Talmon Marco admits he is not the expected climate technologist.
In 2010, he co-founded mobile messaging company Viber, which was acquired in 2014 by Japanese Internet company Rakuten for $900 million. In 2015, Marco co-founded ride-hailing company Juno, which was acquired in 2017 by the Israeli transportation company Gett for $200 million.
In the years after Juno was acquired, Marco changed his focus to making the world better. "There are obviously a lot of problems in the world, but the one that we felt was closest to our heart is the climate crisis."
Marco began looking for technologies that could be used to combat climate change and in his research, he became connected with faculty members at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, who were working on a technology that produces hydrogen in a nonconventional way.
That science became the framework for Marco's next company, H2Pro, which is one of a crop of start-ups trying to speed the clean energy revolution by focusing on new ways to make hydrogen.
When hydrogen is burned in a controlled environment not exposed to the air, it generates energy in the form of heat, with water as a byproduct. (Hydrogen does make nitrogen oxides when burned in air, as does anything when it is burned in air.) By contrast, burning fossil fuels releases dangerous greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide.
Hydrogen is already a key commodity in a variety of industrial processes and in making ammonia fertilizer, which is critical to generate enough food to feed the global population. But because, when burned in a controlled environment it releases no greenhouse gas emissions, it's also being explored as a potential fuel replacement for some hard to decarbonize sectors and for energy storage.
