This was hard.
“It takes a village to raise a child” and it took a village to raise a Series B like this in 2024.
A feature of working in the energy transition is the sheer number of people from around the world willing to help accelerate bold ideas that could make a difference to the climate. This round brought Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Oman, Korea and the UK to the Hysata ‘village’ and relied on friendships new and old.
At Kiko we want to thank our stalwart friends bp ventures for their continued trust and enthusiasm. bp has a real commitment to decarbonization, and the ventures team have been consistent companions over our 7-year friendship.
Templewater were new to us, and it was great to meet a mission-orientated and highly technically savvy team with sophisticated understanding of electrochemistry. We were excited to welcome Alfred Wong to join us on the board.
We are strong believers in European-Asian cooperation in cleantech, and it was gratifying to see POSCO also join the syndicate. Korea is one of the most active counties in cleantech and POSCO’s strategic commitment to green steel was central to their investment case. Like Vestas, part of the village since Series A, the POSCO engineers have already rolled up their sleeves to help, bringing world class systems engineering and EPC experience to the party.
It was hard, but it was worth it.
It’s startling for us to reflect that Hysata is just three years old and already valued at $325m.
To solve the climate crisis, we need to bring the ambition levels seen in Silicon Valley to all game-changing ideas like capillary-fed electrolysis. With Hysata, we are unashamedly taking the climate hyperscaling approach popularized by McKinsey, who have also joined the Hysata village.
We need technologies that can cause step changes in the cost and availability of green hydrogen brought to market faster than previously believed possible, and the 8,000 m2 manufacturing facility at Wollongong is testament to that mission-driven ambition level.
Alongside that first asset, we will be aggressively pursing scale via outsourced manufacturing, leveraging the simplicity and manufacturability inherent in the Hysata stack design. A wide team of manufacturing and supply chain partners has joined the village to help us with this. More news on this soon.
Yes, there is risk, but we are moving fast and fixing things as we go along. It’s inspiring to have so many others recognize the worthy, crazy, exciting journey Hysata is on as a chance to work hard at work worth doing.
