Strategic Energy Analysis

New Approaches to

Energy Hardware

Innovation and Incubation

David J. Garfield, Kate E. Moore, Richard Adams

White Paper

NREL/MP-6A70-73438

April 2019

Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308

The Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis is operated by the Alliance 

for Sustainable Energy, LLC, on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy’s 

National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the University of Colorado-Boulder,

the Colorado School of Mines, the Colorado State University, the 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.
Joint Institute for 

Strategic Energy Analysis

New Approaches to

Energy Hardware

Innovation and Incubation

David J. Garfield, Kate E. Moore, Richard Adams

White Paper

NREL/MP-6A70-73438

April 2019

Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308

The Joint Institute for

Strategic Energy Analysis

15013 Denver West Parkway

Golden, CO 80401

303-275-3000 • www.jisea.org

The Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis is operated by the Alliance 

for Sustainable Energy, LLC, on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy’s 

National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the University of Colorado-Boulder,

the Colorado School of Mines, the Colorado State University, the 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.

JISEA® and all JISEA-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of the Alliance for 

Sustainable Energy, LLC.
NOTICE 

This work was authored in part by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, operated by Alliance for Sustainable 

Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. Funding 

provided by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency. The views expressed herein do not 

necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the U.S. Government.

This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable

Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. 

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reports produced after 1991

and a growing number of pre-1991 documents are available

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Cover Photos: (left to right) Warren Gretz, NREL 04135; iStock 22779761; Toyota Motor Sales, 16933; Pat Corkery, NREL 15648; 

SunPower, NREL 08466; Ruth Baranowski, NREL 21205

NREL prints on paper that contains recycled content.
JISEA | iv This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the investors and entrepreneurs who graciously provided their time to discuss the current 

landscape of energy hardware innovation in the preparation of this report. These discussions provided the backbone 

for the content found within. In particular we would like to thank those investors on the NREL Investor Advisory Board 

who helped guide the selection of the particular programs highlighted in this report. We would also like to thank all the 

program staff who candidly laid out the structures and motivations of their respective programs. We also benefitted 

from reviews by the teams of the respective programs, as well as reviews by Jill Engel-Cox, Doug Arent, Adam Warren, 

and Rachelle Ihly of NREL.
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. JISEA | v

Executive Summary 

Leadership in energy innovation depends on the ability of 

entrepreneurs to develop and successfully bring innovative 

technology solutions to market. In the past five years, novel 

approaches have emerged to support the early-stage 

cleantech development of physical systems, improving the 

path from invention to scale-up in the marketplace. Building 

on a Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA) 

white paper from 2016, we provide additional details, updates 

on progress, and analyses of these maturing programs and 

organizations, as well as discuss several new initiatives that 

have been created since 2016. These enterprises differ from 

traditional business incubators both in their commercialization methodologies and in the combined resources leveraged 

from founding organizations and partners. This paper 

provides a general landscape of these innovative programs 

and begins to identify metrics of success to help quantify the 

impact of these various approaches. 

The following table summarizes the programs we evaluated, 

which fall into three categories as indicated by color. Light 

green represents the most mature innovation organizations 

that focus primarily on access to technology development 

facilities and expertise. Dark green are those organizations 

that were established more recently and were inspired by the 

successes of those in light green. (Both light and dark green 

provide non-dilutive funding.) Blue represents innovation 

organizations that provide equity-based financial resources, 

some of which also provide access to physical resources.

Energy Innovation Organizations Evaluated, with Organizational Focus and Strategy

Organization/

Program

Organization 

Founders

Year 

launched Tech Focus Funding type

Lab/

equipment 

access

Technology 

testing/

validation/

demonstration 

support

Faciliated 

investor and 

industry 

introductions

Wells Fargo 

Innovation 

Incubator (IN2)

Wells Fargo 

Foundation, 

National 

Renewable 

Energy Lab

2014

commercial 

buildings, 

agriculture

nondilutive x x x

Cyclotron Road

Lawrence 

Berkeley 

National Lab

2014

advanced 

manufacturing, 

clean power, 

electronics

nondilutive x x x

Lab-Embedded 

Entrepreneurship 

Program

(LEEP) Nodes

Argonne 

National Lab 

& Oak Ridge 

National Lab

2017 energy

nondilutive x x x

Shell GameChanger 

Accelerator 

Powered by

NREL (GCxN)

Shell, National 

Renewable 

Energy Lab

2018

long-duration 

energy storage, 

controls for the 

grid of the future

nondilutive x x x

Women in 

Cleantech 

Challenge

MaRS, Natural 

Resources 

Canada

2018 cleantech nondilutive x x x

The Engine by MIT MIT 2017 tough tech equity x x x

Carbontech

Labs Carbon 180 2018 CO2 removaland/or utilization equity x x

PRIME Coalition

Public 

charity that 

partners with 

philanthropists

2014 energy equity x x

Breakthrough 

Energy Ventures

Bill Gates, 

Investor-led 2017 energy equity x x
JISEA | vi This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

The following are key findings from this study:

1. Technology-focused innovation organizations show 

early signs of success in aiding startups across the 

Valleys of Death. Started in 2014, the Wells Fargo 

Innovation Incubator (IN2) at the National Renewable 

Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Cyclotron Road at 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have 

five years of track record in helping innovative startups 

gain footing in the marketplace. Through a series of 

interviews with key stakeholders, including program 

staff, entrepreneurs, and investors, we find that these 

organizations produce a marked increase in the success 

rate of the companies that participate. Thus far, 100% of 

the companies participating in both programs are still in 

existence as of the publication date of this report, a key 

metric given the early stage and technological risk of 

the companies involved.

2. The success of energy technology innovation depends 

on a multitude of support approaches. The diverse 

approaches that these innovation organizations take 

is a display of both the complexity and diversity of 

the challenge. IN2 gives technology startups access to 

the facilities at NREL through its staff scientists and 

engineers. Cyclotron Road allows entrepreneurs two 

years of access to the facilities at LBNL, while providing 

entrepreneurial training. PRIME Coalition and The Engine 

focus on the early financing hurdles of a technology 

company that has yet to develop a tangible product. 

All of these approaches and more are needed to fully 

support innovative and disruptive hardware technology 

development.

3. Success begets success. Many of the programs 

explored in this report exist as expansions of the earlier 

approaches or were directly inspired by the earlier 

programs. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Energy 

expanded the Cyclotron Road model to both Argonne 

and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, collectively 

deemed the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program 

(LEEP) nodes. Shell GameChanger Accelerator Powered 

by NREL (GCxN) applies the IN2 model to technology 

areas of interest to the Shell Corporation. The Women 

in Cleantech Challenge was inspired by the success of 

both IN2 and Cyclotron Road and adopts aspects of each 

in a Canadian cleantech program focused on female 

entrepreneurs. These programs stand as a testament 

to the success of the early programs on which they are 

modeled.

The programs in this report address a plethora of hurdles: 

providing trusted third-party validation and demonstration, 

facilitating early customer and industry engagement, leveraging existing physical assets to develop new technologies, 

and/or providing financing with early-stage risk-tolerant 

capital. These functions are complementary, not competitive; a single company would benefit from the services 

or capital of multiple programs, named here or otherwise. 

