Meet Hyme Energy – a Copenhagen-based deep tech scale-up, developing energy storage solutions to decarbonise industrial process heat. Founded in 2021, the company is changing the future of thermal energy storage with molten hydroxides as their innovative storage medium.
Hyme Energy is also a member of the EIC Scaling Club Batteries & Energy Storage Group.
During the Scale 100 Forum in Athens, Greece, we met with Nis Benn, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Hyme Energy. In the interview, whe discussed how the Danish company is tackling one of the biggest decarbonisation challenges. Keep reading and learn more about this scale-up.
You can also listen to the interview recording here (or watch the video below):
Industrial process heat makes up roughly 30% of the world's energy use, and a staggering 90% of that still comes from fossil fuels. While this presents a considerable problem, for Hyme Energy, it’s a challenge to tackle.
The company has developed an innovative molten salt-based thermal energy storage system that captures low-cost renewable energy and dispatches it as heat on demand, enabling industries to shift away from fossil fuels.
“Our energy storage systems take cheap, intermittent renewable energy when it's available, store it in the form of heat, and dispatch it on demand, typically 24/7, into the industrial site where it needs to be used,” Nis explains.
Hyme Energy's low-cost storage medium drives down overall system costs and enhances efficiency. Ultimately, this enables the scale-up to compete with fossil fuels in terms of price, making renewable energy deployment significantly more affordable.
The company’s technology, built on seven years of lab-developed patents, also effectively controls corrosion in its storage media. Due to several key scientific and technological breakthroughs, Hyme Energy can manage this corrosion well enough for the systems to work commercially without quickly damaging the equipment. As a result, Hyme Energy’s patented corrosion control allows the scale-up to build long-lasting systems that provide a return on investment for industrial users.
The scale-up has a broadly skilled team of 40 professionals. Nis tells us that it blends experience from solar thermal technology, crucial to their technology design, with the practical knowledge of oil and gas professionals skilled in managing complex, high-temperature systems. Complementing this technical foundation is their specialised chemistry R&D team, which the scale-up has “been lucky to acquire from across the globe”.
Leading Hyme Energy is a five-person executive team, including Nis and his co-founder, Ask Løvschall-Jensen. The leadership team strives to foster agility and empower individuals to make swift decisions in alignment with the company's milestones.
Nis tells us that succeeding with the tech development has been a critical hurdle the team has overcome. “It was also our main opportunity, and having now commissioned our technology demonstrator, we've made significant progress. We're shifting our focus from technology development towards commercialisation,” Nis elaborates.
Growing the team presents another challenge: keeping everyone aligned as roles become more specialised: “We have established a candid culture where people can freely speak up. Thus, we can quickly spot and resolve issues. Openness is key.”
When speaking of attracting international talent, Hyme Energy takes pride in having hired a recruitment expert early on: “We could’ve spent all our time finding the right talent, but we decided not to. The hiring expert has been a part of the executive team ever since, allowing the rest of us to focus on tech and business development instead.”
The driving force behind the company is a clear vision: to ensure the consistent availability of sustainable energy. As Nis says, while the means to produce sustainable energy are now well-understood, the challenge lies in guaranteeing its presence precisely when needed, a gap currently filled by less sustainable alternatives like coal plants. Hence, the mission to close the gap is one of the core motivations for the Hyme Energy team.
Yet, he adds that within the company, there are individual variations of this mission: “Some are fascinated by the technical challenges, while others are motivated by a profound sense of responsibility for future generations. Some see our work as a part of enhancing European industry competitiveness.”
“The industry competitiveness part is growing on me. What started as a passion to make the green transition possible has turned into a realisation that we can play a key role in making European industry competitive again by bringing down the energy costs,” Nis tells us.
Asked about Hyme Energy’s participation in the EIC Scaling Club, he shares that the scale-up sees plenty of benefits, the main being visibility among fellow scale-ups navigating similar growth stages and sector-specific challenges. The company views it as an opportunity to share experiences, build a supportive network for exchanging information and insights, and receive practical tips for overcoming organisational hurdles, technical setbacks, and other common growing pains.
“The Scaling Club was an opportunity that arose after being accepted into the EIC Accelerator tracks and the major grant from the EIC.”
Regarding other potential gains from the Scaling Club, Nis shares that Hyme Energy hopes to find simpler and faster funding processes to meet their growing capital needs and potentially attract more investment to fuel their ambitions. “We would like to raise funding. And, hopefully, with the ambition level behind the investors who've joined the EIC Scaling Club’s trusted network, we can go higher in funding amount and ambitions,” he says.
Watch the full interview with Nis Benn below, or visit our YouTube channel to explore more video content:
The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.
The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.
The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.
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