Aurora Hydrogen raises $10M, but will its process decarbonize or facilitate tar sand exploitation?

A number of startups have cropped up to tackle the challenge of making hydrogen cheap and accessible for industrial users, including the latest, Aurora Hydrogen.

The startup announced a $10 million Series A yesterday led by Energy Innovation Capital and joined by Williams Companies, Shell Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures and the George Kaiser Family Foundation.

Aurora said its microwave-based approach can make hydrogen using 80% less electricity than the cleanest form of hydrogen production and with less carbon emissions than the cheapest.

Zap Energy nets $160M Series C to advance its lightning-in-a-bottle fusion tech

Fusion startup Zap Energy has reached two milestones that could nudge it ahead in the race to offer low-cost, carbon-free energy — a $160 million Series C round and a successful test of a prototype fusion reactor that could pave the way to a commercial version.

Fusion power has become an unlikely investor favorite as carbon emissions continue to rise and the effects of climate change become more apparent. We have been trying to harness the power of the sun to produce energy for many years, but after tens of billions of dollars and decades of research, fusion remains just out of reach.

Still, clever new approaches to contain scorching hot plasma — which burns at more than 100 million degrees Celsius — have brought fusion power tantalizingly close to reality. Investors are flocking to the field, hopeful that advances wrought by continued research and increasingly sophisticated computer simulations will finally help fusion pull away from its long string of failures.

Zap Energy’s oversubscribed Series C was led by Lowercarbon Capital. New investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Shell Ventures, DCVC and Valor Equity Partners. Existing investors Addition, Energy Impact Partners and Chevron Technology Ventures also contributed to the round. The startup’s core technology was spun out of research performed at the University of Washington and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Generally speaking, fusion power generates electricity by fusing hydrogen isotopes (either deuterium or tritium) into helium. The process releases neutrons, which are then captured to generate heat and spin a turbine. Atomic nuclei don’t like to fuse, so to coax them close enough for fusion to happen, nuclear scientists use extreme pressure and heat, creating a fourth state of matter known as plasma.

Swiggy backs bike taxi platform Rapido in $180 million funding

Swiggy has led a $180 million financing round into bike taxi startup Rapido as the Indian food delivery giant looks to broaden its fleet network across the country, the two firms said on Friday.

Rapido’s Series D financing round also saw participation from TVS Motor Company and existing investors Westbridge, Shell Ventures and Nexus Ventures. The new round values Rapido at over $800 million.

The six-year-old startup, which also counts Kunal Shah of CRED and Amarjit Singh Batra of Spotify India among its backers, offers its two-wheeler service in about 100 Indian cities. The startup, which has raised $310 million to date, says it has amassed over 25 million customers and 1.5 million driver-partners who it calls captains.

At a time when most other fleet startups and firms, including Ola and Uber have struggled to maker deeper inroads in India (in parts because of unfeasible economic model), Rapido’s major focus on two-wheeler has allowed it to continue to slowly grow. A number of other firms including Swiggy’s chief rival, Zomato, have been looking to back Rapido in recent months, a person familiar with the matter said.

“We hold a lot of respect for the resilience Rapido has displayed in transforming the mobility and logistics space in India,” said Sriharsha Majety, co-founder and chief executive of Swiggy.

“Swiggy and Rapido share a vision to build a logistics platform that empowers riders through more opportunities and higher earnings. While we’ve already been working together, this investment facilitates closer alignment to leverage the synergies between the platforms and improve the value we provide to both consumers and delivery executives/captains across the country,” he added.

Aravind Sanka, co-founder of Rapido, said the startup will use “learning from Swiggy’s experience” to scale “throughout” the country and enhance its riders’ experience.

“Besides, TVS Motor, who are very passionate about EVs and the future of mobility, will help us in further expansion. We hope to accelerate our pace of becoming a household name as we increase our geographies and services, on the backbone of our robust, global-standard technology,” he added.

The startup hopes to expand to serve 50 million customers in the next one year, he said.

Indian bike taxi service Rapido raises $52 million

Rapido, a bike taxi aggregator in India, said on Monday it has raised $52 million in a new financing round as the six-year-old startup looks to find space in a category dominated by Ola and Uber in the South Asian market.

The six-year-old startup’s new funding — Series C — was financed by Shell Ventures, Yamaha, Kunal Shah of CRED, Amarjit Singh Batra of Spotify India, and Positive Moves Consulting. Existing investors Pawan Munjal of Hero Group, Westbridge, Nexus Venture Partners and Everblue Management also participated in the round, which brings its to-date raise to over $130 million.