While even the most mature of these organizations is still 

relatively nascent, early data suggests there is both a high 

demand for their services, and that their services provide 

meaningful impact for the startups involved. Detailed in 

the report below are descriptions of the mentioned organizations—how they function, what challenges they address, 

and some early metrics of their successes.
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. JISEA | vii

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Measuring the Success of Innovation Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Catalogue of Innovation Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Cyclotron Road . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Laboratory-Embedded Entrepreneurship Programs (LEEP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Shell GameChanger Accelerator Powered by NREL (GCxN) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Women in Cleantech Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

The Engine by MIT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Carbontech Labs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

PRIME Coalition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Breakthrough Energy Ventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
JISEA | viii This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

List of Figures

Table 1: Energy Innovation Organizations Evaluated, with Organizational

Focus and Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

Figure 1: Stages of Innovation Addressed by Organizations Studied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Figure 2: a. Rate of Investment in IN2 Companies versus IN2 Applicants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

 b. IN2 Channel Partners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Figure 3: Employment Increase for Cyclotron Road Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Figure 4: Increased Renewable Use Will Require Massive Storage Capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. JISEA | 1

Introduction

The cost of renewable energy technologies such as wind, 

photovoltaics (PV) and lithium-ion batteries have fallen 

precipitously over the past decade. PV module prices have 

dropped an order of magnitude, from $3.42 per watt in 20081

to $0.30 per watt in 20182, and renewable energy generation 

capacity has grown commensurately3. In fact, utility-procurement executives are reporting that the cost of adding new 

renewable generation capacity is now less than the marginal 

cost of running existing fossil fuel assets4, resulting in record 

global investments ($333 billion in 2017) in clean energy over 

the past several years5. Despite these tremendous strides, 

however, estimates from Bloomberg New Energy Finance 

and others6–9 project that at current growth rates and 

projected levels of investment, global society will not achieve 

the emissions reductions targets set forth in the Paris Climate 

Agreement, and that in order to meet these targets a host 

of new technologies need to not only be discovered10, but to 

be brought into the market and deployed at scale within the 

next 30 years11 to meet those goals. 

N

on-Dilutiv

e

Pro

grams

in this R

e

p

ort

Application Prototype Scale-up Field Demo Improvement in-use

First Valley

of Death

Second Valley

of Death

Third Valley

of Death

First Principles

Research Development Demonstration Deployment

Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator

Lab-Embedded

Entrepreneurship Programs

Women in Cleantech Challenge

PRIME

Coalition

Environmental

Security Technology

Certification Program

Energy I-Corps

DOE Loan Programs

Technology Commercialization Fund

Breakthrough Energy Ventures

The Engine by MIT

Carbontech Labs

Shell Gamechanger by NREL

Fe

d

erally-fund

e

d

T

echnolo

g

y

O

p

p

ortunities

Dilutiv

e

Pro

grams

in this R

e

p

ort

Cyclotron Road

Small Business Innovation Research

Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy

Figure 1: The pathway to market is not uniform or linear but all innovations must pass through these stages. 

Stages of Innovation Addressed by Organizations Studied 
JISEA | 2 This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

 * Legacy sectors, as defined by Bonvillian and Weiss, are those market sectors in which an established industry already exists, such that market entry by a new 

innovation is impeded by economic, political, and social paradigms.

Compounding the problem, innovation in what Bonvillian 

and Weiss deem “legacy sectors”*12 is both time- and 

capital-intensive, and heavily regulated. The energy 

sector, particularly hardware technologies, certainly fits 

this bill. Incumbent businesses tend to lack the risk tolerance needed to yield transformative innovation13,14, while 

startups attempting to make inroads in these markets face 

many well-documented challenges12,15–17. Collectively and 

ominously deemed the Valley[s] of Death, these difficulties 

contributed to large energy sector losses seen after the 

influx of venture capital (VC) investment in the 2000s, and

led to a dearth of investment in energy innovation through 

the recession and into the economic recovery5,18–20.

Today, many savvy investors seek to limit their exposure 

to technological risk. As one venture capitalist (VC) shared 

as input for this paper, “If I have to put in $30 million to 

find out if the technology will work, it’s a no-go.” No longer 

interested in funding science projects, many investors now 

expect startups to have proven their technologies’ fundamental viability before raising capital. However, de-risking 

physical technologies without the proper resources can 

prove insurmountable. Innovation organizations12,21 have 

therefore been created to help promising technologies 

down the risk curve9 and across the Valley of Death, helping 

them navigate the nuanced innovation process (see Figure 

1) and ready them for third-party investment. According 

to Rafael Reif, President of the Massachusetts Institute of 

Technology (MIT), these organizations are needed to accelerate the process from “idea to investment... to impact.”15

In this paper, we explore several innovative technology incubation models that have been created to address these challenges. The suite of programs described herein is by no means 

comprehensive, but rather attempts to convey the diversity 

of approaches to address the hurdles faced by startups 

in these spaces. These organizations tend to specialize in 

specific areas of the technology innovation process, focusing 

on prototype development, demonstration of those prototypes, financing of these technical endeavors with patient, 

risk-tolerant capital, and/or introductions and engagement 

with potential customers and end-users. This paper will lay 

out fundamental aspects of the following programs, based 

on a series of interviews with both founders and program 

staff. It will also attempt to quantify early successes in two of 

the more mature programs, though it should be noted that 

these innovation organizations are themselves startups and 

it remains too early for them to be definitively judged. The 

following section will discuss in more detail the difficulties in 

attempting to quantify metrics for these programs. 

Measuring the Success of 

Innovation Organizations

Like the startup ventures themselves, the innovation organizations described in this report and elsewhere are experiments, constantly iterating and improving their programs 

in order to better fulfill the goals they set out to achieve. 

Measuring the success of these organizations depends, of 

course, on the goals with which they judge success. For 

the sake of clarity, we will focus on one general goal that 

is universally shared across all the programs described 

below—allowing and accelerating the path from idea to 

scaled market adoption for the ventures that participate in 

the programs.

Many metrics tangentially address this goal: jobs created, 

introductions made, partnerships created, pivots and 

technology development milestones achieved, and others. 

These early success indicators and de-risking activities 

attempt to convey the overall viability of the ventures as 

they work towards profitable enterprise status, and to some 

degree they achieve this goal. The most ubiquitous metric 

tallies the amount of money raised by the participating 

ventures. For two of the more mature programs described 

below, IN2 and Cyclotron Road, we report the latest of these 

metrics at the time of publication.

We also propose a slightly more nuanced metric. By 

measuring the rate of money raised, both before and after 

joining a program, we are better able to quantify the goal 

of acceleration. Using data from IN2, the incubator housed 

at NREL, we plot money raised versus time, for both 

participating and rejected ventures. While it can be argued 

that the positive correlation between money raised and 

program acceptance is simply a result of selection bias, the 

slope change (see Figure 2a) at the time of program entry 

is strong evidence of causation, at the very least due to 

signaling and/or publicity, and quantitatively verifies acceleration. Due to the proprietary nature of this data, we were 

only able to produce this plot for the IN2 program. While

we acknowledge the shortcomings of measuring money 

raised in general, we find this approach a valuable addition 

to the repertoire of quantitative metrics of success for 

innovation organizations.
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. JISEA | 3

Catalogue of Innovation 

Organizations†

We catalogue the organizations in this report into two 

general categories: those that primarily provide access to 

physical resources (laboratories, equipment, research staff) 

and those that primarily provide access to capital.

