What if electricity did not always have to travel as electricity?
Voya Energy is building around that question. Its system stores energy inside aluminum, moves that aluminum through conventional freight networks, and converts it into electricity where power is needed. A 10-foot fuel container is designed to hold roughly 100 MWh of stored energy, turning metal into something closer to transportable energy cargo than a conventional battery.
The Hayward, California company has raised a $35 million Series A led by Energy Impact Partners, with participation from John Doerr, Mantis VC, StepStone, Founders Fund, Overmatch, Seven Stars and others. The round follows a $13 million seed raised in 2025 and will support technology development, initial deployments in 2027, and manufacturing scale-up in 2028.
Voya’s thesis began taking shape in 2024, when the team searched for an energy carrier that could be dense, abundant, durable, safe to store, and easy to transport. Aluminum kept surviving the filter. Within 12 months, Voya says it moved from a napkin sketch to a working electrochemical cell operating at target performance.
CEO Richard Wang, who previously founded Cuberg, is joined by CTO Steven Kaye, a battery and advanced-materials veteran with more than 60 patents, and Chief Commercial Officer Matt Horton, whose background includes Rivian, Proterra and Voltera.
Richard Wang captures the ambition simply:
“The fuels powering the next century will look fundamentally different from those that powered the last.”
Converts low-grade scrap aluminum into fuel pellets. Inside its generator, the aluminum reacts with air and water through a low-temperature electrochemical process, producing electricity without combustion and leaving behind aluminum trihydrate, or ATH. Longer term, Voya wants to regenerate that material back into fuel-grade aluminum using low-cost or stranded energy.
The current industrial design targets up to 2 MW from a standard 20-foot generator, while Voya projects roughly 100 MW of generation and 10 GWh of stored energy per acre at larger scale. Current validation indicates around 57% conversion efficiency. These remain company-reported design figures ahead of broad commercial deployment.
Voya is trying to make stored energy behave like cargo.
During 2026, the company says it scaled its cells 30X, tested full stacks and opened a 28,000-square-foot pilot factory. Its next target is another 30X system-level scale-up in 2027.
That is where the real test begins. A cell can prove the chemistry. A commercial generator has to prove durability, manufacturability and economics at scale.
Voya is initially targeting data centers and industrial sites that cannot afford to wait years for new grid capacity. The company says nearly a dozen organizations are already working with it on planned pilot demonstrations.
For more than a century, electricity has mostly travelled through wires while fuels moved by truck, rail, ship or pipeline.
Voya is testing whether some of the electricity of the future might travel as metal instead.
