Finding the Right Vendors Was One of the Hardest Parts of Building a New Energy Storage System

I was the third employee at Noon Energy. When I was leading the design of our novel energy storage system, I was not prepared for how hard finding vendors would be.

High temperature heat exchangers, compressors and pumps for our application, sensors to measure gas composition in our process lines — every one of these was its own search, and it ate far more time than I expected.

Two things made it hard. Startups don't have a vendor network, so discovery is a genuine problem on its own. And when you're in a market that doesn't really exist yet, with no product and no purchase history, vendors are skeptical. New vendor conversations often feel like you're convincing them you're worthy of doing business with. Within my first 18 months at Noon, a compressor vendor quoted us $300k in NRE for what amounted to maybe 100 hours of engineering work. A porous metals company, in our first year, quoted $30k just to send material samples. Both felt like ways to make the inquiry go away.

It got easier eventually, but it took real effort. We hired a consultant to help design our systems, and it turned out his 12 years of industry experience came with a network of vendor relationships that became the foundation of ours. It still took about three years before vendor discovery stopped feeling like a constant fight.

"The compressor vendor was still dismissive when we came back two years later. Some vendors aren't worth the time, but the ones who get it become partners, not just transaction partners."

We went back to that compressor vendor two years later. Still just as dismissive. Some vendors aren't worth the time.

I think this will start getting easier for new hardware founders in the age of AI. More on that in the next post.