Of those that primarily provide access to physical 

resources, IN2 and Cyclotron Road are the most mature 

innovation organizations in this report. They were both 

established in 2014. 

Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2): The National 

Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), partnered with the 

Wells Fargo Foundation (WFF) in 2014 to create the Wells 

Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2), a technology-focused 

initiative that leverages the physical and intellectual 

resources of NREL to accelerate market acceptance for

new energy companies in the commercial buildings space, 

and in 2017 announced it will expand into agriculture, 

housing and smart mobility.

Cyclotron Road: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 

(LBNL), in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy 

(DOE) created Cyclotron Road, an entrepreneurial research 

fellowship that allows very early-stage hardware innovators the time and resources to de-risk their technologies in 

order to attract more traditional forms of capital. 

The following programs also provide access to physical 

resources, and were inspired by the successes of IN2, 

Cyclotron Road, or both.

Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Programs (LEEP):

The DOE Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) recently 

expanded the Cyclotron Road commercialization model 

to Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Named 

Chain Reaction Innovations and Innovation Crossroads, 

respectively, the programs together with Cyclotron Road 

are collectively named Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship 

Program (LEEP) nodes. 

Shell GameChanger Accelerator Powered by NREL 

(GCxN): The IN2 methodology was recently adopted by 

the Shell GameChanger Accelerator Powered by NREL 

(GCxN) accelerator program. NREL will manage the 

program, and its first cohort is focused on long-duration 

energy storage and technologies that enable the electricity 

grid of the future.

Women in Cleantech Challenge: A partnership between 

the MaRS Discovery District and Natural Resources Canada 

(Canadian federal government), the Women in Cleantech 

Challenge provides select women entrepreneurs with 

financial, technological, and business resources to accelerate their companies’ development. 

The following programs primarily provide access to capital 

rather than physical resources. This is an imperfect classification, and the following programs are ordered by the 

amount of access to physical resources, from most to least.

The Engine by MIT: Spurred in part by the MIT President’s 

call to action, MIT launched its version of an innovation 

orchard deemed The Engine, a unique venture fund with 

laboratory space for technological development. 

Carbontech Labs: Based at the University of California at 

Berkeley, Carbontech Labs combines a technology accelerator with an investment fund focused on CO2-negative 

technologies. 

PRIME Coalition: PRIME pools philanthropic grant money 

into an early-stage, highly risk-tolerant VC fund that 

focuses only on technologies with the potential to mitigate 

gigaton-scale CO2-equivalent emissions.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV): This venture fund 

is noteworthy in its size and fund life ($1 billion initial fund 

over 20 years), its limited partners including Bill Gates, Jeff 

Bezos, and several other notable individuals, and its focus 

only on technologies with the potential to reduce more 

than half a gigaton of annual CO2 emissions if deployed

at scale. 

† The list of programs in this report was compiled based on a series of discussions with various stakeholders, including program directors, investors, and entrepreneurs.
JISEA | 4 This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2)

Introduction

A collaboration between the Wells Fargo Foundation 

(WFF) and NREL, the IN2 program leverages the financial 

capital and market knowledge of WFF combined with the 

technical expertise and world-class facilities at NREL to 

help promising startups gain traction in the marketplace. In 

its very design, the program alleviates the typical disjuncture found between technologists and business managers 

by pairing a leader of financial services with a leader of 

renewable energy technologies22. It is this strategic public/

private partnership that makes IN2 unique, allowing it to 

comprehensively accelerate cleantech commercialization.

Program History and Structure

IN2 was conceived and implemented in a collaboration 

between the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center 

(IEC) at NREL and the WFF and aims to provide market 

acceptance and market traction for early hardware technology companies. In 2014, the WFF granted the Alliance 

for Sustainable Energy L.L.C. (the operator of NREL) $10 

million over a five-year period to create the IN2 program. 

Administered by the IEC, the program began with a 

technical focus in the commercial buildings space. Based 

on the success of the model, IN2 received an additional 

$20 million from the WFF in 2017, enabling the program to 

expand its focus and grow its ability to support innovations 

and partnerships. In 2018, IN2 announced its expansion into 

the food-energy-water nexus and a new partnership with 

the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, MO 

to develop, test and validate promising agricultural technologies addressing critical sustainability challenges.

Companies applying to the program must be referred by 

one of its channel partners (of which there are more than 

50, see Figure 2b), ranging from universities to incubators 

to economic development entities in the United States and 

Canada. While the channel partners recommend companies 

to IN2, IN2 supports them in return through a $5 million 

Channel Partner Awards Program. This symbiotic relationship among ecosystem partners is a defining feature of IN2

.

Applicants then enter a series of down-selection rounds, 

first with NREL technical staff, followed by Wells Fargo 

executives from across the bank, and finally, to a board of 

external industry experts for final selections. Companies 

are awarded up to $250,000 of non-dilutive funding to be 

used on technical services at NREL or the Donald Danforth 

Plant Science Center, as well as additional funding to 

support the company in program-related costs. After being 

accepted into IN2, each company is assigned a principal 

investigator, and together the parties determine the scope 

of work that will most benefit the technical needs of the 

company. The funding has been used to pay for a variety of 

services utilizing the research staff and facilities, including 

demonstrations at Wells Fargo locations and on the NREL 

campus, as well as testing and validation of technologies in 

the various labs at NREL. 

Within the technical focus area, IN2 accepts companies 

across all levels of maturity, clustering them into Tiers 1-3. 

Tier 1 companies are classified as bench-scale, with proof 

of concept but no physical prototype. Tier 2 companies 

have made a physical prototype that is available for testing 

and validation. And Tier 3 companies are classified as 

commercially ready, potentially with pilot-scale production 

and a small revenue stream. The tiered structure, along 

with NREL’s focus in both basic and applied research, 

allows IN2 to incubate technologies across a wide breadth 

of maturity. It also builds a structure for advancement 

within the program. For example, a Tier 1 company, upon 

successful completion of initial milestones, can apply for 

follow-on funding within IN2, enabling further technology 

progress and advancement. Furthermore Tier 3 companies 

in IN2 have the opportunity, upon completion of milestones, 

to pilot their technologies. This real-world field validation 

provides companies valuable insights regarding end-user 

experience while serving as an important de-risking signal 

to prospective customers, investors, and partners. 
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. JISEA | 5

Hurdles Addressed

When entering an established industry such as commercial 

buildings components or agriculture, a new technology 

must work from day one. Working out the shortcomings 

of a new product based on client feedback is not a possibility in this space. For this reason, industry incumbents 

are traditionally wary of startups, and seek certainty 

of product viability before money ever changes hands. 

Through IN2, startups gain access to decades of industry-specific know-how and state-of-the-art testing facilities 

to develop and prove out their technologies. In addition, 

cohort members benefit from the credibility that NREL 

(and Danforth) has earned with major industrial partners 

over decades of working together. Promising technical 

data taken at NREL gains a trusted seal of approval from 

an independent third party. These relationships between 

industry and NREL can then be extended to the startups, 

helping them to make inroads early on. 

