Supratim Das | Key insights on green hydrogen financing

Electric Hydrogen is working on carbon-free hydrogen production, leveraging advanced electrolyzer plants powered by solar and wind to compete with fossil fuels. Their cutting-edge technology offers hydrogen at nearly half the price of competitors, driving cost-effective clean energy.

With over $700M raised through venture capital, venture debt, equipment finance, and government grants, Electric Hydrogen strategically balances financial risk to power its mission. Their innovative project financing model separates project risks from the parent company, attracting diverse investors through ‘derisking’ tactics like insurance products and construction bonds.

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This article is part of the series: Hydrogen Innovators Podcast

Transcript

[00:00:00.43] [Music Playing]

[00:00:03.02] Supratim Das: Today, at an all-in, systems-level, total installed cost, electric hydrogen's offering is roughly half the price of any other competitor out there, including incumbents. On today's date, in our Natick, Massachusetts facility, we hold the world record for the most efficient proton exchange membrane electrolysis device ever made. One thing we're developing is an insurance product. This is going to be the first product of its kind in the industry for our warranty.

[00:00:42.60] [Music Playing]

[00:00:52.10] Karen Baert: Welcome to the Hydrogen Innovators podcast. This is a podcast series is produced by the Stanford Hydrogen Initiative, where we spotlight bold innovators in hydrogen across academia and industry. You can find our podcast series, Hydrogen Innovators, on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts.

[00:01:08.64] I'm Karen Baert, entrepreneur and Stanford MBA graduate. And today, we have the privilege to welcome Supratim Das. Supra worked on corporate development and product strategy, Electric Hydrogen, and recently also has been very involved in the bankability team at Electric Hydrogen. So he has played a key role over the last years at the company across different teams.

[00:01:31.53] Supra has a PhD in chemical engineering from MIT, focused on the degradation of EV lithium-ion batteries and also has an MBA in finance from the Sloan School of Management. Over the past eight years, he's worked as a scientist, investor, and operator in clean energy companies and at institutional venture capital funds. He was recognized by Forbes 30 UNDER 30 in Energy in 2023. Congratulations. And he's also an all-star alumni in 2024.

[00:02:02.19] So, Supra, welcome to the podcast. We're really excited to talk to you today.

[00:02:06.69] Supratim Das: Thank you for having me, Karen. I'm really excited.

[00:02:09.12] Karen Baert: So today we're going to focus, talking about financing in cleantech and especially in innovations in cleantech. But, first of all, we're starting with a high-level overview on electric hydrogen and what the product is. And then we'll talk more about the financing details.

[00:02:26.25] So let's get started. Tell us more about Electric Hydrogen.

[00:02:29.60] Supratim Das: Electric Hydrogen is a manufacturer of the world's most powerful electrolyzer plants. So we build a device that takes in water and power, electricity as the input, and produces completely carbon-free hydrogen and oxygen out the other end. The carbon-free nature depends on the carbon-free nature of the electricity that's going in, obviously.

[00:03:00.61] Green hydrogen, as it is called, is used in a variety of industrial applications across different sectors. So the big ones you will hear are production of ammonia, so-called green ammonia. Ammonia is NH3-- three parts hydrogen, one part nitrogen-- methanol, steel. And also a big part of hydrogen demand today is in refineries for oil, because hydrogen is a key input to both the hydrocracking process and the desulfurization process of crude oil refining. And so those are the main areas in which right now hydrogen is used.

[00:03:44.87] And the last part, that I didn't mention, is methanol, which is an industrial chemical. CH3OH is the chemical formula. And methanol is being explored as a shipping alternative, which currently uses bunker fuel as a fuel, which is the pretty bad stuff that comes out of the bottom of the barrel and refinery cut. And there's a push towards cleaning up that sector as well.

[00:04:14.88] Karen Baert: Great. I think that's a really good overview of the hydrogen industry today. Now, hydrogen has been around for a while. But electrolyzers-- at least widespread adoption of electrolyzers is an evolving and newer market. Tell us a bit more about the status of technology in green hydrogen, so electrolytic hydrogen specifically?

[00:04:35.67] Supratim Das: This is very much a burgeoning market. Green hydrogen is not a thing, to be very clear. It is barely a $1 billion market, but more closer to a $0 billion market today as much as we would love to believe otherwise or the chatter around it can make the audience believe otherwise.

