5 on Funding with Prasanta Sarkar, Co-Founder and CEO of Newtrace

Welcome to 5 on Funding! This weekly newsletter asks venture-backed startups 5 detailed ways they plan to use the new funding to scale their companies.

Quick Facts About Newtrace

Company Description: Newtrace is a technology company aiming to fight global climate change. Newtrace’s line of electrolyzers is based on a revolutionary new technology offering green hydrogen production at up to 3x lower capex costs. These systems are modular and scalable making them suitable for various applications.

Industry: Renewable Energy Manufacturing

Amount Raised: $5.6m?

What 5 things will you do with this funding?

Key Priority for Funding:?Scaling the business, team, and partnerships

1. Scaling up: Product

“We are focusing on scaling our product to a larger megawatt size, which can make tons of hydrogen in a year.”

2. Increasing the number of deployments?

“We are aiming for five deployments in the next eight to 10 months. One of them will be in Europe, so we are getting all the certification and testing done.”

3. Scaling up: Manufacturing

“We are also scaling up our manufacturing capabilities so that we can turn more and more machines out of our facilities. We are making around five megawatts of manufacturing capability, in the short term while aiming for gigawatts of manufacturing and deployment capabilities.”

4. Hiring

“We are expanding our team: the technology team as well as the non-technology team. So we are hiring two to three software engineers who can come and build a software platform on top of our hardware. We are looking for partners to take our media outreach and marketing to the U.S. and Europe.

Hiring is the hardest thing we’re facing right now. We are trying to figure out how to build a global team with individual technology teams in India, U.S., and Europe. Because what we're building is so cutting edge, you cannot find talent in a single location or single country. That's something where we are very willing to experiment and try out different things. Maybe some people from Europe can spend some time in the U.S. and our facility in India, and some of the India team can spend some time in Europe, etc. So we will see how we structure that. But that's always top of mind.”

5. Creating partnerships

“We are also hiring partnership leads who can build industry partnerships in India, the U.S., and Europe. We are an India-based technology company with founders who have spent a lot of time in Europe, so we have good connections there. But the U.S. is a market that requires solutions for decarbonization as well. We are looking for ways to position ourselves in the large industrial sectors in the U.S. market. We have some conversations going, and partners will help with channelizing our efforts.”

About the co-founder: Prasanta Sarkar, CEO and co-founder of Newtrace, is a two-time awardee of the Marie Curie fellowship with a Ph.D. in Fluid Mechanics and Energy Engineering from University Grenoble Alpes, France. He is an aerospace engineer turned entrepreneur with industrial and research experience in product development, multiphase flows, and computational mechanics.