While the services provided through the IN2 program vary 

widely depending on the needs of the company, some 

examples for how IN2 companies have used the resources 

thus far include integrated systems-level modeling and 

design, trusted third-party technical validation, and fieldsite demonstrations. IN2

 companies have used the broad 

skillsets of NREL researchers to refine initial prototypes, 

integrate proprietary components into market-ready 

devices, and model system-level return-on-investment based on projected costs. As addressed above, 

the third-party validation performed by NREL can be 

vitally important. Similar to how the Food and Drug 

Administration validates pharmaceutical technologies 

through clinical trials, positive results from NREL testing 

sends a powerful market signal to would-be stakeholders. 

Perhaps most valuably, IN2 offers the opportunity to 

commercially demonstrate technologies, moving them 

beyond lab curiosities to tangible products that add 

value. These demonstrations have varied from smart 

electric vehicle charging stations at NREL’s National Wind 

Technology Center to energy-metering sensors at a Wells 

Fargo branch bank, and act to further reassure traditionally 

risk-averse customers. 

The partnership between NREL and Wells Fargo acts as a 

key differentiator for the IN2 program. Because Wells Fargo 

operates approximately 90 million square feet of commercial real estate globally, accepted companies have already 

been vetted by a potential future customer. By having 

this marquee first customer co-administer the program, 

IN2 helps open doors into the relevant commercial space 

from the very beginning. Furthermore, the perspective 

from Wells Fargo can help shape product development 

to better address market needs. One example comes 

from a stick-on energy-metering device company that 

uses proprietary deconvolution algorithms to save 90% in 

hardware costs and 75% on installation costs over comparable systems. When this company was determining the 

most compelling value proposition for their technology, 

its conversations with Wells Fargo revealed an opportunity to automate the overnight monitoring of essential 

power systems at bank branches, adding significant value 

in avoided labor expense. It is this kind of insight, from 

a commercial buildings operator in partnership with a 

commercial buildings technology incubator, that makes 

Wells Fargo’s relationship with IN2 supportive of innovation 

to commercialization. 

As IN2 expands into agriculture and other sectors, it will 

expand its network of strategic partners commensurately. Just as Wells Fargo provides insight as a potential 

customer, as well as an opportunity for real-world demonstrations, IN2

 plans to add analogous industry partners 

relevant to the new technology focus sectors.

“Through the pilot at the National Wind 

Technology Center, IN2 gave us validation 

and credibility in the difficult, early period of 

building the company.”   

—Steve Low, Co-founder and

Chairman of the Board, PowerFlex

“Our design and modeling results weren’t 

questioned by potential industry partners 

because of the reputation NREL brings to 

the table.”

—Mike Pintar, COO of NETenergy
JISEA | 6 This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

Figure 2: a. Cumulative investments across companies in IN2 plotted 

versus time (blue circle), versus companies that applied to IN2 but 

were not accepted (green triangle), each normalized by the total 

number of respective companies. To the left of zero shows money 

raised (either through grants or equity rounds) before the respective 

company entered (or would have entered) the IN2 program. To the 

right of zero are monies raised after entering. On average a company’s 

rate-of-investments-received increases upon entering the IN2

program; slope for non-IN2 companies remains relatively constant‡. 

Fitting linear regressions to IN2 companies versus those who were 

not accepted (for positive values of x) yield slopes of 2.66 and 0.72 

$million / company-year, respectively. Companies in IN2 raised $550 

thousand per year per company before entering IN2 on average.

b. IN2 channel partners by geographic location

‡ One company from those not selected was removed from the data. This company raised $80M before applying to IN2 (left of zero), and this created a step-wise 

function for the non-IN2 companies. Including this data, however, does not change the slope to the right of zero for companies not selected. 

Metrics

• The 20 companies of the first three cohorts have 

raised over $114 million in outside funding since 

entering the program (cohort 4 was announced in late 

2018 with an additional five companies), amounting to 

a roughly 19× capital multiplier.

• So far, Tier 1 companies have raised $11 million, Tier 2 

companies have raised $57 million, and Tier 3 companies have raised $46 million. 

• Companies entering IN2 saw a 4.8× increase in

dollars-per-year-raised upon entering the program

(see Figure 2a).

• Four companies have had mergers or acquisitions 

since entering IN2: EdgePower, J2 Innovations, 

SmarterShade, and Whisker Labs.

• Six companies have advanced to the next technical 

Tier within the program: Maalka, Polyceed, PowerFlex, 

simuwatt, ThermoLift, and Whisker Labs.

• Five companies have performed β-demonstrations 

either on NREL campus or at a Wells Fargo branch: 

Ibis Networks, LiquidCool Solutions, Powerflex 

Systems, simuwatt, and Whisker Labs.

• The Wells Fargo Foundation expanded funding for 

IN2 from $10 million to $30 million in 2017, with the 

intent of expanding the program focus from solely 

commercial buildings into agriculture, smart mobility 

and housing. 

• Shell emulated the IN2 structure in a new partnership 

with NREL: Shell GameChanger Accelerator Powered 

by NREL, or GCxN (see below for details).

10

0

2

4

6

8

Cumulative Dollars Invested

per Company ($M)

Years Since Starting IN2

IN2 Start Date

Companies selected

Companies not selected

Regression lines

-8 -6 -4 -2 0 2

a. Rate of Investment in IN2

 Companies

versus IN2 Applicants

IN2 Channel Partners

b.
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. JISEA | 7

Cyclotron Road

Introduction

Cyclotron Road began in 2014 as an attempt to bridge 

the divide between proof of principle and reduction to 

practice for energy hardware technologies16. Housed at 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Cyclotron 

Road is designed to provide a path for scientists and 

engineers from academia to entrepreneurship23, affording 

not only technical but also business resources to its cohort 

members. It is this comprehensive approach to technical 

company building that makes the program unique. 

Program History and Structure

Cyclotron Road was founded in 2014, based on the realization that scientists or engineers interested in translating 

their scientific breakthroughs into applied technologies did 

not have a well-defined pathway. The idea to provide these 

entrepreneurial scientists two-year access to the assets 

of LBNL was approved by the laboratory directorate, and 

through a Laboratory Directed Research and Development§ 

initiative, the program was born. Six months later the 

Advanced Manufacturing Office of the Department of 

Energy (DOE) agreed to support Cyclotron Road. It is now 

funded collectively by DOE’s Advanced Manufacturing 

Office, the California Energy Commission, the Defense 

Advanced Research Projects Agency, and a small group of 

philanthropists, and is currently considering applications 

for its fifth yearly cohort.

Cyclotron Road has a yearly call for new fellows, and applicants go through a rigorous application process including 

a series of pitch-formatted interviews and other review 

processes. Once accepted, fellows are granted access to 

LBNL and University of California at Berkeley facilities for 

two years, while receiving a generous stipend, extensive 

mentorship, entrepreneurial training, and networking 

opportunities. They are required to locate in Berkeley for 

the duration of the program in order to take advantage of 

the laboratory and program resources. The fixed two-year 

duration is intentional; fellows are expected to use their 

time at Cyclotron Road to prepare for and source external 

funding. As several Cyclotron Road fellows have iterated, 

“Two years is great when you get into Cyclotron Road, but 

it goes by quick.” Because it can easily take five to six years 

to get from bench to commercial scale, Cyclotron Road 

provides an initial runway. 