[00:05:00.52] Hydrogen, on the other hand, has historically been produced for many, many decades. Traditionally, hydrogen is produced from natural gas in a process called steam methane reforming. And natural gas comes out of the ground as a byproduct of crude oil mining. And you convert natural gas into hydrogen. That hydrogen goes into ammonia production and oil refineries as the two main uses of it.

[00:05:28.47] The problem is that the production of this hydrogen produces a lot of CO2, roughly 10 kilograms of CO2 for every kilogram of hydrogen produced, give or take. So if you take a typical oil refinery, that takes about five tons a day of gray hydrogen, as it is called. If you produce it from natural gas of input for its processes, that's about 50 tons a day of CO2 produced just on the hydrogen itself for a refinery's activities daily.

[00:06:06.74] And there are hundreds of thousands of refineries globally. And I'm talking a daily average of a normal industrial-sized refinery. This could go on. This is a very cost-effective process that humanity has worked on over many, many decades. And the economics of this works. And it's-- oil and a fossil fuel economy is very easy to produce. The processes have been optimized. And there's a reason why humanity is powered by fossil fuels today.

[00:06:38.84] Green hydrogen, on the other hand, today is not cost-competitive to replace this gray hydrogen, because climate change is becoming a problem. And to solve climate change-- one way you can do it-- is by replacing this gray hydrogen with hydrogen that is sourced from zero-carbon power and water. Zero-carbon power examples being solar and wind.

[00:07:06.45] And if you're able to generate hydrogen that's roughly at the same cost as the fossil fuel-based alternative, then you're in business. Therein lies the problem, though, is that green hydrogen today, the reason why it is a $0 billion market is because that it is not fossil fuel priority cost.

[00:07:32.66] Now, what does that mean? So if you take Texas Henry Hub natural gas today, in the US, and you make hydrogen out of it, you'll probably end up paying roughly between $1 to maximum $1.50 per kilogram of hydrogen produced. In Europe, if you were to take European natural gas, which is more expensive than American gas, you'll end up making hydrogen at roughly $3 a kilogram.

[00:08:03.35] Now, let's compare that to industrial-scale green hydrogen. If you take an electrolyzer, which is the device that's used to make green hydrogen from power and water-- let's talk about the big incumbents, like Siemens or Cummins or Tyson group. You take their equipment-- you're probably looking at hydrogen produced at roughly $5 to $6 a kilogram of hydrogen or green hydrogen.

[00:08:38.30] Now, there's two main components to this cost. One, as you can imagine, is the operating expense, the cost of electricity. As solar and wind expands, you can cut the cost of electricity by half and also make that electricity firm, which is basically having it available 24/7. Normally, the Sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow, and solar and wind have an availability problem. The technical jargon for that is capacity factor.

[00:09:15.10] If you're able to solve that, either by inexpensive, long duration, grid-level energy storage, or other ways, by overbuilding solar and wind, you can have 24/7 carbon-free renewable power. That is a key, key lever in reducing the cost of green hydrogen. And the other big component-- and this is the reason why we're in business today-- is the CapEx, the capital expenditure-- is the cost of the plant itself. Electric hydrogen today manufactures 100 megawatt-- or 55 tons a day-- capable electrolyzer plants. That roughly is an all-in cost of half of all of our competitors in the US today.

[00:10:10.81] Karen Baert: In terms of dollars per kilowatt?

[00:10:13.57] Supratim Das: In terms of dollars per kilowatt, or for our listeners who might find kilowatts confusing because kilowatts is an input to watts kilograms of hydrogen output, but yes. Today, at an all-in, systems-level, total installed cost, electric hydrogen offering is roughly half the price of any other competitor out there, including incumbents. And that allows us to produce hydrogen at close to half the price of what anyone else is offering. It's still not there from a fossil fuel parity price standpoint. But we're the closest we have ever been, as humanity, to delivering fossil-free hydrogen.

[00:11:02.47] Karen Baert: What is the key unlock to that CapEx reduction or cost reduction?

[00:11:07.83] Supratim Das: Yeah, that's a great question. We are addressing it by multiple ways. If you look at the big chunks of CapEx, a big part of it is a technological issue. Electrolyzers historically, these were not meant to be scaled to the levels that we are attempting to scale it at, to solve industrial decarbonization for the planet. The electrolyzers were made on smaller scales. And traditionally, also, the Europeans-- the Nordics were the first to pioneer a large-scale electrolysis. And they connected it to the hydroelectric power plants, where power prices that were way higher. And all of those plants went out of business when steam methane reforming was invented at an industrial scale.

