A young company that formed during the pandemic and chose the Denver area as its base has big ambitions: to become the world’s leading supplier of advanced electric motors.
The company, H3X, was founded by a team of engineers and has grown since its start in 2020 to 33 employees.
“We’re aiming to get to 45 to 50 by end of the year,” said Jason Sylvestre, co-founder and CEO.
The startup’s mission, Sylvestre said, is to help decarbonize the aviation, aerospace, marine, defense and heavy-industry sectors by designing and producing high-density, lightweight electric motors. He said H3X has won about $5 million worth of contracts with NASA and the U.S. Air Force.
In August, H3X announced $20 million in Series A fundraising. The round was led by Infinite Capital, with participation from Hanwha Asset Management, Cubit Capital, Origin Ventures, Industrious Ventures and Venn10 Capital. Other investors included Lockheed Martin Ventures, Metaplanet, Liquid 2 Ventures and TechNexus.
“It’s super exciting. We’ve been looking forward to this day for a while,” Sylvestre said. “The next six months are going to be pretty insane. We’ve got some very large contracts in the pipeline.”
Sylvestre, Max Liben, chief technology officer, and Eric Maciolek, president, formed the company in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were working remotely and living in three different states: Minnesota, California and Alabama.
After a round of fundraising, the three decided it was time to move into a building and start testing the hardware. They have a 17,000-square-foot facility in Louisville.
“We looked at a lot of different cities. Denver just had the right mix of everything we were looking for, with a really strong aerospace and defense ecosystem and an emerging startup scene,” Sylvestre said. “We also wanted our headquarters in a place where we wanted to live and that had a very high quality of life and would be easy to recruit people to move to. We need pretty specialized talent.”
H3X makes compact, lightweight electric motors ranging in power from 30 kilowatts to 30 megawatts. “We can power everything from small drones to large ships and airplanes,” Sylvestre said.
The company’s long-term mission is to advance the technology to electrify aviation. Sylvestre said the company’s current focus is on defense but it also has customers in the aerospace and marine industries.
“We’re pretty well into the commercialization process. We shipped our first products to customers last year,” Sylvestre said
The company is converting the contracts into multi-year orders, he added.
Nathan Doctor, founder and managing partner at Infinite Capital, said in a statement that over the past three years working with H3X, he has seen “a phenomenal display of rapid innovation” from the team.
“Bringing technical advancements to market this fast is rare, as they have already commercialized a series of market-leading electric motors,” Doctor said.
H3X is focused on scaling innovative technologies that Lockheed Martin Ventures believes could provide its customers with effective solutions for “electrifying legacy, multi-domain systems,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of the investment company.
Sylvestre said the company’s motors can be used with batteries, hydrogen fuel cells or hydropower plants and can serve as generators without any changes required.
“The power density of our products is about 2 to 3 times higher over anything else that exists on the market,” Sylvestre said.
That means the motor will be roughly three times lighter than the next-best motor, he added. With aviation, one approach might be a hybrid system that reduces the weight of a battery pack. Sylvestre said H3X has some aviation customers who are looking to put electric-powered planes into service in 2028.
“One is working on a 19-seat aircraft and another is working on a 30-seat aircraft,” Sylvestre said. “Within five years, I think you’ll definitely see some aircraft that are operating using electric propulsion. It’s a lot closer than people realize.”
The company’s long-term focus is on aviation because the industry contributes to greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change and because it’s one of the most difficult industries to decarbonize.
In 2022, aviation accounted for about 2% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. In recent decades, air travel has grown faster than rail, road or shipping, the IEA said.
The International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, said the demand for air travel is expected to rise by an average of 4.3% per year over the next 20 years.
“In terms of impact, aviation is the largest industry that our technology will impact just in terms of decarbonization,” Sylvestre said.