Many Cyclotron Road companies incorporate only upon 

being accepted, and typically do so before entering the 

program. A specially designed Cooperative Research and 

Development Agreement (CRADA) allows the founders 

to either own or co-own any intellectual property (IP) 

created during the two years. All fellows come from 

technical research backgrounds, with the majority holding 

Ph.D.’s; this allows them to either perform the research and 

technology de-risking themselves or to direct employees 

they have hired. The Cyclotron Road program team also 

provides business development support, offering services 

such as technoeconomic modeling, market entry strategies 

and market forecasting, as well as myriad introductions 

to a network of contacts and advisors across the relevant 

communities. The program is designed as much to be an 

immersive training for scientific entrepreneurs as it is a 

hardware technology incubator, and several fellows have 

referred to their time in Cyclotron Road as a mini-MBA. 

Hurdles Addressed

A dearth of financial sources exists to fund prototype 

development. Federal agencies traditionally view the 

endeavor as too applied for government funding, while 

VCs typically want to see a prototype before making an 

investment. This leaves scientists and engineers who aspire 

to bring their promising discoveries out of the lab and 

into the world in a conundrum, and it is this hurdle that 

Cyclotron Road addresses. 

The two-year fellowship attempts to give scientiststurned-entrepreneurs the time, resources and freedom 

to develop their prototypes, spanning the gap between 

federal grant dollars and traditional early-stage investment. 

“Investors wanted a prototype. But without 

investment we didn’t have the resources to

build one. It’s a chicken and egg problem that 

Cyclotron Road solves.”

—Kendra Kuhl, Co-founder and CTO, Opus 12

§

 Representing a small portion of a national laboratory’s research budget, Laboratory Directed Research and Development initiatives are discretionary funds that 

allow a laboratory’s leadership to fund creative and innovative work in line with the mission of DOE but outside the general scope of the laboratory’s current work.
JISEA | 8 This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

In addition to providing the time and resources needed to 

overcome this funding gap, Cyclotron Road is designed 

to build the skills, knowledge, and community that fellows 

require to become business leaders. Most of the fellows 

have strong technical backgrounds but little business experience or contacts. Through the program, they participate 

in quarterly meetings modeled after board meetings, and 

attend weekly sessions ranging from how to hire the right 

people to how to write pitch proposals. The program also 

creates a community of like-minded individuals willing to 

mentor and share. 

The quality of fellows is universal, and those already 

enjoying success from government grants or VC rounds 

are eager to share their approaches and lessons learned. 

In addition to the internal community, Cyclotron Road 

constantly brings potential investors and partners through 

the labs—on average over 300 per year, ranging from 

corporate research and development (R&D) directors to 

VCs to philanthropists to government program managers—

to help ensure cohort teams get well-aligned funding that 

keep the projects going beyond their tenure at LBNL. This 

collective training and networking have contributed to the 

positive outcome that to date, all Cyclotron Road teams 

remain in business.

Metrics: 

• 30 companies have been supported by the program to 

date, with a majority of these companies being created 

only after acceptance into Cyclotron Road.

• Over 140 employees are currently employed by 

Cyclotron Road member companies and alumni

(see Figure 3).

• Five out of six companies in the first cohort have raised 

traditional VC rounds, with the 6th currently funded by

a multi-million-dollar DOE demonstration grant.

• Approximately $80 million in follow-on funding has 

been raised across all cohorts—with roughly half

coming from grants and half from equity rounds.

• Around 150 applicants apply for five to ten slots

each year.

• The AMO expanded the program in 2016 to two other 

national laboratories: Chain Reaction Innovations at 

Argonne and Innovation Crossroads at Oak Ridge.

• In 2017, Cyclotron Road expanded laboratory access

to include the University of California at Berkeley.

• In 2019 Activation Energy, the nonprofit affiliate of 

Cyclotron Road, announced plans to expand the 

program geographically, beginning with a new program 

office in Boston focused on Microsystems. 

“For me, the community aspect is the 

strongest resource of Cyclotron Road.”

—Chris Kaffer, Co-Founder and CEO of Mallinda

0 1 2 3

Years Since Beginning Program

2

8

6

4

Average Number of Jobs

Per Startup

Employment Increase for Cyclotron Road Participants

Figure 3: Employment per company has increased steadily for all 

participating companies thus far. Jobs numbers were calculated based 

on individual startup websites and interviews with startup founders. 
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. JISEA | 9

Laboratory-Embedded 

Entrepreneurship Programs (LEEP)

In 2016, the Advanced Manufacturing Office expanded the 

Cyclotron Road model to both Oak Ridge and Argonne 

national laboratories. These new programs, named 

Innovation Crossroads and Chain Reaction Innovations, 

respectively, operate very similarly to Cyclotron Road, 

offering very early-stage energy hardware entrepreneurs 

a two-year laboratory fellowship to de-risk their technologies while determining a pathway to market. Because the 

program requires physical presence, the expansion allows 

the LEEP fellowships greater geographic reach. Indeed, 

a majority of cohort members from all three programs 

hail from the regions surrounding the respective labs. In 

this sense, the LEEP nodes, as they are referred, help to 

accomplish the long-standing goal of turning the national 

labs into regional innovation and growth hubs24, leveraging 

immense laboratory resources to launch disruptive innovation into local economies. 

While all three programs were similarly modeled, they do 

offer some distinct attributes, mostly a reflection of the 

local ecosystems. Cyclotron Road and LBNL have strong 

ties to UC Berkeley. Thus, beyond offering access to UC 

Berkeley facilities, the program also leans on Berkeley’s 

Haas School of Business for some business development of 

the Cyclotron Road projects. In particular, the Cleantechto-Market Program (C2M) at Haas, which tasks M.B.A. 

and Ph.D. students with developing a pathway to market 

for nascent technologies, has had several Cyclotron 

Road companies participate in the program. Due to its 

proximity to Silicon Valley, Cyclotron Road also attracts 

many VC investors to tour the program and its companies. 

Chain Reaction Innovations at Argonne National Lab 

leans heavily on the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship 

and Innovation at the University of Chicago. For instance 

each Chain Reaction Innovation team participates in the 

Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program at the Polsky Center 

and has access to other resources at Polsky, from a legal 

bootcamp to Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) 

consultants. Finally, Innovation Crossroads has formed 

strong ties with the University of Tennessee (UT) as well as 

Launch Tennessee, a state-wide entrepreneurial resource 

center. The UT’s Bredesen Center, an interdisciplinary 

Ph.D. program, sends energy entrepreneurial students 

through the UT I-Corps program while paired to Innovation 

Crossroads technologies. Teams at Innovation Crossroads 

also get pro bono legal advice from the UT Law School, 

and they are also paired with an energy mentor from 

Launch Tennessee at the start of their fellowship.

The new LEEP nodes are an experiment in and of themselves; only time will tell the success of these programs. 

