Why I Started A Software Company after Founding a Nano Technology Startup
I grew up dreaming about how to become a rocket scientist while playing around with my electronics learning kit. My brother was really into technology and also a smart guy knew about how to create small circuits with 1 or 2 transistors which mostly blinks some lights and create some weird noises. He taught me a lot about how his electronic kit worked and we have built many circuits together just for fun. Laser-triggered alarm for our 10 square meter room, check. An electronically controlled water sprinkler triggered with heat? Check. It was all fun and discovery for me and I even won a small science award with one of the weekend projects with my brother.
All that small creations led me to think how this transistor thing works. I knew how it worked theoretically but I never really understood, this 3 different pieces of NPN sandwich in nanoscale, controls current and makes it possible to give mankind possibility to create wonderful devices called microprocessors.
While my mind was boggled with all these possibilities of electronics, I was really fascinated by nanotechnology. Think about it, humans can manipulate the material in nanometer scale which is thousands of times thinner than a hair, and this material does all kinds of things like generating electricity from the sun, controlling potential inside circuits and stores your funny cat videos inside the silicon memory of your smartphone. It is still simply amazing…
In 2008 I got admitted to Mechanical Engineering department in Yildiz Technical University which is one of the most respected universities in Turkey. To be honest It was not what I exactly wanted to study (Thanks to Turkish System for being admitted to Uni.) but it caused an interesting chain of events that I didn’t imagine.
After I got admitted the first thing that I did was to join the student club which used to make hydrogen-powered electric cars and also solar powered cars. We had all kinds of interesting stuff at our humble workshop at the basement of electronics faculty which was like a childhood dream to me. Using my previous knowledge about electronics I designed a 3 phase electric motor driver circuit for one of the hydrogen-powered electric car which baffled electronics students in our club a bit :)
At the time we were getting ready for Shell Eco-Marathon, we had many problems with our hydrogen fuel cell system because of hydrogen leaks and it was a headache to get rid of the problems. Because you know, Hydrogen is the smallest atom in periodic scale and it is nearly impossible to contain it securely. While I was dealing with all that Hydrogen car and its issues I thought that, energy storage is the biggest problem in our current age and no one had a good solution to it.
For storing electrical energy for personal use and transportation you got few options:
- Lithium-ion batteries: This is the most common and with low energy densities, it is expensive, takes a lot of time to charge
- Hydrogen Fuel Cells: It is fast to recharge and has a relatively good energy density. But it is definitely hard to store and dangerous and after what I have seen in our student club, I wouldn’t drive a hydrogen cell car. (We had some small explosions :)
- Super Capacitors: Excellent safety and excellent charging speed. But it has the worst energy density, which means it would take truckloads of supercapacitors to power an electric car for 400km.
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Around 2012, I was about to start my final thesis and I didn’t want to do usual mechanical engineering stuff -you know cranes and stuff like that. At that time I stumbled upon to one of the possible projects. A professor was looking for a student who can design a machine that can synthesize Graphene, a revolutionary carbon material with excellent electrical and mechanical characteristics. I said to myself yeah that is it, let’s do this project at least it would be fun to design something cool. While I started the project, the intended use of the graphene was actually using the material inside the epoxy-carbon fibre composite material to increase its strength and lower its weight. Then I realized it is a waste of resources to use this wonder material Graphene as the composite material. Carbon composite was already a really good performing material and I didn’t really believe it is possible to make it even better.
I don’t want to go into details about how to increase the energy density of a lithium-ion battery but Graphene was the material to do so. It has the potential to solve energy storage problems of today and I got super excited when I realized that. The idea was clear, design a reactor which will be capable of producing graphene with lots of defects (Defects: Irregularities in nano-sized materials, holes, bends etc. Defects create more volume to store Lithium Ions like a sponge.) and with a very good electrical conductivity. This specific type of the Graphene would be able to theoretically increase lithium-ion battery anode’s energy density 4 times more. That was revolutionary, I had to do it but how? I had no knowledge on how to prototype and manufacture Lithium Ion battery but I had access to loads and loads of scientific articles for free thanks to uni network.
