Ore Energy

Ore Energy was founded in 2022 in Amsterdam, Netherlands by Aytac Yilmaz, who serves as CEO and co-founder. Yilmaz, a Dutch-Turkish scientist and engineer, developed the core battery chemistry during his PhD and post-doctoral research on corrosion science at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. During his work on reversible iron corrosion, he realized that the same electrochemical process that makes iron rust could be made fully reversible with sufficient engineering precision — and that this process would form the basis for an exceptionally cheap, non-toxic, infinitely recyclable battery capable of 100+ hour discharge. He founded Ore Energy to commercialize the technology out of TU Delft.

Ore Energy was built on the insight that iron-air batteries — which store energy by reversibly oxidizing metallic iron to iron oxide (rust) and reducing it back — use only iron, water, and atmospheric oxygen as their active materials: three of the cheapest, most abundant, and most environmentally benign substances on earth. The company’s battery design is modular and scalable, built from interlocking blocks that form a plug-and-play system deployable at any scale from MWh to GWh. The batteries can be manufactured cheaply and recycled at end of life. Ore’s target discharge duration is 100 hours, making it a direct competitor to Form Energy (the American iron-air leader) but with a European focus and a simpler technical approach.

Ore Energy has raised €10 million in seed funding (May 2024) from Positron Ventures and Germany’s SPRIND innovation agency. The company has also received an EU-funded pilot project grant and support from EDF R&D in France.

In July 2025, Ore Energy launched what it described as the first iron-air battery system connected to the electricity grid in the Netherlands — a landmark milestone. In February 2026, Ore completed an EU-funded pilot at EDF R&D labs in France. The company is preparing for commercial deployment and has set an ambitious target of 50 GWh per year of battery production capacity by 2030, though as of early 2026 the team remains approximately 30 people, mostly in R&D.