Danu Robotics builds physical AI for autonomous waste sorting, combining perception, multi-robot coordination and precision picking to recover valuable material from complex waste streams. Its systems are commercially deployed in the UK and Canada, most recently at a customer facility in Toronto in September 2026. The company holds five contracts worth over $510K and ten signed LOIs with major North American waste and resource-management firms, and was selected for the Google DeepMind Robotics Accelerator 2026 and TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200.

Gaia AI is building the operating system for forestry: SLAM-enabled LiDAR backpacks measure individual trees below the canopy, and AI trained on that ground truth extrapolates the measurements across entire landscapes from satellite imagery. TIMOs, utilities and state and federal agencies use the output to plan harvests, quantify carbon and biodiversity, and get ahead of wildfire risk. The MIT spinout has been rated TRL 8 by the USFS, holds $1M+ in NSF funding and a DoD wildfire fuel-load contract, and runs a multi-year statewide program with the New Jersey Forest Service plus a first utility vegetation-management deployment with Eversource.

Swap Robotics builds electric robots that construct and maintain utility-scale solar sites of 1,000+ acres, automating the two largest labor costs in a site’s life: panel laying during construction and vegetation management across 30 years of operations. Fleets are deployed with several of the world’s leading solar companies, which are also investors in the business. Swap has $17M+ in signed contracts to date, $7M already booked for 2027, and expects to pass $40M in signed contracts by the end of 2026.

Terran Robotics builds robots that construct homes from the subsoil already on the job site, cutting construction cost roughly 10x with no factory and no freight. Three homes now stand at ProtoTown, a new town near Lockhart, Texas: the second was completed in 32 days, the fastest turnkey 3D-printed home in the world, and the third cut labor 3.5x against the first. Two were built for Oklo, whose CEO has since invested personally; each robot costs about $100K and pays for itself within months, and the company has been covered in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

Silana builds autonomous sewing robots that take a garment from cut fabric through to a finished product without manual labor, aiming to make fast, sustainable, regional apparel production viable again in high-wage countries. Its SiBot system is roughly four times faster than manual sewing, with reductions in cost, defects and CO2 versus offshore manufacturing. Founded in Vienna in 2022 and part of HAX’s 2023 cohort, the company has since pre-booked close to 200 machine orders from established producers and raised a €1.5M round led by SOSV with OÖ HightechFonds and Material V.

ZettaJoule builds high-temperature gas-cooled reactors that deliver 24/7 firm power and process heat up to 950°C to AI data centers and energy-intensive industry, sold as energy-as-a-service. The same platform serves electricity, industrial process heat, hydrogen, refining and sustainable fuels from a single reactor design. Its team is the only one in the OECD to have designed, licensed, built and operated an advanced reactor, and it has signed an MOU with Texas A&M’s TEES for a first 30 MW U.S. project.

Ayrton Energy converts hydrogen into a room-temperature, room-pressure liquid that moves through the tanks, trucks and terminals already used for diesel. Its e-LOHC (electrochemical liquid organic hydrogen carrier) is a first-of-a-kind electrochemical carrier that cuts hydrogen logistics cost by up to 80% with no new infrastructure. First field pilots start in California and Hawaii later this year, alongside a Quebec commercial partner backed by $5M in non-dilutive funding and a technology validation partnership with a leading Japanese engineering firm.

Blaze Energy builds a compact reformer that converts ammonia and methanol into hydrogen-rich gas at the point of use, so existing marine and industrial engines can burn new fuels cleanly without being replaced. The design works for both retrofit and newbuild, giving shipowners fuel optionality rather than a one-way bet on a single fuel. Testing on commercial-scale marine engines runs this year, with first commercial deployment in 2027.

MIMiC Systems builds solid-state heating and cooling: modular units that use thermoelectric devices with advances in power electronics and controls to deliver precise thermal output with no refrigerant, no compressor and no moving parts. Removing the compressor cuts maintenance cost and extends system life, and the modular format makes retrofits far faster to install than vapor-compression equipment. MIMiC received an NSF Phase II award to scale material fabrication, has signed a corporate partner for commercial product co-development now underway, and has been featured on CNN and in MIT Technology Review.

NOC Energy replaces fossil-fired process heat with clean electrified heat, cutting industrial customers’ exposure to fuel price volatility while adding demand flexibility and meeting decarbonization targets. Its systems have demonstrated over 1,000°C in real industrial environments — the temperature band that has kept cement, glass and similar sectors hard to electrify. A 70 kW pilot has run 15,000+ hours and two 240 kW pilots with tier-1 European cement and glass partners are now in demonstration, moving the company from demonstration to commercialization.

