The journey towards establishing a business is often crystal clear, even if the founder is unaware of it at the time.
Such was the case for Jimmy Rojas, who started on the path towards founding Evoloh while pursuing his graduate degree at Stanford University and working on hydrogen and energy systems. It continued when he later worked at Baruch Future Ventures, analyzing potential deals.
“I was always looking at hydrogen deals,” Rojas told TechCrunch. “I remember those guys joking that I was a terrible investor because I passed on every single deal because I found issues with every single company out there. By the end, we were like, it’s better if I just start my own.”
Hydrogen is a critical element for many chemical manufacturers, and both startups and investors are betting on its potential to combat carbon pollution in a variety of industries such as steel, cement, aviation, and long-haul trucking. With his experience, Rojas had a keen understanding of the challenges facing hydrogen. In his opinion, the biggest hurdle was in the manufacturing of electrolyzers, which are essential for producing hydrogen gas.
According to Rojas, “Electrolyzers are very expensive. They are really hard to produce, logistically complicated, very hard to transport and install, and they are often entangled in politically and environmentally problematic supply chains.”
Rojas’s company, Evoloh, aims to solve all these issues simultaneously by focusing not on novel materials, as is typically the case with hydrogen startups, but rather on manufacturing. In doing so, he hopes to make hydrogen a vital component of the world’s energy system.
“Clean, cheap hydrogen could be a platform on which completely new industries can be developed in the future,” Rojas said.
While many companies devote considerable resources to developing specialized membranes, which are crucial for separating hydrogen from water, Rojas believes that if hydrogen becomes a sizeable market, electrolyzers will quickly become commoditized. Today, membrane development has turned into somewhat of an arms race: “Someone will always have a better one,” he said.
Evoloh designs its own electrolyzers based on alkaline electrolysis. In this method, two electrodes are submerged in an alkaline water solution (usually with a high concentration of potassium or sodium hydroxide). As electricity passes through the solution, water is divided into hydrogen gas and hydroxide, while hydroxides are combined into water and oxygen.
Alkaline electrolysis differs from the other primary approach, proton-exchange membrane electrolysis, in several ways. One of the most significant differences is that alkaline electrolysis does not require expensive exotic metals, such as platinum. This gives alkaline electrolyzers a cost advantage from the start, one that Evoloh builds upon with its more affordable manufacturing process.
Evoloh has also designed its electrolyzer stack, the core of the system, using low-cost, domestically sourced materials and components. “We went to power supply companies and asked for the cheapest, most readily available power supply they had. We did the same with every other component, including pumps, heat exchangers, and everything else,” Rojas shared.
To reduce manufacturing costs even further, Evoloh uses roll-to-roll printing, a technique that has been used for centuries in printing presses and has more recently been utilized in battery manufacturing. Both electrodes and membranes, the two primary components of an electrolyzer, can be produced using roll-to-roll equipment. Once off the assembly line, they are cut to size and assembled into the final product.
Rojas mentioned that the result is a compact and efficient electrolyzer that is easy to transport and install. The goal is to “be prepared for a scenario in which [electrolyzer] stacks can become a hardware commodity.”
Evoloh is still working out the kinks in its manufacturing process, although Rojas expects the company’s first factory to be operational by the end of next year. At full capacity, it will be capable of producing 3.75 gigawatts of electrolyzers using domestically sourced materials. This is a substantial amount, considering that the world had just 11 gigawatts of manufacturing capacity in 2022, according to the IEA.
Evoloh recently completed an oversubscribed $20 million Series A round, led by Engine Ventures with participation from 3M Ventures and NextEra Energy. Rojas stated that the company will use the funding to refine its manufacturing process, deploy large-scale pilots, and acquire paying customers.
