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.
“We are optimizing for the lowest cost of delivered energy. The things that drive cost are, how much energy can you put on the back of a truck? How many trucks do you need? How many drivers do you need? How many trips do you have to take?” Huelskamp said. “A smaller footprint, less energy, might mean more energy on the back of a single flatbed truck. It’s a little counterintuitive.”
“There’s a lot of those types of requirements that, frankly, we just didn’t appreciate at Moxion.”
The new startup will use contract manufacturers to make its batteries, a key difference from Moxion, which tried to do it all in house. “One of the main lessons learned is it’s really tough as a startup to take on that part of [the manufacturing],” Huelskamp said.
For Behl, those lessons served a part in drawing him to the investment. “I’m getting the benefit, as an investor, to have those learnings already secured without having to pay for that,” he said.
While EV charging depots might be an emerging market, construction and live events are more established industries. Currently, many rent fossil fuel-powered generators, which are costly and not as efficient as a large power plant. That inefficiency, Huelskamp thinks, gives Anode an opening. “We’re charging our batteries at three, four, five cents per kilowatt hour, and the industry is used to paying several dollars per kilowatt hour,” he said.
Huelskamp said Anode will use AI to optimize its operations, including charging and delivery. Eventually, that should drive down the cost close to parity with electricity from the grid, though not quite as low as off-peak pricing, he said.
“Over time, as we scale up our operations, create all these efficiencies, drive down the cost of delivered energy, and leverage the continued declines in battery costs, I think it approaches the cost of the power that we get from the grid,” Huelskamp said.