much smaller footprint than conventional alkaline systems. The company packages its technology into shipping-container-sized units that need only water and electricity, aiming to undercut the cost of trucked-in liquid hydrogen and help decarbonize chemicals, steel, and other industrial processes.
Proteum Energy
Proteum Energy is a Phoenix-based cleantech company that turns wasted flare gas and residual hydrocarbons into clean hydrogen, renewable natural gas, and designer fuels. Using its patented modular Flare-to-Fuel platform and steam non-methane reforming (SnMR) technology, Proteum helps oil, gas, and ethanol producers cut emissions and profit from assets that would otherwise be burned off into the sky.
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.
Fourier
Fourier is a Palo Alto-based clean-energy company building modular, fully automated electrolyzers that produce green hydrogen on-site and on-demand. By borrowing architecture from the data center industry - racks of small, software-managed electrolyzer 'blades' running on reprogrammed mass-produced power supplies - Fourier aims to eliminate the costly, hazardous transportation and storage that inflate hydrogen prices, making clean hydrogen practical for heavy industry, transportation fuel, and distributed energy storage.
Utility Global
Utility Global is a Houston-based clean-energy technology company whose proprietary eXERO platform and H2Gen system produce high-purity hydrogen and a capture-ready CO2 stream from industrial off-gases and biogases - without using external electricity. By bolting onto the existing infrastructure of steel mills, refineries, petrochemical plants and other hard-to-abate sites, the company aims to make industrial decarbonization economically competitive with fossil-based hydrogen rather than dependent on subsidies or pilots.
ECL
ECL (EdgeCloudLink) builds the world's first modular, off-grid data centers powered by green hydrogen fuel cells. Founded by data-center veteran Yuval Bachar, ECL delivers Tier 4 uptime with zero emissions, zero grid power, and a PUE under 1.1 - selling capacity in 1-2 MW modular blocks designed for high-density AI compute.