Nitricity

“Early in our history, we created a prototype, and we talked about it here in Silicon Valley, and then we brought it down to Fresno County and talked about it. And the value of the feedback in Fresno County was just much more. And we got contracts, we got, you …”

“So we applied to a pretty ambitious sales tax exemption, and it's almost a million dollars worth of value because sales tax is so high in California. We won one of four of those in the state for recycling programs”

“The other thing we then went for is a USDA Rural Development loan, and we worked through the process there, and I'm very proud to say that that is closed, and so that was an almost ten million dollar Rural Development loan.”

“We produce organic fertilizer using recycled organic almond shells and then air, water, and renewable power today.”

“They didn't really want another piece of equipment to make fertilizer on the field, and so while that is an elegant and kind of exciting tech vision, it's not customer focused.”

“As we built the pilot, and as we're scaling up, you know, our manifold design didn't work. And now we're in a situation where we had to shut the system down, and we had we had to redesign the whole manifold, and the challenging thing about this is that, you kn…”

“You need really, really reliable technology that virtually never needs to be serviced for that to pencil out.”

“But the pilot is more than just to prove the technology can work. The pilot is your team's opportunity to practice running a factory safely and reliably. And that organizationally, you are ready to build your first-of-a-kind commercial factory.”

“And so to get there, we need to bring down our costs by about a factor of 10.”

“And compared to a baseline from before, we've seen about a 500% increase in the amount of inbound interest in the business.”

“We went after grants that could help cover the cost, and we got one grant and one that's helping cover the, some cost, and then we have one tax credit, a 48 C advanced manufacturing tax credit. So together, those come out to about six and a half million”

“Accelerate our transition into the conventional fertilizer marketplace. We can do it. A hundred million would let us, would yeah, we know how. It would require a fair amount of capital, and we could do it with three hundred million, and we could show that it's…”

“The California standard plot size for almonds, for example, is 75 acres. It's like this rectangle that's 75 acres, and sometimes you can get 25 acre blocks, but really, like, that's what you need, and 75 acres needs a lot of product, and so the minimum pilot s…”

“Our first design on something like this didn't work as we hoped, and we had to iterate, and it took, you know, many months, and it would have taken potentially a year or more at a larger scale.”

“We were able to fully sell out this factory before, almost fully sell out this factory before going into any of these finance conversations, so here is a stack of sales agreements binding multi-year take-or-pay sales agreements, and so we have the output of th…”