[00:11:59.28] To unlock true, low CapEx, there's a big technological innovation component that we have pioneered. On today's date, in our Natick, Massachusetts facility, we hold the world record for the most efficient proton exchange membrane electrolysis device ever made. And our go-to-market, the first product, is the most efficient proton exchange membrane electrolyzer that's ever been made.

[00:12:29.47] And so that unlocks just simple coulombic efficiency for electricity. The same amount of power can produce more hydrogen for the customer. And that unlocks cost savings.

[00:12:44.00] The other component is an optimization of how the electrolyzer is made, the engineering around it, and the engineering of the power systems and the balance of plant that is included within our scope. Traditionally, a lot of electrolysis companies just make what we call the electrolyzer stack itself, which is a refrigerator-sized unit-- an American refrigerator sized unit, not the European ones, which are smaller. Our electrolyzer stack looks like a large American refrigerator, which produces the same amount of hydrogen of what the traditional, so-called alkaline technology can produce from a giant school bus-sized device. So you save a lot on materials from producing this device, from technological innovation.

[00:13:40.49] And the last big cost component is the construction aspect. Because electric hydrogen offers the power systems, the balance of plant, and the electrolyzer stack all within its scope, we are able to optimize the construction of this entire plant by eliminating interfaces between the equipment manufacturer, that is us; the construction engineering portion of it; as well as the execution of the project. And I'm trying to stay away from jargon as much as possible. You would typically call this EPC functions.

[00:14:23.81] But the end goal or the end idea is that you have to build a giant plant on the ground that you can power. You can plug-in power and water in, to produce green hydrogen and oxygen, which is exploded in the atmosphere. And the cost to build this thing at a scale, that no one's ever done before, is unknown. And our first project, this 100-megawatt electrolyzer plant that I just mentioned, is roughly four times the size of the largest green hydrogen plant ever built in the modern era. And we're walking through the unknowns right now.

[00:15:06.63] Karen Baert: So if I summarize, the key advantages are, one, much higher efficiency, which means you need less electricity for the same hydrogen output. Secondly, is smaller footprints. So you can do more with less. So you save on material costs. And then m but not least, standardized, optimized manufacturing, which saves us a lot on cost as well. Is that a fair summary?

[00:15:31.76] Supratim Das: Absolutely-- standardized, optimized manufacturing, and construction, deployment and commissioning, yes.

[00:15:38.27] Karen Baert: I think that gives a good initial overview on what electric hydrogen does and what its product is. I think this is a good transition to start talking a bit more about financing and maybe before we go there.

[00:15:49.55] The reason why we're talking about financing here is because financing for green hydrogen is hard. And, obviously, this is not just a green hydrogen problem in general. In climate tech, any key technology innovations come with challenges around financing, basically to break the chicken and the egg problem.

[00:16:09.35] What is that? Well, to further develop technologies and scale up, we need financing and ideally financing with a low cost of capital. But financiers don't really like to take risks. And, obviously, new technologies-- technology innovations are risky by nature. But, obviously, if we can't finance and can't deploy, we cannot de-risk.

[00:16:29.38] Love to hear an overview from your side on what types of financing there are out there for a company like Electric Hydrogen and how you differentiate them?

[00:16:39.37] Supratim Das: Because, like I said, we're not, quote unquote, "in the money" yet. And for anybody to give dollars to build something that's more expensive than what is currently being done is a hard sell. And that's the world we live in.

[00:16:59.66] And that's the chicken and the egg problem you mentioned, is, A, we need money to be able to bring the cost down. And for that, you need believers in the industry and that the cost can indeed come down. And, obviously, we are in this business because we are believers and doers and executors at the same time.

[00:17:22.00] But the second part is, how do you think about running a company like this? And this applies to any kind of hardtech, cleantech company that are trying to build large scale, real world projects, to make an impact on how humanity uses energy.

[00:17:41.55] So, I'll talk through a little bit around how we have thought about financing. And for the audience, that can also be translated to some of the other industries as well and how they have also thought about financing the scale-up or the journey.

[00:18:04.23] So Electric Hydrogen's electrolyzer device could fit into a hand when the company was started. It was a little, handheld device that could make-- rather, break water very, very effectively if you plugged it in. And it was the most powerful electrolyzer cell ever made.

