A year on from the sudden collapse of Moxion Power, co-founder Paul Huelskamp is back with a new venture and familiar goal: replacing diesel generators with clean, mobile batteries.
The startup, Anode Technology Company, is coming out of stealth with $9 million in seed funding led by Eclipse (and participation from investors including Aleph) after betting that a leaner build strategy and a focus on logistics will now make the economics work.
From Moxion’s Fall to a Second Act in Mobile Batteries
Moxion’s failure has become a cautionary tale in climate hardware. The company had raised over $110 million to commercialize big, towable battery systems for construction and live events. But it still hit the hardware “valley of death,” laying off more than 400 people before selling off assets. The episode illustrated how capital-intensive manufacturing, certification timelines that run into years, and providing field support can prove overwhelming for even young companies with strong demand signals.
Anode is spared the most excruciating lesson, Huelskamp says: building it all from scratch themselves. The company will work with contract manufacturers from day one and focus on system integration, software, and operations. Its pack will be smaller than Moxion’s approximately 600 kilowatt-hours — a counterintuitive decision at first, but inspired by hopes to boost throughput by packing in more energy per unit on fewer flatbeds and less crane time, and fewer drivers and trips per job.
It’s that fixation on delivered-energy cost — the all-in price per kilowatt-hour at the point of use — that gets at where Moxion tripped over itself. In mobile power, unit economics depend on logistics as much as they do battery chemistry: payload constraints, route lengths, charging windows, work and utilization. Get those wrong, and the whole spreadsheet is garbage.
Why We Still Need Better Mobile Batteries
The push to electrify fleets is running headlong into grid reality. A depot with 100 to 150 delivery vans ready for charging will draw multi-megawatt power loads that local infrastructure simply cannot support without expensive, time-consuming upgrades. Records from the U.S. Department of Energy and National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicate that most depots contemplating such connections have interconnection timelines on the scale of quarters or years, not weeks. Like the TEP, CALSTART also notes a lag between the schedule of vehicle deliveries and site power availability.
When the grid lags behind, companies fall back on diesel. Even high-profile autonomous and EV fleets have stationed generator trailers at depots to make up the difference. The environmental trade-offs are stark: Off-road diesel engines account for a large share of the nitrogen oxides and fine particulate emissions produced in California, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the state’s air regulators have begun tightening rules governing portable generators at events like festivals and job sites. That policy pressure yields an opening for lower-key, zero-emission battery systems.
Cost is another lever. By recharging packs off-peak on the grid — at rates often as low as a few cents per kilowatt-hour — and discharging where energy is needed, operators can undercut the all-in cost of diesel power, which, with fuel, transport, rental, and maintenance, can exceed $1/kWh. Anode can buy power at around three to five cents per kilowatt-hour and “sell a service innovation that beats generator rates,” Huelskamp says. The hitch: utilization and routing efficiencies need to be high enough that they can absorb trucking and labor overhead.
Anode’s Strategy and Technology for Mobile Power
Anode’s hardware is built around a proprietary, integrated inverter platform specifically tuned to the use cases it addresses — either fast-charging electric vehicles at depots, three-phase supply at construction sites, or clean power for live events. The more compact pack — “flatbed-friendly,” as LeScelle refers to it — will also accept 1,600 V DC and should both increase turns per day and reduce balance-of-plant complexity on-site. While competitors such as Sparkcharge and Power Sonic are also pitching mobile charging, Anode’s argument is that tighter hardware-software integration can wring more value out of each kilowatt-hour moved.
Adding a boost this time is the seed round’s lead, Jiten Behl, an Eclipse partner who adds some hard-earned perspective from his time at Rivian, which signed a landmark deal to supply 100,000 electric delivery vans to Amazon. The program pinpointed one primary bottleneck: charging at scale would often demand substation-like levels of power at depots that just don’t exist yet. Behl’s argument is that mobile storage can become a malleable bridge — detached from the grid, when necessary — as utilities play catch-up.
Software is pivotal. The intent is that Anode can be used to collectively manage such features as charge timing, dispatch, routing, and predictive maintenance through AI to reduce operational costs and increase uptime. The strategy also leans on macro strength: Average lithium-ion pack prices fell to $139 per kilowatt-hour in 2023, according to BloombergNEF, and carried on reducing in 2024; that downward march boosts mobile storage economics year after year.
What to Watch as Anode Proves Mobile Power Model
Short-term proof will emerge through trial deployments with fleet depots, builders, and event operators. Standard certifications for stationary and mobile energy storage — like UL 9540/9540A for safety and fire testing — will be key de-risking milestones. And so will obtaining project finance or leasing structures to float inventory, which has been the undoing of many an asset-heavy startup.
If Anode manages positive unit economics at modest usage, it could carve itself a defensible niche providing clean, dispatchable power where the grid is weakest. If not, it risks reliving a painful chapter in the history of climate hardware. Huelskamp and company see a mandate here: Turn the lessons learned from Moxion’s collapse into a lasting business that finally completes what they began.
