A Milwaukee startup developing devices to make climate-friendly industrial production more affordable has raised $4.2 million to pilot its technology and grow its team, the company said Thursday.
Advanced Ionics is developing industrial electrolyzers that produce hydrogen — a key component of materials like metal, glass and plastic — in a way it says is more sustainable and costs less than the current fossil fuel-derived hydrogen.
"Most of the everyday items we use have had hydrogen used to produce them," Advanced Ionics founder and CEO Chad Mason said. "Hydrogen is a very, very large emitter of carbon dioxide, so in order to decarbonize everything in the world we see, we have to decarbonize hydrogen, and you do that with electrolysis."
Advanced Ionics will use the financing to develop units to pilot with customers starting next year and commercialization could begin after that, Mason said. It plans to manufacture units that could fit inside a shipping container and is talking to potential pilot partners in Europe, he added.
The startup has around 13 employees and plans to grow to around 40 Milwaukee-area employees by the end of 2023, Advanced Ionics spokeswoman Maggie Fedorocsko said in an email.
Mason, who's from North Dakota, founded Advanced Ionics there in 2017. He came to Milwaukee in 2018 for the WERCBench Labs accelerator program through the Midwest Energy Research Consortium (M-WERC) and then decided to stay.
The program provided workshop and lab space in its facility in Milwaukee's Century City Tower, where Advanced Ionics still has its headquarters today. The company will need to move to its own factory in the next year or two as it gears up for commercialization, Mason said.
Advanced Ionics is targeting industrial customers including producers of ammonia, petrochemicals, steel and clean energy. Heavy industry is responsible for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to Advanced Ionics. The startup's technology integrates with pre-existing industrial processes, according to its Thursday funding announcement.
The company's $4.2 million financing round, which was a combination of its pre-seed and seed rounds, was led by Boston's Clean Energy Ventures. The SWAN Impact Network, an angel investing group in Texas, also contributed funding.
“The green hydrogen market is set to grow at an extraordinary rate in the coming decades as the most viable approach for decarbonizing heavy industry," Clean Energy Ventures managing partner Daniel Goldman said in a statement. “After more than five years of evaluating the sector, we backed Advanced Ionics because we believe this leadership team can scale a highly competitive technology to produce the lowest-cost green hydrogen at scale."
The technology Advanced Ionics is developing could produce green hydrogen for less than $1 per kilogram, compared with competitors' costs of around $4 to $5 per kilogram, according to the company.