[00:18:30.15] And our founders, Raffi Garabedian and Dave Eaglesham and Derek Warnick-- so they have deep experience in the power business and solar industry, battery industry background. And they went out to raise venture capital equity money, like most other cleantech companies that have groundbreaking technology.

[00:18:52.17] Over the last four years of our existence, we've completed through series C of financing. I would say a little over $700 million raised in different forms of equity debt as well as government grants. And I was involved in all parts of those financings.

[00:19:16.80] Traditional venture capital equity is pretty standard. You receive money to do business and, in exchange, you give shares of your company to someone else. That is what, in technical jargon, is called a high cost of capital source.

[00:19:35.32] What does that really mean? It means that for every dollar you take from someone else, you're having to give away a piece of your company. And because you're giving away a piece of your company, the person, the financier who is giving you that dollar, is invested in your success. They want to see you grow.

[00:19:58.25] But at the same time, because they also ride the growth success curve, they take a much larger portion of your success for the dollar that they gave you to begin with. And that is where the fundamental notion of cost of capital comes in, is how expensive is $1 to you as a company versus how expensive is it-- or the financier to give you $1 from their own balance sheet?

[00:20:29.12] And the second lever that we will structure this conversation around today is risk. Is, how much risk is the person that's giving you the dollar willing to take? Are they willing to lose it all? Are they a betting person or are they not willing to lose it all and they're perfectly happy, also, not making a so-called 10X return?

[00:20:57.18] And when structuring a company's financial capital stack, we have to think about cost of capital and risk very, very deeply, both at the corporate level as well as on the product and the project level. And I can go into-- I can list off different vehicles, but I'll pause there in terms of offering a thinking framework around structuring financing for late tech companies.

[00:21:31.29] Karen Baert: I like this lecture a lot. And so if we think about early stage venture capital dollars, you could argue that they're willing to take a lot of risk, because you're very early in the journey. But that also has to come with a big reward for them later down the line. And so that means it's high risk, but also relatively high cost of capital.

[00:21:50.84] Supratim Das: Yes.

[00:21:51.71] Karen Baert: Right. Now staying with the topco, so the company itself for a while, what are other vehicles that are maybe in different positions on the spectrum when it comes to cost of capital and risk?

[00:22:08.75] Supratim Das: Absolutely. So let's think about the topco, the parent company first. The parent company-- the cost of capital of a fast growing startup is quite high. Why? Because $1 to you today, to grow the business, is worth way more than $1 to you two years from now when you have grown a significant amount because that dollar today could be used to retire a lot of existential risks that might render 2 to 3x growth or might put you out of business.

[00:22:45.65] So the value of money today is a lot higher and it's hard to quantify in an Excel sheet. But the cost of capital for a fast growing cleantech/hardtech startup is really, really high, which means that venture finance is typically something that shouldn't be used. But there's no other way because you don't really have a product. And the other levered risk becomes way more important, because if you don't have a product in the market and you don't have operating hours and runtime, and all you have is a track record, credibility, and a product in the lab, you're a very high risk entity in general.

[00:23:31.24] As a company, you can go out of business anytime. And risk tends to take the priority in terms of deciding financial structure. And venture capital equity from cleantech venture capital firms is the priority. And so we raised a little over, I would say, $550 million in terms of venture capital equity.

[00:23:58.72] As the company grew, we also put together a venture debt facility. Venture debt is a unique flavor of debt. Now, debt is typically a lower risk form of capital. But debt also uses collateral, like if you've ever taken loans out on your car, on your house, the collateral on a car loan is the car itself, and similarly for the house. And if you don't pay back your loan, you will lose that car or lose the house.

[00:24:32.94] Now, if you're a startup, you don't really have a lot of assets you can lose. What do you have? An office and a few tables and chairs, and maybe something in the lab that someone else may or may not be able to use. And so debt traditionally becomes tough for early stage climate tech companies.

[00:24:51.16] But there are ways in which the venture debt world, that is some specific debt providers who have figured out a way to finance these early stage startups, either by valuing some part of his assets or by figuring out structures of innovative interest payments, or maybe putting in some warrants that allows the debt provider to participate in a company's success. It has allowed us to put these facilities in place. So we have close to a $100 million facility syndicated across four banks, HSBC, JP Morgan, Stifel Bank, and Hercules Capital. These look more like term loan type venture debt. Then we have a $50 million equipment finance line from Trinity Capital.