Furthermore, the definition of success depends on 

perspective, and aligning the interests of the various stakeholders will be challenging. For instance, the Advanced 

Manufacturing Office seeks to seed young startups that 

will graduate from their residency within the national lab 

to create domestic manufacturing jobs. The national labs 

seek fresh ideas and entrepreneurial excitement, as well 

as new projects and funding opportunities. And according 

to a senior staff member of one of the LEEP nodes, their 

goal is to shorten the maturation time to a Series A from as 

long as seven years down to 18 months, while lowering the 

capital requirement from $10 million to $1 million all-in. 

Shell GameChanger Accelerator 

Powered by NREL (GCxN)

In 2018, Shell announced it would partner with NREL 

through the Shell GameChanger program. The resulting 

program, Shell GameChanger Accelerator Powered by 

NREL (GCxN) will extend Shell’s efforts to reposition 

itself as the energy company of the future, helping the 

world decouple energy consumption from carbon dioxide 

output. GCxN will be administered by the Innovation and 

Entrepreneurship Center at NREL, the same department 

that administers the Wells Fargo IN2 program, with which it 

will share many attributes. 

As in IN2, companies must be referred to the program by 

GCxN channel partners, many of whom are shared with 

IN2 (see Figure 2b). Selected companies will receive up to 

$250,000 of non-dilutive funding, to be used on a scope of 

work agreed upon by both Shell, NREL, and the respective 

company. GCxN will focus on technologies in Tiers 1 and 

2 on the IN2 development scale, or Technology Readiness 

Levels 2–5||, to focus on high risk, high reward technologies. 

Initially, NREL will support projects in two technical focus 

areas: long-duration energy storage and technologies that 

enable the power grid of the future. The long-duration 

energy storage call seeks technologies that deliver electricity at less than $0.10 per kWh with preferably more 

|| Technology Readiness Levels were developed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in order to systematically judge a technology’s level of 

development or validation for space applications. While real-world technological development does not fit so neatly on a linear scale, TRLs are still useful for quantifying 

the relative maturity of a technology.
JISEA | 10 This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

than 16 hours of discharge duration at the rated power. 

Technologies that fulfill these requirements would allow 

intermittent renewables to perform more like baseload 

sources for the majority of use cases; however by some 

estimates, upwards of 200 hours of storage capacity at the 

rated power will be needed to store enough excess generation without curtailment, while having enough energy 

to deploy during production lulls (see Figure 4). Even at 

16 hours, these requirements preclude ubiquitous battery 

chemistries such as lithium ion. Technologies that fall within 

the “grid of the future” call will provide services required 

to manage the increasingly complex electricity grid as 

our energy system evolves. Increasing penetration of 

renewable generation and the proliferation of batteries and 

electrification (of transportation and heating for example) 

will create the need for real-time optimization controls, 

highly-accurate weather forecasting, and related technologies to effectively manage a safe, reliable electricity grid. 

These two initial technology areas are potentially the first 

of many that will be housed at GCxN, and highlight the 

unique synergies between Shell’s vision for the future of 

energy25,26 and the unique capabilities of NREL.

Women in Cleantech Challenge

Funded by the Canadian Government’s Department of 

Natural Resources (NRCan), and supported by the MaRS 

Discovery District, an urban innovation hub based in 

Toronto, the Women in Cleantech Challenge is an entrepreneurial support program and C$1 million prize competition. 

Six women entrepreneurs in cleantech have been selected 

as finalists, and after 30 months of support, a winner will 

be selected in the winter of 2020/21. 

In 2017, representatives from MaRS’s cleantech program 

pooled together best practices collected on several entrepreneurial program visits, including to IN2

 andCyclotron 

Road. Combined with the Canadian Government’s 

initiatives in creating cleantech grand challenges and in 

bringing more women into STEM (science, technology, 

engineering and math) fields, MaRS and NRCan started the 

Women in Cleantech Challenge with an open call to female 

entrepreneurs in Canada. From over 150 applicants, ten 

semi-finalists were selected to pitch their ideas in front of a 

panel of experts. From that ten, six finalists were selected 

to join the program. These six women are receiving a 

C$115,000 annual stipend for 30 months, along with 

extensive technical and business development support. 

The technical development will come from Canada’s 

national laboratories. Each entrepreneur will be paired with 

a relevant lab scientist and will receive up to C$250,000 

in technical assistance, a model which closely mirrors that 

-

0.5 

1.0 

1.5 

2.0 

2.5 

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Daily TWh

Daily shortfall

Daily surplus

Intraday shift

Demand

Coincident with demand

Figure 4: The Shell GCxN program is focused on storage because power use in Germany (which has heavy renewable buildout) shows the need 

for significant energy storage. Demand (black) is plotted against renewable generation, showing a production shortfall (blue) that can be met 

with intraday shifting from storage (green). (Reproduced with permission from Pierpont et al.27)

Increased Renewable Use Will Require Massive Storage Capacity
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. JISEA | 11

“Without the resources that The Engine provided, 

the technical progress we achieved in 14 months 

would have taken five years.”

—Shreya Dave, CEO at Via Separations

of IN2. In tandem, the MaRS Discovery District will provide 

venture services in the form of “market intelligence, talent, 

communications and educational support”28. At the end 

of the 30 months, the six finalists will again make their 

pitches to the panel of judges. Because the finalists are 

starting from very different levels of technical maturity 

spanning Technology Readiness Levels 2–5, companies will 

be judged on their progress during the program, both in 

terms of quarterly metrics as well as a final determination 

by the judging panel. The winner will receive an additional 

C$1 million to further accelerate her company’s growth. 

The Women in Cleantech Challenge is currently planning 

to extend the model to other underrepresented groups. 

Applying the best practices from a variety of innovation 

organizations to female entrepreneurs, who are traditionally underserved in the community29, NRCAN and MaRS 

aim to not only catalyze cleantech innovation, but create a 

more equitable ecosystem in the process.

The Engine by MIT

As stated above, in 2015 Rafael Reif, President of MIT, 

encouraged the formation of “innovation orchards” to 

“accelerate... idea to investment” for science innovators15. 

The Engine was MIT’s realization of Reif’s concept. 

Launched in 2016, The Engine takes a hybrid approach to 

commercializing what it deems “Tough Tech”, combining a 

long-term venture fund with access to well-equipped labs 

and entrepreneurial guidance. The Engine aims to provide 

an example for how universities with powerhouse research 

facilities can turn those bench ideas into groundbreaking 

innovations that benefit society.

Started by MIT, The Engine now exists as an independent, 

for-profit venture capital firm that invests in early-stage 

Tough Tech companies in the Boston area. The Engine 

Fund, the primary vehicle to serve this purpose, is a $200 

million investment fund, to which MIT contributed $25 

million. With an 18-year fund life, the fund provides patient 

seed-stage capital in exchange for an equity stake in the 

company to ventures that hold potentially prohibitive technical risk for the traditional investor30. While startup companies do not need to have an affiliation with MIT in order to 

participate, as of early 2019, 12 of the 16 companies do have 

an affiliation, with the remaining four coming from Harvard 

University, MIT’s neighbor in Cambridge. The Engine does 

require companies to locate in Boston if they are to accept 

funding, an attempt to strengthen the local innovation 

ecosystem and ensure that they take full advantage of the 

programmatic offerings beyond financial capital.

