At General Catalyst, we believe that investing in energy resilience will shape our future and build a self-reliant energy system for generations. As AI, electrification, and industrialization drive rapid growth and transformation across industries, energy demand is soaring in parallel. New Systems of Power need to be built to propel the applied AI era and ensure energy resilience. Enter Fourier: building on-site, on-demand hydrogen production systems that are sustainable, affordable, and truly scalable—expanding possibilities for a more efficient, clean energy future.
In 2023, we proudly led Fourier’s Seed round, and today, we're deepening our partnership by co-leading its $18.5M Series A. From the moment we met Fourier’s co-founders, Siva Yellamraju and Ali-Amir Aldan, we were drawn to their systems thinking, bold technical approach, and audacity to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.
Siva grew up in India, where he discovered his passion for computer programming in middle school. He pursued computer engineering at IIT before moving to the U.S., where he built and sold multiple companies to industry giants like Polycom, Google, and Apple. Ali, originally from Kazakhstan, studied computer science at MIT and collaborated with Siva on their last two startups.
Despite their successful careers and deep expertise in AI, enterprise software, and consumer hardware, in 2023 Siva and Ali came to a pivotal realization: the future of human progress was now an energy challenge. Innovation in AI, computing, and infrastructure was beginning to outpace our ability to power it sustainably.
But they didn’t see energy resilience as an unsolvable crisis requiring painful sacrifices. Instead, they saw it as the world’s next great engineering challenge—one that could be tackled with innovative systems thinking and applied engineering. And with that, Fourier was born.
Engineering Energy Resilience
As energy demands continue to rise, and existing infrastructure struggles to keep pace, innovative systems thinking is needed to rearchitect energy market structures to satisfy this demand. In our view, these new market structures will involve a wider range of dispatchable generation technologies, flexible storage, and software to optimize production and distribution.
Hydrogen has enormous potential to meet these demands. As a clean fuel with high energy density, hydrogen should be a much larger contributor to this new energy future. However, high costs, inefficient production, and complex distribution logistics have historically prevented its widespread adoption. But this is a failure of market structure, rather than molecular structure.
To date, most industrial-scale use cases for hydrogen have sought to replace Steam Methane Reforming with large, monolithic electrolyzers, which are hard for customers to integrate into existing sites and have high upfront CAPEX. Other approaches have invested in large offsite facilities that require substantial infrastructure buildouts to transport and distribute the gas, resulting in a premium cost for customers.
But Fourier takes a very different, first principles approach: instead of optimizing this challenged market structure, it seeks to rearchitect the market for hydrogen by selling it onsite and on-demand to customers, providing them with a cheaper and less operationally complex product.
Fourier’s modular, software-defined electrolysis architecture produces hydrogen at the optimal cost per kg for any load factor across an array of small, small, purpose-designed electrolyzer modules using off-the-shelf components—resulting in more efficient production and lower overall system cost.
Beyond its technical sophistication, Fourier’s business model enables greater customer adoption of this technology. Fourier sells “Hydrogen as a Service”—not its devices. This aligns with how customers buy hydrogen today, through multi-year offtake agreements that lock in a $/kg cost, typically with a minimum. Fourier’s dynamic production enables the company to charge customers only for the hydrogen they are producing and using—driving a lower total cost of ownership.
After building a large base and honing its technology in this sizable initial market, Fourier plans to scale its ambitions to energy storage, where on-demand hydrogen production can transform the economics versus short-duration lithium-ion batteries.
Catalyzing a Flourishing Future
We believe that transformative technologies and visionary technologists are essential to catalyzing a flourishing future of energy resilience—and Fourier exemplifies both. Fourier’s initial pilot results confirm their thesis that on-site, on-demand hydrogen production can meaningfully reduce overall costs and finally make hydrogen economic. Their approach and results have attracted customers across several industries including specialty chemicals, pharma, and transportation. With this funding, Fourier plans to scale device production to execute its next commercial pilots, enhance system efficiency through R&D, and grow its team.
As Siva has always said, it’s time to stop imagining a better world and start engineering it. We’re excited to continue the journey with Fourier to engineer energy resilience and power humanity's next systems of power.
