This post is co-written by the founders of Voltx, Alishba Imran and Shagun Maheshwari.
Voltx is a hard tech startup with the mission to bring novel battery innovation to the market 10x faster than the status quo. Improving the current state of the art in manufacturing and identifying new battery chemistries will be vital to meeting our world’s electrification demands.
Through Voltx, we built our MVP, a machine learning and physics-based hybrid platform that would be used to accelerate R&D, production, and recycling for batteries. We also conducted pilots with mid-large size battery manufacturing companies as well as raised a pre-seed round.
Navigating building a hard tech startup, especially as young first-time founders, came with many challenges and learnings. We hope to share these with folks interested in pursuing something similar. This has been one of the highest growth periods of our life which has been catalyzed by learning best practices from our peers and mentors, we want to pay that forward.
Hard tech startups are often rooted in pushing the boundaries of tech or scientific research, allowing them to solve huge global challenges. What differentiates hard tech startups is that there is often also a technical risk that needs to be solved.
Hard tech startups are distinguished by the significantly longer time-frames, technical risk, and specialized resources needed to take innovations from a small prototype to a full product that can then be scaled. This is because alongside solving a business problem you are also innovating on new engineering/tech.
As a young person, you often have low responsibility (higher risk-taking ability), time, and a plethora of options from which you can carve your journey. If you’re interested in hard tech, this may lead you to ponder if you want to start a startup.
But before you start building, It’s important to know why you are building in the first place.