The chemist who found the missing middle of the hydrogen economy
By 2019, the hydrogen industry had a peculiar gap. Hundreds of companies were racing to produce clean hydrogen. A handful were building fuel cells to consume it. But the middle - getting dense, affordable hydrogen from point A to point B at commercial scale - was largely empty. Ted McKlveen walked into Stanford's Graduate School of Business, noticed the gap, and built a company in it.
Verne, co-founded with Bav Roy (now COO) and David Jaramillo (CTO), pursues a technology called cryo-compressed hydrogen (CcH2). The principle: cool hydrogen below its boiling point and compress it simultaneously, without forcing a full phase change. The result is hydrogen stored at up to 79 grams per liter - 33% denser than liquid hydrogen, 87% denser than the 700-bar compressed gas tanks that dominate today's market. For long-haul trucking, where payload and range are everything, those numbers rewrite the economics.
"About 40% of heavy duty trucks are either long range or payload limited. And that's really the market for hydrogen."- Ted McKlveen, Down to Zero podcast
McKlveen grew up in Minnesota. His father's family owned a lumber company in rural Iowa - a background that gave him an early, ground-level understanding of physical industry, the kind that can't be optimized away with a software update. The environmental turn came later. In 2006, fourteen-year-old Ted watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and came away with a conviction that stuck. He steered toward chemistry at Harvard, graduated summa cum laude, and spent his early career working on grid-scale redox flow batteries and renewable energy at Advanced Microgrid Solutions before landing at Bain & Company.
At Stanford, while classmates were building SaaS dashboards and consumer apps, McKlveen dove into decades-old research from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and BMW's hydrogen work. He recruited the original inventor of cryo-compressed hydrogen storage technology as a technical advisor at Verne's earliest stage - before the company had more than a handful of employees. That move signaled something about how he operates: respect for the science, willingness to go back to primary sources, and zero interest in reinventing what doesn't need reinventing.
Verne's most visible proof point arrived in late 2024: the world's first cryo-compressed hydrogen Class 8 truck drove hundreds of miles in Southern California, completing multiple refueling events with Verne's own CcH2 filling equipment. It wasn't a closed-track demonstration. It was real-world testing that validated dormancy, density, and durability simultaneously. McKlveen called it confirmation that cryo-compressed hydrogen "can break the current trade-off between density and cost."
Then came the LLNL collaboration in March 2025: Verne and Lawrence Livermore demonstrated a hydrogen densification pathway that achieves cryo-compressed storage without requiring a full phase change - cutting energy consumption by 50% compared to small-scale liquefaction. The physics had cooperated. The cost curve bent.
McKlveen's Verne isn't just a trucking company anymore. As of early 2025, the company began offering zero-emission on-site power generation to customers at ports, EV charging stations, construction sites, and data centers - sectors facing grid capacity crunches. A Pennsylvania manufacturing facility announced in mid-2025 will produce hydrogen storage vessels for distribution and mobility at commercial scale, creating 61 new jobs in Lycoming County with backing from Governor Shapiro.
"This demonstration confirms that cryo-compressed hydrogen can break the current trade-off between density and cost. Providing a low-cost way to reach high densities will bring down the cost of delivering and using hydrogen, opening up a host of applications... from construction to ports to warehouses."- Ted McKlveen, March 2025
On policy, McKlveen takes an unfashionable position for a clean-energy founder: he'd rather have a carbon tax than technology-specific subsidies. His reasoning is straightforward - subsidies pick winners; a carbon price lets the best solutions compete. He estimates hydrogen fuel could reach diesel price parity within six to seven years, but only if infrastructure and density challenges are solved at the same time. He's building the infrastructure. He's already solved the density.
What drives him isn't abstract climate policy. It's the roads. McKlveen has repeatedly pointed out that low-income communities near major freight corridors bear a disproportionate pollution burden from diesel trucks. That specificity - not "global emissions" in the abstract, but the air quality alongside I-10 - is what distinguishes his framing from the usual founder pitch.
Verne's investors include Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, United Airlines Ventures Sustainable Flight Fund, Trucks Venture Capital, Collaborative Fund, and Newlab - a group that spans e-commerce logistics, aviation, and deep-tech infrastructure. The bet they're all making is the same one McKlveen made at Stanford: hydrogen's future isn't just about clean production. It's about getting that hydrogen to where it needs to be, as densely and cheaply as physics allows.
He named his company after Jules Verne, who wrote in 1874 about a future powered by hydrogen. The reference isn't sentimental. It's a wager - that the 150-year-old prediction is finally, precisely, about to come true.