🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week:

Qnetic

✍️ Notes from the Editors

Christmas has come early for Unicorner readers. 🎄

Why? You can directly invest in this week’s company.

You read that right. For a limited time, you can invest $300 or more in this week’s cover.

Take a read and decide for yourself whether Qnetic’s offering is the solution to our world’s growing energy problems.

- Arek and Ethan 🦄

Zero lithium & zero-degradation batteries

Qnetic is building battery technology to make energy storage more efficient and sustainable. Its mechanical batteries, which leverage flywheel energy storage—a system for storing energy in a rotating flywheel—don’t degrade over time, are projected to be 50% cheaper than traditional lithium ion batteries, and are far more temperature-resilient. While traditional batteries store energy chemically, Qnetic stores energy kinetically by using input energy to spin a rotor. The energy is stored in the frictionless motion of the spinning rotor, and when the battery needs to release this energy, the rotor slows down to convert the stored kinetic energy back into electricity. Although Qnetic’s full-size production product is still in the works, with this novel approach, the team is aiming to revolutionize energy storage and propel us to a greener future.

🔗 Check it out: Qnetic

A word from our partner

Invest in the future of sustainable energy

Imagine a future where energy storage enables our world to be powered reliably 24/7 without fossil fuels.

The simple reality is that lithium ion batteries are an unsustainable solution to our world’s energy problem. Between environmental detriments and the complex geopolitics around sourcing lithium ion batteries, it’s evident a better solution is needed.

The best part? You can join the movement. Invest in Qnetic on Wefunder with as little as $300 and be part of the energy revolution.

This is sponsored content. Readers should conduct their own research before making investment decisions.

💰 Business Model

Qnetic sells its batteries to the grid, but the grid probably isn’t what you think it is: rather than being a centralized entity that delivers power from plants to your outlet, it’s a decentralized collection of private corporations, local governments, and national utility agencies. Specifically, Qnetic sells to the entities within the grid that need to store large amounts of energy, such as private developers and infrastructure investors facilitating energy storage, private solar/wind farms, and enterprise energy consumers.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

📖 Founder Story

While Michael Pratt and Loïc Bastard were engineers by day, they were constantly building together outside of work. By collaborating on big construction art projects and other pursuits, they realized they wanted to work together full-time, and were united by a mission of building for human impact. Although they tinkered in a wide array of problem spaces from healthcare to politics, with their deeply technical backgrounds, they kept coming back to the problem of energy storage. While exploring potential solutions, Loïc’s expertise “in all things rotating machinery” led them to found Qnetic around the thesis that the energy storage of the future needed to be mechanical.

💼 Opportunities

Qnetic doesn’t have any active job listings but is looking for talented people to fill some specific roles. Reply to this email with your resume if any of the following roles sound interesting to you:

🔮 Our Analysis

With a warming planet, we need to transition to clean energy. But as we make this transition from fossil fuels, we face major problems in current energy infrastructure. Power systems are traditionally based on thermal energy from burning fossil fuels, meaning energy suppliers can modularly turn them up or down to meet demand. During the day, when people are consuming more energy, producers can burn more fuels, and at night, when demand drops, suppliers ramp down production. Through the ability to modularly adjust energy, we’ve developed a grid that matches the supply and demand of energy directly through the rates at which we produce it.

But clean energy doesn’t work like this. We can’t modularly adjust the sun or the wind, meaning that transitioning to clean energy like solar or wind means potentially losing this match between energy supply and energy demand. Therefore, in the future, the grid will need to have the ability to store energy while production is at a surplus, and distribute it when demand outpaces supply. For example, although the sun doesn’t shine at night, if we collect excess solar power during the day and store it in batteries, we can still access this solar power at night, regardless of the sun.

Of course, this future is heavily reliant on our ability to store energy. However, current solutions, which all use lithium-ion technology, are terrible. They’re expensive, degrade quickly, and directly damage the environment through cobalt and lithium mining. Qnetic, however, positions itself as a way to allow us into this greener future by building better energy storage solutions to solve the dissonance between energy supply and demand. Since Qnetic’s solution is mechanical rather than chemical, it doesn’t face the environmental or human rights concerns of mining and problematic supply chains. Furthermore, in order to meet energy storage demands on the scale of entire energy grids, Qnetic’s batteries are engineered to be far more effective than traditional solutions, with higher battery capacities, greater power output, and longer discharge times.

Beyond being more sustainable and efficient, Qnetic’s value proposition to customers also depends on being almost 50% cheaper than lithium ion batteries. These lithium-based batteries quickly degrade due to the chemical properties of the ions within them, and therefore can only ensure one cycle of being fully charged and discharged per day to mitigate degradation. The constant need to replace them every 10-15 years and limitation to one cycle a day makes using these solutions extremely expensive. Conversely, these fundamental limitations don't’ affect Qnetic’s mechanical batteries, meaning its batteries can be charged multiple times per day and only need to be replaced every 30 years. Thus, Qnetic’s solution strives to not only be cheaper to buy initially, but cheaper in lifetime cost.

While shiny, clean energy production technology tends to attract significant hype, we can’t reap the benefits of a cleaner grid until we build the infrastructure needed to utilize and store it—and the team at Qnetic is working everyday to bring us to a greener energy future, one kilowatt hour at a time.

Written by Rohan Desai

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Made with 💜 by the Unicorner team 🦄

Unicorner has been compensated by Qnetic for publicizing the offering of Qnetic’s crowdfunding round. Read the full 17(b) disclosure on our website.

Nothing in this email constitutes investment or legal advice. Readers should conduct their own research before making investment decisions.