[00:25:42.37] Equipment finance, again, is a specific type of debt that is collateralized against factory equipment. So it's pretty clear cut, is if you default on that debt, that specific piece of equipment gets repossessed by the debt provider and is sold off into the market.

[00:26:01.66] And then we have a bunch of government grants. So these are grants from the US Department of Energy. Close to $65 million of government grants, specifically around subsidizing manufacturing equipment in our manufacturing facility at the gigafactory for electrolyzer production that we have in Devens, Massachusetts. That's about 45 minutes northwest of Boston.

[00:26:28.14] At its full capacity, it's designed to produce 1.2 gigawatts a year of electrolyzer plants. And that, in its full capacity, will be the largest electrolyzer plant in North America, that is when demand materializes for it. Right now, demand for green hydrogen is not north of a gigawatt a year in the US. And the last part is Department of Energy grants for technological innovation, to reduce the cost of stacks down to enable fossil fuel parity hydrogen.

[00:27:02.46] So these were provisioned both by the bipartisan infrastructure law as well as the Inflation Reduction Act. So to date, that is how we have structured the capital stack, which looks decently similar to any other cleantech company that's building large scale projects of our size.

[00:27:22.94] Karen Baert: Interesting. And so to stay with your structure and cost of capital and risk, I guess venture capital was highest cost of capital, highest risk. Venture debt comes next to that. Still a good amount of risk, and hence a good amount of cost of capital. And then equipment, that would be lower risk because you have the actual assets and lower cost of capital.

[00:27:44.97] And then, I guess, non-dilutive funding is a bit of an odd one out, because that's technically zero cost of capital. But, of course, that's not always available and not always easy to get.

[00:27:55.43] Supratim Das: Absolutely. And the application process is slow. So when you're running a fast-growing business, you cannot certainly rely on the grant or when it comes through because as it is dependent on the public markets and it's something that is we definitely are very grateful to have, but not something that we have planned the growth of the business around.

[00:28:17.36] Karen Baert: Understood. Now, one type of financing that we haven't talked about yet is project financing. My understanding is that technically, in an ideal world, since you're an OEM, you sell to customers who build hydrogen projects. And so you wouldn't necessarily need project financing yourself.

[00:28:35.79] However, typically, initially, you do need to do a few of your own projects to further the rest of technology and then that type of capital does become relevant. How do you think about that vehicle and how have you, if at all, used it in the context of electric hydrogen?

[00:28:52.58] Supratim Das: Yeah. So now we're opening up a world that's way more vast than what we have talked about here. If you pull in the total amount of money that is in the venture debt and venture capital equity world, it is less than a tenth of the money that we are talking about at project levels.

[00:29:18.35] Cheque sizes become way larger. You're thinking nine-figure check sizes and you're looking at large-scale infrastructure projects, large forms of debt at project level, project equity. So this becomes a different ball game. And as a startup, as a growing startup, we're at the cusp of taking our toes into this world.

[00:29:48.56] So before we go in, let me explain what project financing is, because until now, we have talked about how to finance the parent company. Now, we go into just look at parent company financing or corporate finance. There's a few problems. One is if you're selling products into the market, that takes a lot of money to build. And if things go wrong with that product, you necessarily don't want the entire corporate to be facing that liability just from a legal structuring standpoint.

[00:30:29.59] Second is, if you're building a product which basically requires money to buy a lot of pipes and pumps and heat exchangers, you don't want to use expensive venture capital equity dollars to buy pumps and pipes. That doesn't sound like a very good use of that money. You want to use that money to grow the company and hire people and do M&A and strategic partnerships and growth strategy. And so there has to be a better way to do it.

[00:31:01.39] And the third reason is that as a company, you might want to be building a lot of products at the same time. And that means you need money to buy a lot of pipes, pumps, and heat exchangers and unit operations equipment. If you start dipping into the corporate coffers to do that, you might suddenly find yourself without enough money to pay your own employees. So project finance is a way to create a separation between running the corporate-level company and also having the cash to do projects, as well as realize returns for customers without exposing the company to big levels of risk.

[00:31:53.88] We are an OEM. We are an equipment manufacturer. A green hydrogen project has three main parts. One is the power interconnection. The second is the actual electrolyzer plant itself. And the third is the offtake equipment. That is, how is the integration of the hydrogen going to work for whatever the end product is?