The Engine is somewhat unique as a venture capital firm, 

combining not only an investment fund but physical office 

and lab space, facilities partnerships, and entrepreneurial 

mentorship as well. Its headquarters include both office 

and lab space in Cambridge, which portfolio companies 

(and non-portfolio companies) can rent for as long as 

they need. Thus far companies typically reside for one to 

two years before outgrowing the space. Several facilities 

in and around the Boston area also have agreements 

with The Engine to provide portfolio companies access 

to specialized equipment, including The Broad Institute, 

the Department of Defense’s MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and 

several research institutes within MIT. The Engine also 

provides tailored professional development and business 

services for its portfolio companies. Investments at The 

Engine are made on a rolling basis, a condition that 

restricts the uniformity of these ancillary services but 

according to Engine staff is meant to allow for a more 

hands-on, tailored approach to best address the development needs of the founders.

With its longer fund life than the typical VC firm, The 

Engine is designed to provide patient capital that lacks 

technical-risk aversion, allowing founders the time to tackle 

the key development hurdles facing their technologies 

while spanning the gap between government grants and 

traditional venture capital. Further, the concentration of 

ready-to-use resources with the injection of meaningful 

capital early on allow the founders to accelerate their 

development times by going all-in on their technologies, 

without having to worry about converting warehouse 

space into a scientific development lab.

Beyond affording the means and freedom for technical 

development, The Engine seeks to ensure that the technical founders successfully navigate the entrepreneurial 

process. Some portfolio companies have founders who 

are experienced entrepreneurs. For others, The Engine will 

run workshops with invited experts to target the needs of 

the specific companies, from hiring decisions to managing 

capital expenditure. The requirement that startups are 

physically located in Boston allows valuable interactions 
JISEA | 12 This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

with The Engine staff, fellow founders, as well as curated 

visitors like potential investors or corporate partners. The 

visibility and connectivity are designed to ensure that 

portfolio companies seamlessly transition beyond The 

Engine as they grow.

Less than two years after starting up, the companies 

funded by The Engine are already seeing some early 

success. An initial investment in a nuclear fusion company 

utilizing high-temperature superconductors just closed 

a Series A with outside investors31. An energy storage 

MIT-spinout aiming for name-plate durations in the 

thousands of hours also recently closed its Series A32. 

A quantum computing software company partnered 

with Google33. And a startup focused on space data has 

launched its first satellite34. 

Carbontech Labs

Recognizing that the world will not be able to achieve 

climate change targets merely by reducing emissions, 

Carbon180, formerly the Center for Carbon Removal, 

focuses on technologies that can remove CO2 from the 

atmosphere. Carbon180 strives to achieve meaningful 

market penetration by convening key stakeholders, 

advocating market-based policy, and running a technology 

accelerator focused on carbon-negative technologies, 

known as Carbontech Labs. Potential technologies in the 

accelerator could do many things: remove CO2 from the 

atmosphere; convert captured CO2 into value-added products such as plastics, building materials, fuels, pharmaceuticals, or anything else involving carbon atoms; utilize 

biomass as an input into product streams; design new 

systems to increase the carbon sequestration processes in 

farming practices; and likely many others. The accelerator 

pools best practices from several disparate programs, 

focusing them on carbon technologies, or carbontech. 

The program at Carbontech Labs is broken into three 

phases, with a progressively-narrowing filter at each phase. 

The first phase mirrors the regiment of National Science 

Foundation I-Corps in many ways. Approximately 20 

companies in this phase are granted $40,000 to define 

their value propositions, perform customer-discovery 

interviews, and refine their paths to market. In addition, 

each of these startups are expected to perform life-cycle 

and techno-economic analyses of their technologies, 

prepare a ten-page white paper ready for potential investors, and have their technology assessed by Carbontech 

Labs staff. The investor advisory network at Carbontech 

Labs then chooses eight Phase-One companies to bring 

to Phase Two. These eight companies receive between 

$200,000 and $600,000 of equity investment from the 

Carbontech Impact Fund to build a physical prototype. If 

need be, Carbontech Labs will help Phase Two companies 

gain access to a lab from one of their partners in the New 

Carbon Economy Consortium, a collection of universities 

and national laboratories across the United States. Upon 

completion of Phase two, startups can receive additional 

equity funding from the Carbontech Fund, or source 

capital from other investors, including potentially with the 

partners of Carbontech Labs. Several demonstration sites 

offer Phase Three companies the opportunity to build pilot 

demonstrations of their technologies. Thus far these sites 

include the Wyoming Integrated Test Center for carbon 

capture technologies, as well as two sites for testing 

farmland, rangeland, and biomass conversion practices

and technologies.

Carbontech Labs attempts to compile the best incubation 

practices across all levels of company maturity and focus 

them onto a single technological focus. In doing so, they 

are creating a one-stop shop for startups to determine 

their business plans and mature into presentable enterprises, source funds and laboratories to build working 

prototypes, and partner with real-world test sites in 

deploying demonstrations. At the same time, through 

their focus on this one (albeit broad) technology area, 

Carbontech Labs can also curate a more relevant network 

of investors, foundations, large corporations and others 

interested in carbon-negative technologies for its startups. 

These ventures will gain both exposure and recognition 

within this network, further strengthening the merit of

the program.

PRIME Coalition

PRIME Coalition mobilizes philanthropic dollars to de-risk 

early-stage companies addressing climate change. As 

stated above, there is a tremendous gap in funding 

between scientific research and commercial technological 

development, especially for hardware-based technologies. 

Using vehicles such as recoverable grants and program-related investments (PRIs), the goal of PRIME is to help fill 

that gap. PRIME acts as a non-profit investment syndicate 

for philanthropic organizations, identifying companies 

and technologies with tremendous potential to mitigate 

greenhouse gas emissions while pooling charitable asset 

owners to support them.

Private foundations governed by the U.S. federal tax code 

must give away 5% of their assets annually, and historically 

these have been made as grants to nonprofit causes with 

no financial return. While the other 95% (the endowment) 
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. JISEA | 13

“The VCs understood the concept, but wanted 

to see more technological de-risking. PRIME 

funding bridged this gap, so that we could go 

into the field and demonstrate key elements of 

our technology in order to raise the Series A.”

—Startup founder supported by PRIME

is sometimes invested in socially-impactful assets, fiduciaries generally attempt to preserve the social mission of the 

foundation in perpetuity, and therefore prioritize financial 

returns over social impact when investing the endowment. 

Program-related investments (PRIs) allow foundations to 

make disbursements that count towards the 5% in grants, 

but can be structured as equity or debt to nonprofit or 

for-profit entities35. PRIs must meet three criteria in order to 

be lawful, according to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service36:

1. The primary purpose is to accomplish one or more of 

the foundation’s exempt purposes,

2. Production of income or appreciation of property is not 

a significant purpose, and

3. Influencing legislation or taking part in political 

campaigns on behalf of candidates is not a purpose.

With U.S. foundations giving away more than $60 billion in 

grants annually37, PRIs have the potential to fund high-risk 

but transformative innovations both patiently and substantially. However, a list of hurdles makes charitable investing 

to science and engineering innovation prohibitively difficult 

for private foundations, and as a result, very few use PRIs 

to advance energy hardware innovation. PRIME Coalition 

acts to lower these educational, operational, and perceived 

regulatory barriers. 

