Voya Energy raises $35M to build aluminum-fueled data center generators

Why it matters

Voya is turning data centers' grid bottleneck into a potential market for metal fuel. The $35M funds pilots, while commercial output, fuel cost and lifecycle efficiency remain the test.

Voya Energy, founded by battery veterans Richard Wang, Matt Horton and Steven Kaye, announced on August 26 in a company release that it raised a $35 million Series A to turn scrap aluminum into onsite electricity for data centers and industrial facilities.

Voya Energy will use the financing for technology development, initial deployments in 2027 and manufacturing scale-up in 2028. Energy Impact Partners led the round, joined by John Doerr, Mantis VC, StepStone, Founders Fund, Overmatch, Seven Stars and other investors.

For Richard Wang, Voya is a second attempt to move a difficult electrochemical technology from the lab into a capital-intensive market. Wang founded lithium-metal battery developer Cuberg while completing his materials science doctorate at Stanford. Northvolt acquired Cuberg in 2021, and Wang subsequently ran Northvolt's North American operations.

His co-founders give Voya technical and commercial experience. Matt Horton previously led charging-infrastructure developer Voltera and held senior roles at Rivian, Proterra and Propel Fuels. Steven Kaye was chief technology officer at Our Next Energy and worked on materials research inside Apple's Special Projects Group. Voya says Kaye holds more than 60 patents.

The three founders are pursuing a market created by a practical constraint: large electricity users can build facilities faster than utilities can connect them. Data centers are the immediate target, giving Voya Energy a customer base willing to consider unfamiliar hardware if it can provide dependable power without combustion or point-of-use air emissions.

Aluminum becomes the fuel

Voya Energy's system starts with low-grade scrap aluminum, which it processes into solid pellets for transport and storage. Inside the generator, the aluminum reacts with air and water. A proprietary electrolyte controls the electrochemical reaction, producing electricity without combustion.

The process leaves aluminum trihydrate, or ATH, rather than exhaust. Voya says the powder can be routed into industrial products or recycled into new aluminum fuel using low-cost electricity.

That distinction matters. Voya's claim of zero carbon emissions applies to the generator at the point of use. The full environmental and economic case will depend on how the aluminum is sourced, how much energy is needed to produce the fuel, and whether ATH can be sold or recycled at commercial volumes.

The hardware is built around 50 kW power modules. Five modules form a 250 kW commercial generator, while 40 modules would produce a 2 MW industrial generator inside a standard 20-foot container, according to Voya's product specifications.

Voya says a one-acre installation could eventually combine 100 MW of generation capacity with 10 GWh of stored energy, enough to power a 100 MW data center for 100 hours. Those figures remain company-stated design targets rather than measurements from a commercial deployment.

Voya currently has an in-house prototype that has yet to operate at commercial scale, Bloomberg reported. That gap defines the job this Series A must fund. A container drawing and a working prototype are several manufacturing steps removed from a generator that can sit beside a data center and start every time it is needed.

The round buys proof

Voya says nearly a dozen companies across data centers, industrial manufacturing, utilities, transportation, real estate and emergency response are working with it on pilot demonstrations. The customers have not been identified. Wang told Bloomberg that Voya expects to test generators at customer sites by the end of 2027.

The Series A follows a $13 million seed round announced by Voya in November 2025. Voya has therefore announced at least $48 million in funding since its 2025 founding. The valuation and investor ownership were not disclosed.

Energy Impact Partners was involved before Voya Energy's public launch and has remained the central institutional backer through both rounds. The repeat investment gives Wang and his co-founders time to build hardware, establish an aluminum supply chain and place early units with customers. It also concentrates the technical risk: Voya Energy now has the capital and investor roster to test its core claims against operating data.

Voya Energy has been explicit about the engineering problems it believes it has solved. In comments filed with the California Energy Commission, Voya Energy said its electrolyte and fuel-metering design addresses corrosion and byproduct buildup, two historical barriers in metal-air systems. A related filing claimed a 99% reduction in metal corrosion compared with published results. Commercial pilots will show whether those improvements persist across long operating periods and larger equipment.

Fuel economics will be another test. Aluminum is easy to store and ship, but its value as an energy carrier depends on the price and consistency of scrap feedstock. Voya Energy is initially positioning the generators for backup and constrained-grid applications, where equipment availability, permitting and footprint can matter more than fuel cost alone. That is a more forgiving entry market than continuous baseload generation.

Voya Energy is also selling density. Diesel backup fleets require tanks, engines and emissions controls. Lithium-ion installations become physically large when a customer needs tens or hundreds of hours of stored energy. Voya's solid fuel can sit unused for long periods, then be delivered through existing freight infrastructure. If the generators work at the stated scale, that combination could give data center developers another route around delayed grid interconnections.

Wang's first company developed a new battery chemistry. Voya asks data center operators to treat aluminum as a fuel. The Series A funds the part where that thesis leaves the materials lab and reaches a customer's site, with 2027 pilots carrying far more weight than the megawatt figures on today's specification sheet.