California-based clean energy startup Voya Energy raised $35mn in series A funding to scale its new energy system that uses fuel made from aluminum scrap to power generators that can produce electricity without combustion or air emissions at point of use.
The financing will go toward technology development and its initial product rollout in 2027, while also supporting its plans to scale to commercial manufacturing in 2028, the company said on Wednesday.
Voya, which raised $13mn in its seed round in July 2025, anticipates that its system will qualify for the clean electricity investment credit under section 48E of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.
The company intends to market the technology to data center developers, along with industrial operators and other "large energy users", touting that the system can alleviate pressure on local power grids and ease permitting challenges, given its "ultra-silent" design and zero-emission capabilities.
Voya's metal-based fuel comes from turning "low-grade scrap aluminum" into pellets that then mix with air and water to produce electricity through a low-temperature, electrochemical process inside the company's generators that are housed in 20-foot containers. The company's industrial-scale design is expected to generate up to 2MW of electricity and will have a 10-foot fuel container that can hold around 100MWh of stored energy.
When fully scaled, Voya anticipates that its system will be able to provide 100MW of generation capacity and 10GWh of stored energy per acre, which it touts is four times more compact than diesel generator fleets and 100 times more compact than grid-scale battery installations. It added that current efforts to prove out its technology have shown a conversion efficiency of 57pc, which it compared with 35pc from a diesel generator.
Voya's fuel process creates aluminum trihydrate (ATH) as a byproduct, which the company plans to sell as a common industrial feedstock initially before pursuing its longer-term goal of turning ATH that it and others produce into "fuel-grade aluminum". ATH, which some consider as "specialty alumina", is a versatile compound whose uses include as a flame retardant in industrial applications, an antacid in the pharmaceutical industry and as a coagulant additive for water-treatment chemicals.
"Our long-term opportunity is not simply to build another generator," Voya co-founder Richard Wang said. "It is to establish metal fuels as an entirely new energy category — one that can deliver dependable electricity across industries and applications anywhere on Earth."