So I started reading. Between 2012–2014 I read nearly everything that is written about nanotechnology and lithium-ion batteries. I don’t know why but I was having a weird sense of satisfaction each time I read those articles. In the same time, I realized there were lots of shitty articles getting published, I was super surprised when I discovered that you should definitely shouldn’t trust what is written in peer-reviewed articles. Half of my article pile was basically bullshit.
I finished my research and also started designing my colossal reactor which was planned to produce Graphene material. At that time, there was a specific grant from the Turkish Ministry of Science and Industry which aimed at young entrepreneurs whom are still studying and want to start a company. I applied to this programme and I got the grant! I was still studying meantime and I got 100k from the Ministry to produce my graphene reactor design and test the battery anode which will be created with the material produced.
After the grant, I went through the toughest time of my life. I was writing down patents while trying to get the reactor done right by the undereducated metal workshop workers, when all this happening I would be probably in a coffee shop near to famous district of Istanbul called Karakoy where you can find all kinds of electronic components and parts -because I also have to get the right electronics for my precious reactor..
Middle of 2013 I got my reactor done properly and also started producing some graphene. Meanwhile, I was in the middle of the programme which also means that my money tank was half full…
Nearing to end of the programme, I made a barely functional battery prototype but it was far far away from what I wanted to build. So the process of finding investors kicked in. I had to make it work because it meant a lot to me and it would possibly create a positive impact on our daily lives.
Long story short, It didn’t work in the end. I tried to keep the company running R&D but it was not really possible with little funding. We had an investor but the time and money they gave to us were severely limited. Then I realized what we were trying to do was multi-million budget projects by big companies such as Panasonic or Samsung SDI. We were outnumbered, out funded…
It was the moment of truth for me to let it go, with all of the approved patents of the company. I was burnt out and not able to go further any more. So I sold the company with its patents and put everything behind for a while. In 2015 I started working for a Solar Energy Company as Product Development Manager in Leipzig, Germany and put my entrepreneur background aside.
At that company, I still worked in the nanotechnology field and I lead the team who developed my Electrochromic flexible transparent film technology. We made really good prototypes in just 6 months but the project was killed due to lack of financing for scaling up the whole technology. Then I quit the company with a really good working product which was about to scale up and solve energy efficiency problems of buildings. Didn’t happen.
After 5 years I started Grafentek, I decided I want to build again but this time in a different area. In an area that I can create rapid impact and rapid growth. No more research labs with expensive equipment inside. Just our computers and few good people who share the same ambition like I do.
That’s how we created Kryptowatt with my ex-colleague from my previous company. It is basically a energy trading platform for everyone who are willing to reduce their energy costs.
Let me briefly explain how it works. Electricity price is actually not fixed and changes every hour. Time to time prices can hit zero and even negative values. The reason behind that is, we basically built too much solar and wind energy plants without matching them with proper energy storage devices. The result is fluctuating energy supply which sometimes doesn’t even get used and damages the grid when the sun shines too much or when the wind blows strongly. Of course, as a customer, we don’t feel that in our bill, it is a fixed bill so no one really aware of what is going on in the background.
The cost of unbalanced energy generation is too much even some governments are now taking some precautions to limit renewable energy sources. Here is a cropped article from NDR: Not only is grid stability a problem, but “waste power” is also growing astronomically, NDR writes, citing the Bundesnetzagentur (German Network Agency), that 555 gigawatt-hrs of renewable power went unused in 2013 because of overloading and the surplus had to be discarded. The trend of “waste electricity” is skyrocketing, NDR writes.
So if the energy storage is too costly, what can we do to solve this inefficiency problem? The answer is educating and changing individuals electricity usage habits through an app. Sunny day, low energy prices? Kryptowatt app sends a notification advising you to plug your electric car to plug and charge it. It will give you a better rate than the fixed tariff, you will help stabilize the grid and use the excess power while you are paying less. The environment wins, pocket wins.
That is the main reason why I went out from creating high tech startups and started a software company. I believe nowadays it is one of the fastest ways to create impact and value with low capital requirements.
I am optimistic that we will change and impact the world in a positive way with Kryptowatt. And who knows, maybe I will start my own research lab after selling this startup and plan to go to Mars like Elon Musk :)
Regards from Leipzig. Keep building fellow readers!
