Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy bets these 21 startups will shape energy’s future

While the world is focused on the power demands of AI data centers, the folks at Breakthrough Energy are paying attention, but not for the reasons you might think.

“Data centers are a 10% bump against basically flat demand for electricity over the last 30 years. So it looks like a big bump, but data centers are absolutely the canary in the coal mine,” Eric Toone, managing partner at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, told TechCrunch. “You’re chasing a coming massive increase in demand for electricity.”

That demand is forecast to surge as countries electrify entire sectors of their economies to rein in carbon emissions. “Electrifying everything implies a 3x increase in demand for electricity,” Toone said. 

In other words, the coming decades will make today’s scramble for power seem quaint by comparison.

To help prepare for that future, Breakthrough Energy has spent the last several years supporting a handful of early stage startups with its Breakthrough Energy Fellows program. This year’s installment, its sixth, features a range of companies and technologies spanning everything from agriculture and nuclear fusion to robotics and data center power efficiency. TechCrunch received an exclusive look at the incoming cohort.

This cohort of fellows is the first announced since Ashley Grosh, who previously led the Fellows program, departed to become a partner at WovenEarth Ventures. In the meantime, senior director Benjamin Gaddy is serving as acting director while the organization determines what’s next, Toone said. 

Despite Grosh’s departure, this cohort still hews to the formula that defined previous years. “We’re always always right on the line that you’re not going to fund things that are silly, but the name of the game here is to take some big bets and hope to get some big payoffs,” Toone said.

Some of the incoming fellows certainly qualify as big swings. 

Among them is Borealis Fusion, a startup that’s pursuing fusion power using proton-boron fuel, which is widely available, but challenging to heat to the temperatures required to ignite fusion reactions.

Despite the long-shot nature of proton-boron fusion, the potential upside is significant. “If they can do it, you could get to much lower cost of energy,” Gaddy told TechCrunch. Another fusion startup, StarWarden, is working on heat management technology for future reactors.

Other startups, including Bedrock Semiconductor, K1 Semiconductor, and Vari Flux, are working on ways to squeeze more efficiency out of semiconductors and data centers. K1, for example, is developing a new, more efficient method to process key semiconductor materials, including gallium nitride and silicon carbide. “You could reduce the cost of these power electronics by maybe 50%, maybe more,” Gaddy said.

Breakthrough Energy is also placing bets on agriculture and critical minerals, including molecular sensing techniques to detect crop disease and robotics systems to harvest minerals from the ocean floor while minimizing disturbance.

It’s also supporting several startups, including AmyHyTech and Ammovolt Energy, that are developing ways to use and transport hydrogen with ammonia.

“Hydrogen is the Swiss army knife of energy. If you have enough hydrogen, and importantly if its cheap enough, you can do anything,” Toone said. But the infrastructure to move it around doesn’t exist. “There’s pretty close to zero installed capacity in this country,” he said. “There’s no simple way to move hydrogen around, and ammonia offers a potential way to do that.”

But for all the startups focused on decarbonization, this year’s fellows class has a number that are working to help humanity adapt to a warmer climate. 

“I think that folks really hoped that we were going to be able to decarbonize faster than we were able to,” Toone said. “It’s going to take longer and it’s going to be harder than we thought, and that absolutely leads you directly to adaptation.”