Inside the Stack: Newtrace's Playbook to Scale Green Hydrogen One Electrode at a Time
- Speciale Invest
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
A Staircase Worth Climbing
If you skip the elevator at Newtrace's R&D facility in Bengaluru and take the stairs, every step greets you with a sticker — a hydrogen factoid. How much of it humanity consumes. How much carbon the current production methods emit. How far the gap stretches between where we are and where we need to be.
It's a small detail, but it tells you something important about the founders: Prasanta Sarkar and Rochan Sinha are not building a company for a pitch deck. They are building one for a problem they genuinely cannot stop thinking about.
The Problem With Green Hydrogen
Green hydrogen — produced by splitting water using renewable electricity — is among the cleanest energy carriers we have. It is also, today, stubbornly expensive. At nearly triple the cost of its fossil-fuel-derived "grey" counterpart, it sits tantalisingly close to commercial viability, yet remains out of reach at scale.
The bottleneck is not ambition or policy. It is the electrolyser — specifically, the stack components inside it. Traditional systems depend on fragile, costly polymer membranes and electrocatalysts made from rare metals like platinum and iridium. These are expensive, supply-chain-intensive, and often imported. For a country like India, building a green hydrogen economy on the back of scarce, globally traded critical materials is simply substituting one dependency for another.
Newtrace was founded on the conviction that this dependency can — and must — be broken.
Starting With the Electrode
Newtrace's long-term ambition is a membrane-less electrolyser architecture that eliminates the polymer bottleneck entirely. But technology of that order requires patient development and rigorous validation cycles. In the meantime, the founders identified a more immediate opportunity: a superior electrode that works within the systems the industry already uses.
The result is Voltagen — a proprietary electrode technology designed as a drop-in replacement for existing alkaline electrolysers. Instead of rare metals, Voltagen uses abundant earth-metal-based electrocatalysts, which Newtrace expects to significantly reduce manufacturing costs. More strikingly, the system is designed to cut specific energy consumption by up to 9.5 kWh per kilogram of hydrogen produced — pushing the economics of hydrogen production materially closer to their theoretical limits.
This is not incremental improvement. It is precision-engineered efficiency delivered through a product that existing operators can adopt without rebuilding their infrastructure.
As Sarkar explains: "The risk was that India would become a slave to the supply chain of critical materials from global players. We said this is a problem statement to address while the membrane-less electrolyser goes through its own development and validation cycle."
Why This Moment
The global electrolyser market is projected to reach $42.4 billion by 2034. The companies that capture it will not necessarily be those with the most ambitious full-stack vision — they will be those that can deliver cost-effective, locally manufacturable components at the point when industrial buyers are making capital allocation decisions. That moment is arriving faster than most anticipated.
For India specifically, the urgency is structural. The National Green Hydrogen Mission, backed by a budget of Rs. 19,744 crore, targets five million metric tonnes of domestic production annually by 2030. Achieving that goal requires a supply chain that is not hostage to import volatility. Indigenous electrolyser technology is not just an industrial preference — it is a strategic necessity.
Newtrace's selection for the government's SIGHT (Strategic Interventions for Green Hydrogen Transition) subsidy — awarded in the 30 MW/year capacity category for indigenous stack technology providers — is a meaningful validation of where they stand in that ecosystem.
Proving It in the Field
Speciale Invest backed Newtrace from their pre-seed round. The appeal, from the outset, was not speculative. It rested on the specificity of the problem definition, the depth of the founding team's technical insight, and a product roadmap anchored in demonstrable milestones.
That rigour is now showing up in the field. Newtrace has already deployed pilots with BPCL and ONGC, demonstrating that their 99.9 percent pure hydrogen output holds up in demanding refinery environments. Their 30,000-square-foot Bengaluru facility houses more than 45 scientists engaged in the painstaking work of industrial validation — the kind of groundwork that separates durable deep-tech from venture theatre.
Their recent Pre-Series A funding round of Rs. 56.9 crore, in which we participated, marks a meaningful inflection. It signals a strategic pivot: Newtrace is positioning itself not only as a full-stack developer of next-generation electrolysers, but also as a high-value component supplier to a global market hungry for efficiency and supply-chain resilience.
The Road Ahead — and the Friction
Over the next five years, Newtrace aims to scale electrode production to hundreds of thousands of units annually. That trajectory requires sustained commercial partnerships, continued investment in manufacturing capacity, and — perhaps most critically — procurement ecosystems that can evaluate technical merit alongside cost.
This last point is the honest friction in the path. India's public-sector procurement landscape has historically favoured the lowest bid — the "L1 tender" mindset that rewards price over performance and often stifles deep-tech companies at precisely the moment they need long-term buyers. Navigating this without compromising the integrity of the technology will be among the founders' most consequential challenges in the years ahead.
What We're Backing
Investing in hard technology of this kind demands what we would call conservative patience — a willingness to sit with long development cycles, hold conviction through validation phases, and resist the pull toward earlier, softer returns.
With Newtrace, that patience is grounded in a clear-eyed view of the unit economics, the policy tailwinds, and the irreversible direction of industrial decarbonisation. The international community is not debating whether heavy industry needs to shift away from fossil fuels — it is debating how fast and at what cost.
Newtrace's answer to that question is one electrode at a time: locally made, technically superior, and built for a world in which energy security and climate ambition are no longer competing priorities but the same imperative.
India's energy economy of the future needs an Atmanirbhar supply chain at its core. Newtrace is building one.
Speciale Invest backed Newtrace at pre-seed and participated in their Pre-Series A round.