PRIME taps a team of internal and external investment 

experts to vet portfolio companies based on three criteria: 

the potential to reduce gigaton-scale CO2 equivalent 

emissions, significant commercial promise that would 

bring them to scale, and fitness for charitable capital (i.e. 

an inability to raise sufficient financial support without 

philanthropic intervention). From 2014-2018, PRIME vetted 

promising startup companies and showcased them to 

prospective philanthropists: foundations, donor-advised 

funds, individuals, family offices and trusts. Since the end 

of 2018, PRIME has also led financing rounds via the PRIME 

Impact Fund, a seed fund with pooled resources from 

philanthropists, investing in companies that fit the criteria 

listed above.

Because of the rules of charitability, PRIME must invest in 

transformative companies with significant technical risk. 

This early capital injection enables technical proofs of 

concept in order to bring the risk profile in line with more 

traditional follow-on investments. From the standpoint 

of foundations, its grant dollars can not only “accomplish 

[their] exempt purposes” by bringing transformative clean 

energy technologies into the world, but also have the 

potential to earn returns, multiplying the reach of the initial 

grant. From the standpoint of the startup, it now has access 

to significant flexible capital to validate the key proofpoints necessary for later commercial investment rounds.

Since 2015, PRIME Coalition has mobilized $48.8 million 

and supported eleven companies, ranging from grid-scale 

energy storage to electric airplanes to cradle-to-cradle 

composite materials. These investments have helped 

companies build prototypes, fund pilot demonstrations, 

obtain grants from the Advanced Research Projects 

Agency - Energy and/or raise follow-on rounds of capital. 

While it is clearly too early to fully evaluate the success 

of PRIME’s model, the quality and potential impact of the 

11 companies thus far, along with the immense pool of 

untapped grant dollars, add up to a promising idea.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures

In late 2015, on the eve of the United Nations Climate 

Change Conference in Paris, Bill Gates spurred a collaboration called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition focused 

on supporting new technologies to prevent the impacts of 

climate change. The collaboration includes several corporations, as well as 30 of the richest and most influential 

people in the world, including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, 

and Michael Bloomberg. Breakthrough Energy Ventures 

(BEV) was created as an offshoot of the Coalition, in order 

to inject patient capital into the technologies needed to 

address climate change.

BEV is unique from other VC firms in several ways. The 

LPs consist of a majority of the individuals in the Coalition, 

allowing BEV to be set up like a family office. The fund 

life is 20 years, with $1 billion of initial capital. The added 

time horizon over a typical VC fund allows BEV to invest in 

transformational technologies still in their nascency, while 

the size of the fund allows BEV to place many bets across 

various sectors and levels of development. Breakthrough 
JISEA | 14 This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

Energy has laid out five grand challenges that together 

capture nearly all sources of greenhouse gas: electricity, 

transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and buildings—

and will only invest in those technologies which have the 

potential to reduce global GHG emissions by at least half a 

gigaton of CO2-equivalent. They have assembled a team of 

26 people to run the fund, consisting of prominent scientists, entrepreneurs and industry experts, among them 

one Nobel Laureate and one National Medal of Science 

Laureate. BEV is willing to span very-early seed to latestage scale-up, and typically takes one board seat in its 

investment companies.

BEV, as with many venture firms, is quite secretive about 

its deal-flow and process. It has announced investments in 

fourteen startup companies, spanning technologies from 

nuclear fusion to CO2-light concrete, several of which tackle 

various forms of energy storage. It is unclear how much of 

the $1 billion fund they have invested so far, but they likely 

have a large portion still untapped. Again, only time will 

tell if BEV is successful—that success hinges on its ability 

to quickly transform disruptive innovations into global 

companies that will simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas 

emissions and earn handsome profits in order to scale.

Discussion and Conclusion

Based on the research performed for this report, we briefly 

provide some areas in which these and other organizations 

could further improve the innovation pathway for energy 

hardware technologies.

Strengthen the Entire Ecosystem

The path from invention to diffusion in energy and related 

markets is both challenging and long. The programs and 

institutions described above contribute vital functions in 

this energy technology innovation ecosystem, and as in 

any ecosystem, the various components allow the system 

as a whole to function. Some effort has been expended to 

connect the components, and yet they still exist largely as 

silos, both geographically and functionally. These connections need to become stronger, such that any individual 

entrepreneur can benefit from the suite of capabilities 

across the ecosystem. It should be recognized that this 

is not a zero-sum game, and that creating a stronger 

ecosystem benefits all parties. 

Certain ecosystem functions deserve more attention. For 

instance, many early-stage innovators do not consider the 

manufacturing processes by which their products will be 

made. Several innovation centers are designed to focus on 

this, such as mHUB in Chicago. Not only do they provide 

physical resources to test manufacturing processes, but 

these centers also partner with outside corporations to 

gain expert insights as well as foster connections with 

future customers. These relationships with the market 

players who are already at scale, similar to those relationships that IN2

 and GCxN have with Wells Fargo and Shell 

respectively, allow startups to scale more rapidly.

Market demand presents another key component to this 

ecosystem that is sometimes institutionally suppressed. 

Part of the difficulty in bringing disruptive innovation 

to legacy sectors such as energy lies in the magnitude 

of the incumbents12, the inertia against change, and 

risk-aversion in general. Some programs are beginning to 

add divisions focused on policy solutions to encourage 

market movement. For instance, Imagine H2O, a water 

technology accelerator, recently partnered with the Milken 

Institute in California to launch a water policy accelerator38. 
This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. JISEA | 15

Designed to encourage market-based water technology 

adoption, the Water Innovation Policy Program convenes 

stakeholders within the policy and research communities 

to develop solutions that enable innovations to penetrate 

markets organically. While this program is focused on 

water, the structure is generalizable to technologies across 

the legacy sectors.

Embrace the Rejected

Ryan Kushner, author of Accelerate This39, and others12,40

advocate that programs should also consider methods 

to highlight deserving applicants who did not receive 

awards, in order to strengthen and preserve goodwill in the 

community. For instance, Y-Combinator maintains a discussion board where everyone in the community (including 

rejected applicants) can post ideas, and the Advanced 

Research Projects Agency—Energy allows top applicants 

who did not receive an award a booth at its annual summit. 

These offerings provide the opportunity for rejected 

applicants to learn from their mistakes, in order to succeed 

in follow-on attempts. Many high-quality ventures will 

initially be rejected. By providing some amount of consolation prize, programs can build a community of advocates 

broader than its awardees, and further strengthen the 

ecosystems in which they work. 

Conclusion

Each of these programs offers a targeted approach to 

addressing the challenges on the road from scientific 

invention to market disruption. Rather than competing 

with one another, these approaches are complementary; 

a single startup company could benefit from Cyclotron 

Road, followed by IN2, with investments from PRIME and 

Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Also, this list is by no 

means sufficient or comprehensive. These and many other 

organizations are needed to enable the coming energy 

transformation, combining the best attributes of the 

programs above as well as entirely new approaches. 

Through innovation, the world’s energy system and by 

extension nearly every sector of the economy will see 

dramatic change in the 21st century. The organizations and 

programs described in this paper are designed to fill the 

existing gaps that prevent entrepreneurs from commercializing disruptive technologies. The early results are promising and exciting, but they are just the beginning.
JISEA | 16 This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.

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