Rapido offers its two-wheeler service in about 100 Indian cities. The startup says it has amassed over 15 million customers and 1.5 million driver-partners who it calls captains. In recent years, the startup has also expanded in three-wheeler space, which it says recorded a growth of 4X since last year in 26 cities where it is operational, and hyperlocal delivery.

In a statement, the startup said its platform, which was hit by the coronavirus pandemic that prompted India to enforce lockdown in several states, has already seen an 85% recovery. The startup attributed growth in part to the growing e-commerce and hyperlocal delivery opportunities in India.

“Even though our product and business model are lucrative and have the potential to churn out an exceptional revenue, this fundraising indicates more of the investors’ confidence in us than the need for capital,” said Aravind Sanka, co-founder of Rapido, in a statement.

He said the startup hopes to expand to serve 50 million customers in the next 18 months. The startup plans to also deploy capital to broaden its technology stack — it’s looking to make strategic investments — and hire more people

The growth of Rapido follows a shift in India’s mobility market, where Uber and Ola flooded more than a million cabs in the past decade. In urban cities, two-wheelers and three-wheelers have proven more effective because they can zip through much faster in traffic and are more affordable.

Both Ola and Uber have also expanded to two-wheeler and three-wheeler categories in recent years, inking partnerships with firms such as Vogo and Yulu. Ola has additionally expanded into manufacturing of electric vehicles. On Sunday, it launched its first electric scooter, called Ola S1, that is priced at 99,999 Indian rupees, or $1,350. The electric scooter offers a range of 121 kilometers (75 miles) on a complete charge.

From the ashes of nearly a billion dollars, Ample resurrects Better Place’s battery swapping business model

A little over thirteen years ago, Shai Agassi, a promising software executive who was in line to succeed the chief executive at SAP, then one of the world’s mightiest software companies, left the company he’d devoted the bulk of his professional career to and started a business called Better Place.

That startup promised to revolutionize the nascent electric vehicle market and make range anxiety a thing of the past. The company’s pitch? A network of automated battery swapping stations that would replace spent batteries with freshly charged ones.

Agassi’s company would go on to raise nearly $1 billion (back when that was considered a large sum of money) from some of the world’s top venture capital and growth equity firms. By 2013 it would be bankrupt and one of the many casualties of the first wave of cleantech investing.

Now serial entrepreneurs John de Souza and Khaled Hassounah are reviving the battery swapping business model with a startup called Ample and an approach that they say solves some of the problems that Better Place could never address at a time when the adoption of electric vehicles is creating a far larger addressable market.

In 2013, there were 220,000 vehicles on roads, according to data from Statista, a number which has grown to 4.8 million by 2019.

Ample has actually raised approximately $70 million from investors including Shell Ventures, the Spanish energy company Repsol, and the venture capital arm of the $10 billion money manager, Moore Capital Management. That includes a $34 million investment first reported back in 2018, and a later round from investors including Japan’s energy and metals company, Eneos Holdings that closed recently.

“We had a lot of people that either said, I somehow was involved in that and was suffering from PTSD,” said de Souza, of the similarities between his business and Better Place. “The people who weren’t involved read up about it and then ran away.”

For Ample, the difference is in the modularization of the battery pack and how that changes the relationship with the automakers that would use the technology.

“The approach we’ve taken… is to modularize the battery and then we have an adapter plate that is the structural element of the battery that has the same shape of the battery, same bolt pattern and same software interface. Even though we provide the same battery system.. .it’s same as replacing the tire,” said Hassounah, Ample’s co-founder and chief executive. “Effectively we’re giving them the plate. We don’t modify the car whatsoever. You either put a fixed battery system or an Ample battery plate. We’re able to work with the OEMS where you can make the battery swappable for the use cases where this makes a lot of sense. Without really changing the same vehicle.”

Ample’s currently working with five different OEMs and has validated its approach to battery swapping with nine different car models. One of those OEMs also brings back memories of Better Place.

It’s clear that the company has a deal with Nissan for the Leaf thanks to the other partnership that Ample has announced with Uber. Ample’s founders declined to comment on any OEM relationships.

It’s clear that Ample is working with Nissan because Nissan is the company that inked a deal with Uber earlier this year on zero-emission mobility. And Uber is the first company to use Ample’s robotic charging stations at a few locations in the Bay Area, the company said. This work with Nissan echoes Better Place’s one partnership with Renault, another arm of the automaker, which proved to be the biggest deal for the older, doomed, battery swapping startup.

Ample says it only takes weeks to set up one of its charging pods at a facility and that the company’s charging drivers on energy delivered per mile. “We achieve economics that are 10% to 20% cheaper than gas. We are profitable on day one,” said Hassounah.

