Despite being the most abundant element in the universe, making cheap, clean hydrogen here on Earth has been a surprisingly tough nut to crack.
“Hydrogen has always been plagued with a couple problems, One is, how do you make it efficiently? Another one is, how do you distribute it efficiently?” Siva Yellamraju, co-founder and CEO of Fourier, told TechCrunch.
Most recent hydrogen startups have been focused on making modular electrolyzers, allowing them to be mass produced and squeezed into shipping containers. Yellamraju’s company has taken that trendy tactic to the extreme. Fourier is targeting something no bigger than two standard server racks standing side-by-side.
Investors have taken note, with General Catalyst and Paramark Ventures leading an $18.5 million Series A round, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Other participating investors include Airbus Ventures, Borusan Ventures, GSBackers, MCJ Collective, and Positive Ventures.
Fourier’s server analogy extends inside the module, too. There, the company installs multiple small electrolyzers — about 20 in the current design — that it calls blades. Each blade is fed water from a pump shared among them, and electricity comes from lightly modified power supplies borrowed from the data center world.
“We reprogram them, retrofit them to run electrolysis,” Yellamraju said. “It also allows us to use these components that are already sold in the billions.”
Within each hydrogen production module, software manages the blades to optimize their operation. Here, Yellamraju said the company was inspired by another bit of commoditized technology, the lithium-ion battery.
“If you look at companies like Tesla, they started with small cells, an array of them, so that allowed them to do off the shelf components, but push the complexity into a compute layer,” he said.
Tesla’s battery packs string together thousands of smaller batteries, all of which are overseen by a combination of hardware and software that is known as a battery management system. The BMS handles charging and discharging of each individual cell, and it will also watch for anything that suggests a battery is degrading, reducing its use or flagging it for repair.
Fourier’s system similarly monitors the performance of each electrolyzer blade, tweaking output and watching for signs of degradation. The goal, Yellamraju said, is to “push the overall efficiency problem and production problem into a data optimization problem.”
The startup has operated two lab-scale pilots, which make about a kilogram of hydrogen per hour, with a pharmaceutical manufacturer and a solar energy company. Up next are two commercial-scale pilot plants, one at a petrochemical plant in Ohio and another at a company in Fremont, California, that makes airline parts. Both should be operating by June. Ultimately, Fourier is targeting customers that need six to 20 kilograms per hour, which would require around 300 kilowatts to 1 megawatt of electrolyzer capacity.
Fourier’s potential commercial customers, which include pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and ceramics manufacturers, pay around $13 to $14 per kilogram today. Yellamraju said that his company can deliver hydrogen for $6 to $7 per kilogram, not including any government incentives. “With our margin, they’re still saving half the price of hydrogen,” he said.