Project K Energy is commercializing potassium-ion batteries for AI hyperscalers and next-generation EV OEMs, eliminating lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper from the cell entirely. Removing these materials eliminates the price and supply-chain exposure that comes with them, and potassium-ion chemistry offers advantages over LFP, NMC, and sodium on fast charging, safety, cost, and low temperature performance. The team has moved the chemistry from TRL <2 to >5 in three years, demonstrated 2,000 cycles on small cells and is now testing >1 Ah cells past 200 cycles, and scaled to multi-layer pouch cells. Project K is backed by $2.6M from the U.S. DOE and $650K from the California Energy Commission.

Qnetic builds grid-scale flywheel energy storage — a mechanical alternative to lithium-ion engineered for the cycling demands of AI-era grids. Its Pulsar system spins a carbon-fiber rotor on magnetic bearings inside a vacuum, delivering sub-50ms response and 22,000+ cycles with effectively zero degradation across a 30-year design life, with no lithium, no chemicals and no thermal-runaway pathway. Qnetic began testing its first full-scale Pulsar unit in September 2026, is under independent evaluation in EPRI’s deRISKED program sponsored by SMUD on behalf of eight major utilities, and has utility pilots planned for 2027 with SMUD and at NREL’s ARIES campus.

Renewell Energy converts idle oil and gas wells into flexible-duration gravity energy storage, turning a multi-billion-dollar plugging liability into an asset that serves the AI power boom in the same basins. Storage duration is configurable from roughly 1 to 100 hours, and the model reuses existing wells, electrical infrastructure, industrial sites and the oilfield workforce. Its first Gravity Well pilot is installed and operating with California Resources Corporation, a management-approved five-well pilot with Occidental is advancing, and five more California Energy Commission-funded installations follow near Bakersfield in 2027.

Tenor Energy has invented an all-electric, membrane-free water removal technology that concentrates brines to any target using 5–8x less energy than the fired evaporators industry still relies on. It sells containerized brine concentrators built entirely from off-the-shelf pumps, compressors, heat exchangers and flash vessels, serving lithium and critical minerals extraction, wastewater recycling and zero-liquid discharge. A lab prototype has concentrated lithium chloride from 10 to 30 wt% and matched the full-plant design within 8%, with six-plus pilot conversations active and a 2027 customer pilot in design.

Terra Fusion Energy is developing centrifugal mirror fusion, a modular approach the company projects can reach net positive energy on roughly $100M of capital investment. Founded in 2024 on 25+ years of patented research and two university experiments, the most recent funded by more than $5M in ARPA-E grants, it is led by the leading figure in centrifugal mirror technology. Terra Fusion has reached 10 million degrees (1 keV) in stable, peer-reviewed discharges and cleared two of the six accepted milestones toward fusion energy on under $1.5M of funding, with funded collaborations at LLNL and AFRL.

TrelliSense makes long-range, continuous open-path laser sensors that detect, locate and quantify methane emissions from the ground in near real time. Shrinking the laser platform brought per-site cost down far enough for single-site monitoring to pencil, covering both leak detection in oil and gas, landfills and wastewater and MMRV for agricultural methane abatement. TrelliSense closed its Seed in spring 2025 led by a large strategic, has paid contracts for roughly 100 new customer sites owned by top-five operators in oil and gas, landfills, Tribal energy and wastewater, and holds two full patents plus three provisionals.

XFuel develops, patents and deploys technology that converts contaminated liquid hydrocarbon waste into on-spec, drop-in marine fuel in a single step, with no hydrogen required. The fuel replaces conventional fossil fuel at price parity with SGS-validated lifecycle GHG savings of up to 85%, and needs no engine or infrastructure changes. XFuel has raised $40M including from strategic investors and prospective offtakers NYK Line and Stolt-Nielsen, holds offtake MOUs representing $100M+ in value, and has land secured and building licences granted for its first commercial plant in Spain.

5QXT recovers commercially valuable metals from smelter slag and battery black mass. These are waste streams conventional hydrometallurgy cannot process economically. Its proprietary Controlled Corrosion process dissolves target metals at ambient temperature and pressure, cutting sulfuric acid, water, energy and consumable use, and is designed to bolt onto existing processing plants. The company is deploying its pilot plant and building a commercial pipeline against stockpiles already sitting at customer sites.

AtoMe makes nano-ceramic reinforced metal powders that hold their properties in extreme environments across oil and gas, aerospace, nuclear and energy. Its first nickel alloys deliver 30–50% higher strength and hardness and 4x the high-temperature toughness of standard grades, and they make additive manufacturing viable in markets where conventional alloys fail. The 2024 MIT spinout has scaled production from 500g to 8kg per day and recently shipped 70kg to a top-three oilfield service provider for erosion testing.