Uber is the first step. Ample is focused on fleets first and is in talks with multiple, undisclosed municipalities to get their cars added to the system. So far, Ample has done thousands of swaps, according to Hassounah with just Uber drivers alone.

The cars can also be charged at traditional charging facilities, Hassounah said, and the company’s billing system knows the split between the amount of energy it delivers versus another charging outlet, Hassounah said.

“So far, in the use cases that we have, for ride sharing it’s individual drivers who pay,” said de Souza. With the five fleets that Ample expects to deploy with later this year the company expects to have the fleet managers and owners pay for. charging.

Some of the inspiration for Ample came from Hassounah’s earlier experience working at One laptop per child, where he was forced to rethink assumptions about how the laptops would be used, the founder said.

“Initially i worked on the keyboard display and then quickly realized the challenge was in the field and developed a framework for creating infrastructure,” Hassounah said.

The problem was the initial design of the system did not take into account lack of access to power for laptops at children’s homes. So the initiative developed a charging unit for swapping batteries. Children would use their laptops over the course of the day and take them home, and when they needed a fresh charge, they would swap out the batteries.

“There are fleets that need this exact solution,” said de Souza. But there are advantages for individual car owners as well, he said. “The experience for the owner of a vehicle is after time the battery degrades. With ours as we put new batteries in the car can go further and further over time.” 

Right now, OEMs are sending cars without batteries and Ample is just installing their charging system, said Hassounah, but as the number of vehicles using the system rises above 1,000, the company expects to send their plates to manufacturers, who can then have Ample install their own packs.

Currently, Ample only supports level one and level two charging, but won’t offer fast charging options for the car makers it works with — likely because that option would cannibalize the company’s business and potentially obviate the need for its swapping technology.

At issue is the time it takes to charge a car. Fast chargers still take between 20 and 30 minutes to charge up, but advances in technologies should drive that figure down. Even if fast charging ultimately becomes a better option, Ample’s founders say they view their business as an additive step to faster electric vehicle adoption.

“When you’re moving 1 billion cars, you need everything… We have so many cars we need to put on the road,” Hassounah said. “We think we need all solutions to solve the problem. As you think of fleet applications you need a solution that can match gas in charge and not speed. Fast charging is not available in mass. The challenge will not be can the battery be charged in 5 minutes. The cost of building  charges that can deliver that amount of power is prohibitive.”

Looking beyond charging, Ample sees opportunities in the grid power market as well, the two founders said.

“Time shift is built into our economics… that’s another way we can help,” said de Souza. “We use that as grid storage… we can do demand charge and now that the federal mandate is there to feed into the grid we can help stabilize the grid by feeding back energy.. We don’t have a lot of stations to make a significant impact. As we scale up this year we will.”

Currently the company is operating at a storage capacity of tens of megawatts per hour, according to Hassounah.

“We can use the side storage to accelerate the development of swapping stations,” de Souza said. “You don’t have to invest an insane amount of money to put them in. We can finance the batteries in multiple ways as well as utilize other sources of financing.” 

Ample co-founders John de Souza and Khaled Hassounah. Image Credit: Ample

From the ashes of nearly a billion dollars, Ample resurrects Better Place’s battery swapping business model

A little over thirteen years ago, Shai Agassi, a promising software executive who was in line to succeed the chief executive at SAP, then one of the world’s mightiest software companies, left the company he’d devoted the bulk of his professional career to and started a business called Better Place.

That startup promised to revolutionize the nascent electric vehicle market and make range anxiety a thing of the past. The company’s pitch? A network of automated battery swapping stations that would replace spent batteries with freshly charged ones.

Agassi’s company would go on to raise nearly $1 billion (back when that was considered a large sum of money) from some of the world’s top venture capital and growth equity firms. By 2013 it would be bankrupt and one of the many casualties of the first wave of cleantech investing.

Now serial entrepreneurs John de Souza and Khaled Hassounah are reviving the battery swapping business model with a startup called Ample and an approach that they say solves some of the problems that Better Place could never address at a time when the adoption of electric vehicles is creating a far larger addressable market.

In 2013, there were 220,000 vehicles on roads, according to data from Statista, a number which has grown to 4.8 million by 2019.

Ample has actually raised approximately $70 million from investors including Shell Ventures, the Spanish energy company Repsol, and the venture capital arm of the $10 billion money manager, Moore Capital Management. That includes a $34 million investment first reported back in 2018, and a later round from investors including Japan’s energy and metals company, Eneos Holdings that closed recently.

“We had a lot of people that either said, I somehow was involved in that and was suffering from PTSD,” said de Souza, of the similarities between his business and Better Place. “The people who weren’t involved read up about it and then ran away.”