[00:32:16.80] These projects can be owned by the customer. And that could be an example of a customer-- it could be an oil company or a fertilizer company-- or they could be owned by a hydrogen project developer, and/or they could be owned partially by a large infrastructure financier or a project finance bank. All of them can have a stake in this special purpose vehicle and can either benefit from the revenue that is made by the sales of hydrogen into whatever the end use is, or just make a fixed amount back based on the terms of the investment.

[00:33:03.67] So at Electric Hydrogen as an OEM, original equipment manufacturer, we are focused on removing as many roadblocks as possible for our customer, to raise project-level financing. Now, that's hard. Why? Because traditionally, project financing is a lower cost of capital finance, but also a way lower risk-tolerant financing mechanism.

[00:33:33.51] Because project finance, if a project goes under, the people who put in money into the project do not necessarily get to go back to the parent company and ask for that money back. That money is gone. And now, if you think about it, if we are building a giant, large-scale hydrogen project that has never been built before, the financier needs to have some level of comfort that they're not going to lose all of their money.

[00:34:01.15] So how do they view this? They view this in a couple of different ways. One is, is their field operating data for real-world projects. And two, what is the level of technical and engineering risk to realizing revenue? And. And, actually, there's three parts. And, three, what is the market build on the tax credits and policy incentive side, as well as the price of the final product side that is going to generate cash flows?

[00:34:36.26] For us, we are very focused on de-risking the product itself, as well as working with the customer to make the construction and the execution, deployment, commissioning of it as simple as possible. From a financing standpoint that can take a few different forms. One thing we're developing is an insurance product. This is going to be the first product of its kind in the industry for our warranty.

[00:35:10.07] Think about it as a synthetic, giant, nine-figure balance sheet that sits behind our own products' warranty such that if Electric Hydrogen goes out of business, the customer can still keep running the product and keep making money on the sales of hydrogen. And so we decouple the risk of the product from the risk of the parent company. And that's what we traditionally call bankability, is how does a bank get comfortable putting money into a project that necessarily cannot have a fallback into the corporate-level financing structure?

[00:35:56.51] There are other ways to do this, too, in addition to insurance products. We're looking at construction bonds, advanced payment bonds that you can put in place, that gives the customer a guarantee that the thing is going to be built on time and there are penalties if you don't build it on time and on budget. And that the actual final electrolyzer plant is going to be producing hydrogen at the spec that is required for producing the final product, whatever it is. It could be ammonia. It could be fuels, methanol, steel, et cetera. So there are specific bounds you can put in place.

[00:36:39.22] And the project itself can be owned in form of project-level equity financing. That is, because this is a special purpose vehicle-- it is a standalone company and by itself. So a financier can come in and put in an equity stake in the project, similar to venture capital. That is an equity stake in the parent company. But in this case, the project-level equity would be solely reliant on the success of that specific product working out rather than the entire corporate entity expanding.

[00:37:16.69] And it could also be financed by project-level debt that is a loan given for the construction of the project that gets paid back either from the revenues from that specific project or gets paid back by contributions from other sources. It could be governmental, tax incentives, or otherwise. The risk of project debt takers is quite low. They don't like to write high-risk checks, contrary to venture debt investors that are way more risk tolerant.

[00:37:58.76] And so project-level debt-- getting financiers comfortable with product-level risk and project-level risk to unlock nine-figure checks at project-level debt is what we are really focused on for the first project. And it is a multi-entity collaboration between us, the OEM; the project debt provider; the customer. And we're putting in place a whole host of financial instruments to enable that.

[00:38:33.03] Karen Baert: Very interesting. So, in general, project financing is lower risk capital and goes to a different entity. So Electric Hydrogen doesn't take project financing. But your customers-- their projects-- take project financing. And so you're very involved because you want to help your customers get that financing.

[00:38:52.38] Supratim Das: Absolutely.

[00:38:53.13] Karen Baert: Supra, I think this was a really good overview of the different types of capital. And I think this is a very complex world. And you have a really unique ability to explain it in very structured and clear terms. So I'm sure our listeners will benefit from that.

[00:39:09.13] I want to transition to talking a bit more about your personal journey, especially because I think you have a really cool, unique story on how you got into Electric Hydrogen.

