KYMA Battery Technologies — transatlantic company creation, founder-built and founder-exited
From an idea in 2022 to a certified demonstrator on utility test and a clean founder exit. KYMA was incorporated in Wisconsin, seed-funded, and operated transatlantically — engineering and commercial strategy from the UK, manufacturing and site presence in the US. The case establishes transatlantic company creation as a distinct Hatch Oxford capability.
The starting position
In 2022 the US grid storage market was accelerating into a supply-demand imbalance the battery industry could not close from new-cell production alone. Gigafactory build-out was underway but years from the installed capacity that policy demand signals required. At the same time, first-generation EV batteries were reaching the first wave of module-level failures, warranty replacements, and end-of-service events — a fast-growing volume of batteries which were in most cases being landfilled or sent for destructive recycling, even though the underlying power cells were often still functional. The binding failure was typically elsewhere in the powertrain or in pack-level control, not in the cells themselves.
The thesis was straightforward. Intake those modules. Sort and test them against a characterised acceptance specification. Repackage tested modules into grid-storage battery packs, chemistry-agnostic at pack level, with a battery management system engineered to operate heterogeneously across mixed module sources. Stand the product up against the demonstrator cascade US utilities expected — residential, commercial UPS, containerised grid — reach commercial certification, and enter the grid storage market with a unit-economics and embodied-carbon profile a new-cell competitor would struggle to match.
The harder question was not technical. It was operational. Neither founder was based in the US; the market, the capital, and the raw feedstock were. KYMA had to be incorporated, capitalised, sited, and built — credibly — from a transatlantic operating model.
What we built
The engagement is ourselves. Lesley Blaine and Chris Gregory co-founded KYMA Battery Technologies in August 2022, ran it together, and exited cleanly two years later.
August 2022 — Company formation and seed capitalisation
KYMA Battery Technologies was incorporated in the US and seed-funded. The corporate structure was deliberately set up as a three-entity configuration — an operating company for KYMA Battery Technologies, a separate entity for product sales, and a third for grid-storage asset ownership — separating IP and product revenue from capital-intensive asset-ownership plays. The choice was deliberate. It preserved the optionality to build, own, and operate grid-storage assets directly when the project economics justified it, without burdening the product business with asset-heavy balance-sheet characteristics.
2023 — Site, partners, first demonstrator
A 90-acre site was secured in Wisconsin, with on-site warehousing for battery assembly and repurposing and the capacity to serve as both manufacturing facility and first grid-storage asset. A 13,000 sq ft operational facility was stood up. Battery-handling permits were filed. Two-way tie-ins with the local utility were established. Relationships with local universities and the technical college created a viable talent pool. In parallel, the product partner network was built — residential design, product development, inverters, battery management, and a working design relationship for the containerised grid-storage products. In September 2023 the first 10 kW residential demonstrator using 100% repurposed modules went live.
2024 — Commercial UPS, megawatt grid demonstrator, certification
February 2024 delivered the 50 kW commercial UPS demonstrator. June 2024 put the first 1 MW containerised grid-storage system on test in Wisconsin with a regional utility trial partner. September 2024 closed the demonstrator arc with products certified for commercial use. The certification milestone was the gate. From that point KYMA had a product line — residential, commercial UPS, and grid-storage containerised systems at 250 kW, 500 kW, 1 MW, and 3 MW configurations — that could be sold into the US market rather than only demonstrated.
The transatlantic operating model
Throughout, KYMA was run across two geographies. Engineering leadership, commercial strategy, partnership development, and investor management were conducted from the UK. US operations, site development, regulatory engagement, hiring, and customer-facing delivery were conducted in Wisconsin. The model required deliberate architectural choices — a corporate structure that could absorb a transatlantic principal-and-operations split, contractual and governance arrangements that did not create timezone-triggered decision bottlenecks, and a deliberate separation of which decisions travelled and which stayed local. Those choices are the transferable lesson from the engagement.
Founder exit
Lesley and Chris exited KYMA cleanly two years after founding it, ahead of a subsequent change of control. The exit was executed without ongoing equity or operational involvement on either founder’s side. The product direction the company has taken under new ownership is its own narrative and is not described here.
The founding move
The move that distinguished KYMA from a conventional new-cell grid-storage venture was the decision to build the product around repurposed modules with a battery management system engineered for chemistry- and source-agnostic operation, rather than around new cells.
That decision set everything downstream. It determined the supply-chain architecture (module intake instead of cell procurement), the certification pathway (repurposed-module test and acceptance protocols rather than new-cell qualification), the demonstrator cascade (because repurposing-first products had to demonstrate against power profiles real utilities run, not just the test-bench profiles cell-level qualification produces), the embodied-carbon story (an order of magnitude lower than equivalent new-cell capacity), and the capital intensity of the business (the dominant cost was site, certification, and BMS engineering, not gigafactory CAPEX).
Repurposing-first was the original thesis. The demonstrator cascade reached certification on that thesis. The exit was clean on that thesis. Whether repurposing-first remains the right long-run answer for US grid storage is a question the market will keep settling for some time. What matters for this case is that the thesis was built, the company was built around it, the demonstrator cascade was completed, and the exit was cleanly executed.
What was built
- An incorporated US company with a three-entity corporate structure separating product and asset-ownership lines.
- Seed capital deployed against a two-to-three-year demonstrator roadmap.
- A 90-acre Wisconsin site with on-site warehousing, battery-handling permits, and utility tie-ins.
- A 13,000 sq ft operational facility stood up as both manufacturing base and demonstrator host.
- A partner network spanning residential design, product development, inverter supply, battery management, and containerised grid-storage design — each contracted into a modular product roadmap.
- A demonstrator cascade: 10 kW residential (September 2023), 50 kW commercial UPS (February 2024), 1 MW containerised grid on utility test (June 2024).
- Products certified for commercial use across residential, commercial UPS, and grid-storage containerised configurations from 250 kW to 3 MW (September 2024).
- A transatlantic operating model that sustained engineering leadership from the UK and operational presence in Wisconsin throughout.
- A clean founder exit executed ahead of the subsequent change of control.
Why it matters
Most founder stories in the deep-tech case-study literature are told as single-geography narratives — the UK venture, the US venture, the European venture. The reality for a non-trivial proportion of deep-tech founders is transatlantic. The capital is disproportionately in the US. The manufacturing scale and tax incentives increasingly are too. The engineering talent density is still distributed. And for founders who started their careers in UK research or UK industry, the right company is often one that is incorporated, capitalised, and operated in the US but led from where the founders already are.
That operating model is not automatic. It requires deliberate corporate-structure, governance, contracting, and decision-authority choices that most UK-centric venture-building playbooks do not describe and most US-centric ones do not either. Getting it right takes the kind of practical, lived familiarity with both sides that you only acquire by having actually built such a company.
KYMA is the case we point to when a founder asks how we think about transatlantic company creation. The specific thesis — repurposing-first US grid storage — is not the transferable lesson. The transferable lesson is operational: a UK-based founder team can incorporate, seed-fund, site, staff, partner, demonstrate, and certify a US deep-tech company inside roughly two years, and execute a clean exit without ever relocating the principal team. That is the operational claim. The evidence is the company.
A note on status
KYMA Battery Technologies was founded in August 2022 by Lesley Blaine and Chris Gregory, run by them through the demonstrator cascade and certification milestone, and exited cleanly ahead of a subsequent change of control. Lesley and Chris hold no ongoing equity or operational involvement in the company. This case study describes the founding-to-exit arc; it does not describe the company’s current operations under different ownership.
