On our $ 4.5 M SEED Round
Our oversubscribed SEED round lets us expand our roster of testing partners and projects with automotive makers and hydrogen producers and ultimately drive the wheel for a market-driven pathway to affordable green hydrogen.
Manufacturing, logistics, and heavy industries are invisible in our daily lives. Yet, they are crucial to get products sourced, made, and delivered to our doorsteps. They are also one of the most difficult to decarbonize because of their heavy reliance on traditional fuels like diesel for trucking or natural gas for heating. In short, fuel is the lynchpin to successfully transition these industries to a carbon-neutral ecosystem, and hydrogen is the key.
Our Seed round, totaling $4.5 million, gets us one step closer to helping these industries decarbonize. We are excited to include new investment partners, Maniv Mobility, Dynamo Ventures, and EPS Shipping, specializing in mobility, logistics, and shipping. With their help, we are addressing the demand size of this equation to make hydrogen useful for our customers in high value applications like heavy duty trucking. We are excited to have them on our journey while contributing to their commitment to drive transformational change in their respective industries. This new roster of supporters add to our existing advisors and supporters like Dr. John Kopaz, Dr Theodore Krause, and Dr. Deborah Myers of Argonne National Laboratory, Steven Freilich, former Director of Engineering at DuPont and Ron van Dell, the CEO of Inspire Semiconductor Inc. I also want to express a heartfelt thanks to all the mentors that have supported both Celadyne and my own personal journey leading the company: Matthew Blieske, James Kast, and Bill Ott. Special thanks to Dan Goodman, my long time mentor who invested personally into Celadyne through his new fund, Sandy Springs Climate Partners.
We are grateful for the support of our partners, investors, and mentors and their belief in our simple mission to use hydrogen to decarbonize the world while realizing high-value use cases in mobility, manufacturing, and power. We want innovation to be the world’s primary pathway to decarbonization rather than simply stopping the use of technologys: the latter isn’t always an option for the many. Where I was growing up in Malaysia, we didn’t use diesel because we wanted to. We used diesel and diesel generators because we had to. We see hydrogen as an avenue to create better technology and to use decarbonization as the opportunity to create new ways of thinking, living, and doing that make the world more circular and equitable.
Significant capital has already been deployed to make hydrogen happen in the world. They have been focused on hydrogen production, aiming to make hydrogen as cheap as possible. The underlying assumption is that widespread adoption of hydrogen will occur if its cost is sufficiently low.
Yet I believe the core problem of hydrogen remains unsolved: how do we create a flywheel that will propel hydrogen forward, a mechanism that encourages hydrogen usage to increase demand which then incentivizes long term supply arrangements thus lowering cost, which then creates new high value applications that take advantage of the lower cost thus increasing demand, which then increases supply and so forth. You get the idea. Some folks call it the chicken-or-egg problem. I like to think of it more as an upward spiral for market transformation. This is what we do at Celadyne.
Celadyne’s strategy to unlock the potential of hydrogen is a balanced approach that targets high value use cases like mobility while enabling new avenues to cheap hydrogen production. Our first logical step is mobility because it embodies both of our values of technological transformation balanced with community impact. Heavy trucking remains difficult to decarbonize. It’s polluting for both the driver and the surrounding communities, and it’s an opportunity to launch a better product that will drive better, be safer, and change the paradigm into one that will be compatible with future autonomy as a high utilization asset. Numerically, enabling hydrogen trucking can reduce the cost of trucking by 20 % while decarbonizing the world by 400 Mts of carbon a year. We enable hydrogen trucking by making fuel cells durable so that they can last beyond the typical 15 year lifetime of a truck.
That’s not all, we are also working on electrolyzers with utilities already to reduce the cost of hydrogen production by increasing electrolyzer efficiency significantly. But that’s a story for another day.
A company’s product, culture, and vision is an amalgamation of the people in it. The founder might have an outsized effect on it, but it is true that great products take great teams. I am incredibly fortunate to have a team of brilliant engineers hailing from prestigious universities and institutions such as Stanford, Northwestern, Berkeley, University of Texas, Argonne, Siemens Energy, and others. We stuck together through 2020, bootstrapped from 30 sq ft of lab space to 4000 sqft of space today in Chicago, Illinois. A quick shout out here to the team at CBRE that built us our state-of-the-art hydrogen facility here in the heart of Fulton Market, Chicago.
One of my proud albeit unexpected metrics for the Celadyne team is that 91% of the company comes from one or more underrepresented backgrounds. We have tried to be fair, just, and transparent in all our practices, but this is an outcome that exceeds even my wildest expectations. The more poetic side of me likes to believe that tackling the challenge of climate change might just be the thing we need to unite a previously divided world.
This round of funding will enable us to drive the expansion and evolution of Celadyne Technologies. We intend to utilize the funds to further grow our team of experts, expand testing with our partners and scale. Our goal of realizing hydrogen by boosting demand while increasing supply will be accelerated significantly as we expand our roster of testing partners and projects with hydrogen producers, and ultimately drive the wheel for a market driven pathway to affordable green hydrogen.
Upon reaching scale, Celadyne will be recognized as the go-to manufacturer of cutting-edge hydrogen membranes and devices, solidifying our position as an economic powerhouse within the city of Chicago. We are proud to be the first company to address both hydrogen usage in this way for our partners and to pave the way for the widespread adoption of green hydrogen.
If you are interested in joining a world-class team, unlocking the true potential of hydrogen, email us at jobs@celadynetech.com. We will have two new openings soon. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for our latest news.
With Gratitude,
Dr. Gary Ong - CEO
