At GIC Insights 2024, GIC’s annual thought leadership event, Mateo Jaramillo, Co-Founder and CEO of Form Energy, discussed the unique role of iron-air batteries in the electric system, what firms looking to attract scale-up capital should do, and why his best career advice is to work on hard problems.

The following is an adapted transcript of Mateo’s full interview and has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What is one key recent development that has significantly impacted your business?

MATEO: It’s hard to narrow it down to one thing, but maybe one thing internal and one thing external, because that is really how we see the world. We just closed our series F financing as a company. So, this is another $400 million into the company, which takes us to over $1.2 billion total equity for the company over the last seven years.

So capital risk. Building a deep-tech company like we are, hard-tech manufacturing — in our case, it’s a battery — requires a lot of capital. Being able to retire that capital risk is one of the most important things for us as a company. I think we have done that quite well so far.

On the external side of things, it’s hard not to be in the energy world in the United States and not think about the election. So much has already happened in the meantime. So really digesting what the impact is there.

Form Energy building this battery, it’s for the grid and for reliability purposes. Our four-day duration battery enables a low-cost, reliable, increasingly renewable and growing electric grid. It really supports the growth of the industry, which is what everybody agrees that we need. We need a lot of energy and we need it now, and our battery can help deliver that.

Beyond balancing renewables, what roles can multi-day storage play?

MATEO: The type of battery that we are commercialising — this iron-air, reversible rusting, 100-hour duration battery — plays a really important role when we work with our utility customers. We model their system with this asset as part of it. Incorporating renewables is a part of that, but it really is letting their whole portfolio of assets perform more effectively, at a lower cost and higher reliability than if they did not have this kind of asset. So our battery really is a reliability asset first or capacity asset as they may say in the industry sometimes.

This just means that we are supporting the entire system at all points. The electric system needs to be completely reconciled from supply and demand at all times. That can be challenging when you are using a lot of renewables, which are based on the weather that shifts minute to minute and hour to hour.

Think about a polar vortex that lasts for four days. Gas has some challenges in those scenarios as well. So having this kind of resource makes the whole system operate more efficiently. We have never had this kind of asset in the electric system before. It solves a lot of challenges that you are piecing together through different methods, but which are all imperfect attempts to solve this multi-day weather intermittency challenge.

What sets iron-air batteries apart from other solutions in the long-duration storage space?

Solving the challenge of multi-day intermittency or long-duration weather patterns is something that the grid needs to do no matter what.

There are existing ways to solve that. It’s what coal, natural gas, and nuclear have done for a very, very long time now. But into that, we have a lot of new load growth, a lot of new demand for electricity. We are also looking for new solutions that can scale very quickly and cost-effectively to meet that demand. So other options that our customers are considering are things like small modular nuclear reactors or some form of hydrogen that is produced electrolytically and then turned into generation at some point. There’s also carbon capture, for example, or maybe restarting existing nuclear facilities.

We see some of that already happening. The reason why I am particularly bullish about where Form is really comes down to cost and timing. These are all options that likely will show up in the market at some point. The question is how quickly and at what scale. Form is delivering our first projects to customers starting 2025.

We have been at this now for seven years, so we are very happy to finally be at this stage of delivery to customers. We expect to ramp up very quickly and prove that this technology does exactly what we know it does, based on all the testing that we have done so far at full-scale systems. We expect to ramp up the manufacturing as quickly as possible.

Competing against these other technologies in terms of timing, cost, and cost entitlement is perhaps the most exciting piece of this. We can bring things to market and also see just how quickly we are going to come down that cost curve once we have started producing these batteries at any relevant scale.

So very clearly, [Form] starts to occupy a unique position of satisfying some of this early pent-up demand for these kinds of newer solutions. We think we can have that best solution to the market fastest, at the biggest scale.

What best practices can climate tech firms use to attract scale-up capital?

First and foremost was making sure we had a product our customers needed.

Not just that they maybe would want it, but that they really needed it. We were able to unequivocally demonstrate that using the quantitative approach that we took, this modelling approach with our customers. It was a very hand-in-hand approach to understanding the value and seeing that this type of asset really does solve some really challenging problems for them, no matter what their view is on their grid. Making sure that we had that strong value proposition upfront was fundamental.

This allowed us to sign contracts. The utility world is changing fairly quickly; it’s moving faster than it ever has before, and it’s willing to take some risk. Before, the utility industry has historically been very risk-averse. Now, that has changed and it’s because of the urgency to meet the demand, reliability, and decarbonisation challenges and keep costs under control throughout all of that. Establishing the value [of our solution] upfront was the most important thing which enabled those contracts to be signed. We signed contracts for about 55 megawatts (MW) of projects of 5.5 gigawatt-hours (GWh), which represents for us about 18 months of backlog in the factory.

We had to come down the cost curve, that classic Valley of Death process that every hard tech company has to go through. But it really was the value proposition followed by the contracts, which enabled capital to meet us in the middle of that phase.

What’s one bold prediction you have for your business, the industry, or the world?

MATEO: The easy prediction for me to make is that Form is going to be spectacularly successful over the next few years!

I think as a society, generally, when we decide that we want to meet a challenge, we meet it. I think that there’s a huge amount of momentum to go solve those big problems because there’s huge opportunity in solving them. There’s economic opportunity. There’s happiness opportunity. There’s a better living opportunity through that.

I tend to be quite optimistic that in the end we will solve these challenges, because we will decide to do that. And the benefits will be for everybody.

What have been your key leadership lessons throughout your career?

MATEO: There really is nothing better than working with amazing colleagues on a really important mission that you are all bought into.

That’s something that we have tried to do at Form – go pick a problem that matters. Even if it sounds really, really hard, let’s work on something that if we solve it, it really does make a difference.

And that doesn’t have to be going after a $10 trillion market, like what we happen to be doing; there are smaller scales than that of course. But finding that problem, that is key to, I think, a long, satisfying career.