[00:39:19.47] Supratim Das: Yeah, it's a funny story. I used to work at this institutional venture capital firm called Energy Impact Partners with Shayle Kann, who I think a lot of our audience will be familiar with from the Catalyst podcast. I remember when I was working with the team, Electric Hydrogen was starting to raise its series A round. And as I got a sneak peek into the company, I fell in love with the approach and the team of what Electric Hydrogen was trying to accomplish.

[00:39:56.80] It was daunting enough to pique my interest, because we're literally trying to change the way that heavy industry uses energy. And this is across different sectors, a $2 trillion market, with a vast impact on global carbon emissions. That can have a material impact on the rate of climate change of our planet.

[00:40:23.64] And also the technological starting point-- when I was at MIT, I was very focused on technological innovation. One thing I did miss, though, was after you write your papers and patents in an academic setting, is what happens to it? We keep saying, someone's going to take it and run with it.

[00:40:43.83] And at Electric Hydrogen, I had an opportunity to be at the starting point of a cutting-edge technology that was superior to anything else that's ever been made on the planet in that specific area, by far. And the mission was to build a real product around it and build teams and actually address a real customer need.

[00:41:08.72] I fell in love with that mission. And so what I ended up doing was after we did the deal, the series A, I jumped ship from the fund into the company itself. And Cheryl now sits on our board. And we often have meaningful conversations about how the company has grown and changed.

[00:41:33.71] When I was in the deal team, the company had just hired its first employee, Alex Vanselow, who's our head of product. I joined the company. And I think we were 40 something people, and then now we're close to 300 people. And the company has been around for four years.

[00:41:50.49] So it's been a fascinating journey of not only the financing side of Electric Hydrogen, but also how the product itself has grown and how the different teams have been built around it. And to be a part of that, and be a part of this so-called rocket ship DNA, it's been a huge learning experience for me.

[00:42:11.39] Karen Baert: I can imagine. It must have been a wild ride already. And it's just the start.

[00:42:16.64] Supra, we're getting to the end of the podcast. But I want to make sure to ask one last question that we ask every guest on the podcast. I have this strong belief that we all stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us. And that it's actually standing on these giant shoulders that makes us see further. So in that context, who inspires you most and why?

[00:42:39.68] Supratim Das: Yeah, I think that's a great question. I'll answer it in two parts. I think within the context of Electric Hydrogen, I deeply, deeply, deeply look up to my founders.

[00:42:51.75] Raffi Garabedian was our CEO. He has deep experience at First Solar. And he's seen the evolution of the US cleantech industry in its entirety. And to have a chance to work with him is phenomenal.

[00:43:10.79] Dave Eaglesham, our CTO and founder, who really pioneered this technology, he has also a deep background for solar. Dave was the CTO of First Solar as a private company. And then Dave actually hired in Raffi to be the CTO for Solar as a public company for eight years, who built it to multi-billion dollar revenues. And Dave also ran a battery company for a little while and was at Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

[00:43:36.14] And then lastly, Derek Warwick, who's our third co-founder and CFO. And he has deep expertise in power and gas trading, utilities, as well as a company building in early stage cleantech. So I am just very grateful to be here and to have a chance to work with them is huge.

[00:43:58.24] On personal life, this is going to be funny, but I'm growing up, I was a huge martial arts combat sports fan. And one of my biggest inspirations is John Cena. He started his career in WWE wrestling, which a lot of people know of as being fake. But I admire him for the character that he has played out in the WWE setting of hustle, loyalty and respect.

[00:44:29.50] And, obviously, now he's spending way more time in Hollywood. And I got a chance to meet him in 2018 in the Boston Children's Museum. And that was the high point of my life. And everything else has been downhill from there.

[00:44:42.63] [LAUGH]

[00:44:44.38] But I deeply respect the fact that he's actually never submitted or tapped out in any WWE match. And he wears his badge of hustle, loyalty, and respect as a way of life. And I try to emulate that in my own. So those would be the biggest factors of inspiration.

[00:45:06.52] Karen Baert: I love the link between character and persistence and the cleantech journey also doesn't go unnoticed. Supra, it's been such a joy to talk to you today and learn from you. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with the world. And I can't wait to continue to follow the great progress that Electric Hydrogen is making in the green hydrogen world.

[00:45:28.29] Supratim Das: Thank you for having me, Karen. And really enjoyed talking with you as well. And good luck to you for your endeavors.

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