Qnetic Raises $5M in Funding to Kick Off U.S. Manufacturing
Energy doesn’t disappear. It just waits for the right moment to move. The grid has always had a timing problem. Sun shows up on its schedule. Wind clocks in when it feels like it. Utilities spend the rest of the day trying to choreograph the chaos. That is where Qnetic steps onto the floor with a $5M funding round to kick off U.S. manufacturing and deploy its first Q500 flywheel energy storage systems. Congratulations to Co-founder and CEO Michael Pratt and Co-founder and CTO Loïc Bastard for turning a deep physics lesson into something that can actually move markets.
Qnetic is building what a lot of people in energy quietly wish existed more often. Mechanical batteries. No chemistry drama. No waiting around for rare minerals to show up on a cargo ship. Just rotational energy stored in motion and released when the grid needs a little muscle. A flywheel is simple in concept and brutally difficult in execution. Precision engineering, materials science, electrical systems, control architecture. It takes a team that understands how motion, power, and durability play together over years instead of quarters.
That team is not small talk. Malcolm Mathews driving business strategy and finance. Dr. Mathias Mier overseeing quality and procurement. Silvio Semmer leading electrical engineering. Dr. Nathan Melenbrink pushing materials engineering forward. Elaine Kang keeping operations and marketing moving in rhythm. Advisors Alex Shoer, Jörg Zeumer, and Art Dicker adding commercial, technical, and legal gravity where it counts. When a company lines up talent across engineering, strategy, and operations like this, the signal is clear. They are not experimenting. They are building.
The $5M raise sets the stage for U.S. manufacturing in California and the rollout of the first Q500 systems. That matters because energy storage is becoming the quiet backbone of a renewable grid. Generation gets the headlines. Storage keeps the lights on when the sun clocks out and the wind decides to take a coffee break. The ability to store power as motion adds another serious tool to the system operators’ toolkit.
There is also a lesson hiding in plain sight for founders watching this round. Big problems attract capital when the solution sits at the intersection of engineering depth and market inevitability. Renewable energy keeps scaling. Grids keep getting more complex. Storage is not optional anymore. Companies like Qnetic are betting that kinetic energy can carry some serious weight in the next era of power infrastructure.