Founder Profile: Lee King of Hydro Wind Energy

The major inspiration was trying to make an impact on the world’s water crisis and also recognizing that the environmental crisis is probably one of the biggest threats to humanity, and one of the main causes of that is fossil fuels. We are in the business of sea water desalination, so the energy cost and the levelized cost of water are the most important aspects of building something that can solve the world’s water crisis. From the solution we developed for seawater desalination, we found a way to also harness offshore wind for power generation and energy storage. 

Hayk Vasilyan, our CTO, and Aboozy Ghaly, our systems integration and IT director, are both working on the development of our products. We have a pretty large team of engineers led by Donald Naylor, our chief technology engineer. Maryam Hassani is in charge of our strategy. She serves as a chief innovation officer. Every single one of our team members has been crucial to get where we are. Dennis Nwatu has been particularly helpful in writing grants to help us gather more funding. Finally, I come on board with my experience working in an investment fund specialized in energy and desalination technology in Abu Dhabi. 

This technology will significantly improve how we access and turn wind offshore into a usable form of energy (electrical energy). Globally, there is a challenge to cost-effectively access and harness wind offshore in deep waters where 80% of the world’s wind energy resources exist. This technology will open up the ability to exploit offshore wind in deep waters, cost-effectively and simultaneously providing a solution to the problem of energy storage. The technology is a combination of a form of pumped hydro storage and wind power. It is a hybrid system that combines wind and subsea energy storage. We’re using the same principles as pumped hydro storage, but instead of using a dam, we are using sea depth and gravity-based blocks to obtain the same results. 

The potential of this technology is that it could be a game changer for the 21st century in terms of developing a renewable energy system that can outcompete fossil fuels on power density, energy density, cost, and scalability while also providing dispatchable and reliable power generation to the grid. In addition, it’s ultimately wind power, which eliminates carbon emissions entirely from power production. This technology can rapidly accelerate the transition to renewables and worldwide electrification, lowering the cost of energy and increasing security of supply. The main objective is to provide unsubsidized, reliable electrical energy. The technology is extremely disruptive from the current state of the art yet utilizes existing and proven technology in a new area.

Our technology focuses on providing low-cost fresh water. Conventional seawater desalination technologies are prohibitively expensive, energy intensive, and primarily powered by fossil fuels with significant environmental impact. Solar-powered desalination cannot meet the volumes that are required for our ever-growing consumption needs. 

We have developed an extremely disruptive yet simple technology to desalinate seawater into fresh water using offshore altitude wind kites, reverse osmosis membranes, and subsea pressure, eliminating entirely the need to use fossil fuels for water desalination and reducing desalination costs by 95%. This technology has the potential to alter the entire dynamics of the global water challenge and permanently alleviate the world’s water shortages in the short term. It is sustainable, scalable, zero-carbon emissions technology; provides significant volume capacities at negligible costs versus all other desalination technologies; and has the potential to transform the lives of billions of people around the world.

We are preparing ourselves for growth and scale and are in the process of launching QuenchSea, the world’s only low-cost, handheld seawater desalination device, on a global scale. We have $500,000 in pre-orders already with an additional pipeline of 10,000 orders. The first 5,000 units of QuenchSea will be delivered in June 2022. Following this, we will be scaling QuenchSea to more than one million units through to 2023 to generate revenue in excess of $50 million. Our aim is to scale QuenchSea to 100 million units over the next three years and impact the world’s water crisis at a small scale. 

We are a Techstars-backed company, which gives us access to a large network of amazing founders and brought an advisor on our board. Techstars also invested in our company. In terms of the product, we are using SunPower-Gen’s workshops to build our larger size systems. Finally, we were selected into Amazon Web Services’ Clean Energy Accelerator program. 

We were very fortunate that we have had funding from the start. At this stage, as we build the company, many people are contributing their time and experience to help us achieve certain milestones, and in return we give them shares to provide the incentives and loyalty we need (share option pool). The core team is working in exchange for stock options. More options in terms of working engagements will be offered to everyone once we secure a significant equity funding round with the involvement of human resources. We are trying to build a mobile and agile tech culture that offers flexibility to our team members to choose their level of involvement and contribution but that also manages risks and rewards. We want team members to be part of our success. 

In terms of risks, the most significant are operational and technical risks of building systems that operate in the ocean. This is a complex project with lots of moving parts and inputs, so ensuring perfect project management and execution is key. With a project of this size and potential, there are of course lots of risk factors. We are more concerned now with short-term risks over the next 12 months than with long-term failure. In the long term, the project will succeed. It is just a matter of whether we can align all the factors to make it happen within the next year and in the desired location. We are taking steps to mitigate all the technological, financial, and legal risks that we will inevitably encounter along the way. We have a fantastic team (and growing) behind this project with lots of experience and are confident that we can overcome the challenges we will face.

We are actively moving toward a listing with a signed commitment of $57 million from an institutional investor for an initial public offering (IPO). Our exit is definitely an IPO. We could also run a Regulation A raise with liquidity to get us there.