For Ample, the difference is in the modularization of the battery pack and how that changes the relationship with the automakers that would use the technology.

“The approach we’ve taken… is to modularize the battery and then we have an adapter plate that is the structural element of the battery that has the same shape of the battery, same bolt pattern and same software interface. Even though we provide the same battery system.. .it’s same as replacing the tire,” said Hassounah, Ample’s co-founder and chief executive. “Effectively we’re giving them the plate. We don’t modify the car whatsoever. You either put a fixed battery system or an Ample battery plate. We’re able to work with the OEMS where you can make the battery swappable for the use cases where this makes a lot of sense. Without really changing the same vehicle.”

Ample’s currently working with five different OEMs and has validated its approach to battery swapping with nine different car models. One of those OEMs also brings back memories of Better Place.

It’s clear that the company has a deal with Nissan for the Leaf thanks to the other partnership that Ample has announced with Uber. Ample’s founders declined to comment on any OEM relationships.

It’s clear that Ample is working with Nissan because Nissan is the company that inked a deal with Uber earlier this year on zero-emission mobility. And Uber is the first company to use Ample’s robotic charging stations at a few locations in the Bay Area, the company said. This work with Nissan echoes Better Place’s one partnership with Renault, another arm of the automaker, which proved to be the biggest deal for the older, doomed, battery swapping startup.

Ample says it only takes weeks to set up one of its charging pods at a facility and that the company’s charging drivers on energy delivered per mile. “We achieve economics that are 10% to 20% cheaper than gas. We are profitable on day one,” said Hassounah.

Uber is the first step. Ample is focused on fleets first and is in talks with multiple, undisclosed municipalities to get their cars added to the system. So far, Ample has done thousands of swaps, according to Hassounah with just Uber drivers alone.

The cars can also be charged at traditional charging facilities, Hassounah said, and the company’s billing system knows the split between the amount of energy it delivers versus another charging outlet, Hassounah said.

“So far, in the use cases that we have, for ride sharing it’s individual drivers who pay,” said de Souza. With the five fleets that Ample expects to deploy with later this year the company expects to have the fleet managers and owners pay for. charging.

Some of the inspiration for Ample came from Hassounah’s earlier experience working at One laptop per child, where he was forced to rethink assumptions about how the laptops would be used, the founder said.

“Initially i worked on the keyboard display and then quickly realized the challenge was in the field and developed a framework for creating infrastructure,” Hassounah said.

The problem was the initial design of the system did not take into account lack of access to power for laptops at children’s homes. So the initiative developed a charging unit for swapping batteries. Children would use their laptops over the course of the day and take them home, and when they needed a fresh charge, they would swap out the batteries.

“There are fleets that need this exact solution,” said de Souza. But there are advantages for individual car owners as well, he said. “The experience for the owner of a vehicle is after time the battery degrades. With ours as we put new batteries in the car can go further and further over time.” 

Right now, OEMs are sending cars without batteries and Ample is just installing their charging system, said Hassounah, but as the number of vehicles using the system rises above 1,000, the company expects to send their plates to manufacturers, who can then have Ample install their own packs.

Currently, Ample only supports level one and level two charging, but won’t offer fast charging options for the car makers it works with — likely because that option would cannibalize the company’s business and potentially obviate the need for its swapping technology.

At issue is the time it takes to charge a car. Fast chargers still take between 20 and 30 minutes to charge up, but advances in technologies should drive that figure down. Even if fast charging ultimately becomes a better option, Ample’s founders say they view their business as an additive step to faster electric vehicle adoption.

“When you’re moving 1 billion cars, you need everything… We have so many cars we need to put on the road,” Hassounah said. “We think we need all solutions to solve the problem. As you think of fleet applications you need a solution that can match gas in charge and not speed. Fast charging is not available in mass. The challenge will not be can the battery be charged in 5 minutes. The cost of building  charges that can deliver that amount of power is prohibitive.”

Looking beyond charging, Ample sees opportunities in the grid power market as well, the two founders said.

“Time shift is built into our economics… that’s another way we can help,” said de Souza. “We use that as grid storage… we can do demand charge and now that the federal mandate is there to feed into the grid we can help stabilize the grid by feeding back energy.. We don’t have a lot of stations to make a significant impact. As we scale up this year we will.”

Currently the company is operating at a storage capacity of tens of megawatts per hour, according to Hassounah.

“We can use the side storage to accelerate the development of swapping stations,” de Souza said. “You don’t have to invest an insane amount of money to put them in. We can finance the batteries in multiple ways as well as utilize other sources of financing.” 

Ample co-founders John de Souza and Khaled Hassounah. Image Credit: Ample