Canyon Magnet Energy designs and manufactures high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets, coils and cables for fusion, quantum computing, medical systems, nano research and AI data center power. Its systems run without scarce liquid helium and ship with built-in quench detection and protection and fully automated cryocooling, delivered from its Newark, NJ line in weeks rather than the industry’s typical year-long waits. CME is post-revenue with $500K+ in purchase orders and $1M+ pending from tier-1 customers, a team out of PPPL, Brookhaven and MagLab holding 280+ publications and 40+ patents, and Navy STTR, DOE SBIR and NJEDA support.

Chemshift refines crude lithium into ultra-high-purity battery-grade material, opening a midstream market that lets lithium miners sell an intermediate product instead of shipping concentrate overseas for refining. Its process collapses the conventional multi-stage refining route into a streamlined one, targeting the 65%+ of crude lithium currently sent to China. The Calgary-based company has built and operated a complete small-scale refining system, produced battery-grade lithium from multiple customer feedstocks, secured strategic investment from Rio Tinto, and has feedstock in queue with 12+ suppliers and partners.

Cocoon turns steel slag, an abundant and growing waste stream from electric arc furnaces, into low-cost, low-carbon cementitious material for the cement industry. Its modular, low-capex plants sit next to the feedstock, and existing partnership agreements give it access to over 60 EAF sites representing 5m+ tonnes of potential supply. Cocoon went from TRL3 to TRL7 in 18 months, has signed a term sheet and is in final offtake negotiations with a cement major, and is about to break ground on a demonstration plant.

Nascent Materials manufactures next-generation LFP and LMFP battery cathode materials in the U.S., where more than 90% of cathode supply currently comes from Asia. Its pCAM-free thermo-fusion process skips the precursor step entirely, letting it take locally available, lower-grade feedstock and convert it directly into pure cathode material. The Newark, NJ company runs a fully operational bench production facility, has scaled to multi-hundred-kilogram batches, and has 10+ customer sampling programs underway.

Princeton Critical Minerals raises recovery and speeds up production across lithium brine ponds and next-generation extraction systems. Its first product line lifts productivity in existing evaporation ponds without requiring new capital expenditure, and a second approach recovers lithium from sources previously considered uneconomical, including produced water from oil and gas operations. The Princeton University spinout has commercial products deployed with leading global brine lithium producers, a global IP portfolio and international team, and backing from private investors and U.S. federal funding.

Still Bright replaces copper smelting with RACER (Rapid and Complete Electrochemical Reduction), a vanadium-based electrochemical process that extracts copper from sulfide ores and concentrates at ambient temperature and pressure. Because it is fully electric, lower-capex than smelting and sited at the mine, it opens copper resources that are uneconomical or unpermittable today — the real constraint on supply for electrification, EVs and AI data centers. Developed at Columbia University, the process has achieved 99% copper recovery from rougher concentrate, and the company has grown to 19 people in its own 14,000 sq ft Newark lab with a DOE pilot selection in August 2026.

unspun is a B Corp apparel technology company whose 3D weaving platform turns yarn directly into a semi-finished garment in minutes. No cutting, no sewing, almost no waste. Producing next to demand instead of across an ocean cuts lead times from months to days and improves brand gross margins by 400–500 bps through fewer markdowns and write-offs. Under CEO Arne Arens, former Global Brand President of The North Face, unspun is building the first automated apparel manufacturing hubs in the U.S., with letters of support from Walmart and REI and more than $50M raised from DCVC, Lowercarbon, SOSV and Fifty Years.

XERA Energy is building America’s missing critical-minerals refining layer, converting domestic nickel-rich feedstocks into high-purity products. Its patented MECS platform cuts conventional refining from roughly 110 steps to fewer than 10, with potential for 50–70% lower capex and around 40% lower production cost. The chemistry has been reproduced 20+ times and scaled 10x to 50L across black mass, MHP, nickel pig iron and ore concentrate, and five customers have validated XERA material with line of sight to three off take agreements.

Arculus Solutions applies SputteredPipe™, an MIT-licensed ultra-thin Al/Al₂O₃ multilayer coating, to oil and gas pipelines to stop corrosion and raise flow throughput by 16.5–48.8%, independently validated by DNV. The same coating lets operators move CO₂ and blend hydrogen through infrastructure they already own. Arculus sells to pipe manufacturers for new installations and retrofits deployed lines with its autonomous SputterPig™ robot, earning recurring revenue per coated foot, with a field pilot MOU signed with a major U.S. pipeline operator.