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Finalist – Entrepreneur of 2024: Electra
Sandeep Nijhawan, co-founder and CEO, and Quoc Pham, co-founder and CTO, Electra, Boulder
ColoradoBiz Staff //July 5, 2024//
Finalist – Entrepreneur of 2024: Electra
Sandeep Nijhawan, co-founder and CEO, and Quoc Pham, co-founder and CTO, Electra, Boulder
ColoradoBiz Staff //July 5, 2024//
After working together developing grid-scale battery solutions, Nijhawan, 54, and Pham, 60, co-founded Electra in 2020. The 105-employee startup aims to be a big part of cleaning up the steel industry.
“We started with a thesis, doing decarbonization of steelmaking,” Pham says. “And steelmaking is actually iron-making, so decarbonization of steelmaking is about decarbonization of iron, because that step of making steel is basically responsible for 90 percent of steel’s CO2 emissions.”
Electra has developed a process to electrochemically purify iron ore at 140 degrees Fahrenheit using renewable electricity. More than two-thirds of iron today is refined at 2,912 degrees Fahrenheit using coal, emitting about two tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of steel produced.
Electra’s process can utilize low-grade ore, Pham says. “We have used up most of the highest-grade iron ore, and the industry is facing a supply constraint, potentially in the next decade.”
The company raised Series A round of $85 million in 2022, then launched a pilot plant in Boulder in late 2023. The next step is commercialization on a national scale.
“We are in the process of operationalizing our vision, which is to build regional ironmaking hubs,” Nijhawan says. “We are already mapping out how we can get to our vision to get to a million tons of capacity before the end of this decade.”
Nijhawan says he’s learned to be persistent in the face of Electra’s challenges, almost to the point of foolhardiness. “For me, the first rule of entrepreneurship is that you have to believe,” he says. “Here we are with a company that has no steelmaking background, a 500-year-old industry, and we’re basically saying, ‘Let’s go disruptive.’”
Echoes Pham: “My guiding principle has always been what Steve Jobs summarized really well: Stay hungry, stay foolish.”
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