Just over a year ago, Moxion Power closed its doors, adding its name to a list of high-profile bankruptcies that roiled the climate tech world in 2024. The portable battery startup had raised more than $110 million in a bid to replace diesel generators at festivals and construction sites, but even that wasn’t enough to get it through the valley of death. Moxion laid off more than 400 employees and its assets were liquidated.
Now, the startup’s co-founder, Paul Huelskamp, and several former Moxion employees are back with another startup, Anode Technology Company, hoping to accomplish the same goal — ideally without repeating the same mistakes.
“We started Anode with that goal to kind of finish what we started,” Huelskamp, now Anode’s CEO, told TechCrunch.
Anode has been operating quietly, but it is now emerging with $9 million in seed funding. The round was led by Eclipse, and its partner Jiten Behl, who spearheaded the deal, was previously Rivian’s chief growth officer.
Behl’s interest in the space was sparked by his experience at Rivian, which once had an agreement to sell 100,000 electric delivery vans to Amazon. But the companies soon realized that the problem wasn’t the cost of the vans, but the charging infrastructure.
“You need a mini power plant to charge 150 vans, and that infrastructure does not exist at depots,” Behl said.
In a pinch, many fleets will turn to diesel generators. Waymo, for example, was found to be using them at its depot in San Francisco. “What businesses are actually looking for is some grid independent solutions that can provide them flexibility,” Behl added.
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Other companies, like Sparkcharge and Power Sonic, provide EV charging using mobile batteries, but Huelskamp claims Anode’s integrated hardware should set it apart. The company has designed an inverter that’ll work for the markets it is targeting, including EV charging, construction sites and live events.
Anode’s mobile battery is also slightly smaller than Moxion’s 600 kilowatt-hour unit, he said, which makes it easier to load onto flatbed trucks.
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