Flywheels and the Future of Electrification

On this week’s episode of Profit Meets Purpose, Matthew Journee, CEO of Levistor, discussed the transition to electrification and the role that energy storage will have to play in ensuring the consistency and reliability in the supply of renewable energy. 

“Energy storage is one of the cornerstone technologies we need for electrification,” explains Journee. “Our wealth is all predicated on having energy. The difference between when we generate it and when we use it is now becoming critical and you have to make up that difference with energy storage”. 

Levistor believes it has created a solution with their flywheel technology. The startup, launched in 2021, has already demonstrated its technology with National Highways and is now raising its seed round to carry out commercial expansion and scale its  manufacturing capabilities.

Levistor are pitching at the Sustainable Startup Investment Summit on 1st October. A few tickets remain, please see the link below. 

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Levistor is tackling one of the biggest challenges in electrification with a technology that combines technical innovation and a modular, scalable design to keep unit costs low. The company is now seeking investors to support its transition into commercialisation, getting the company ready for institutional backing. For investors, the key takeaway is Levistor’s capital-light approach, and for hardware founders, it’s a reminder that thoughtful design can be the difference between a promising technology and a commercially viable business. 

Listen to the full episode here. 

The challenge of energy storage 

Energy storage is a significant challenge to decarbonisation. Governments’ net zero plans call for the broad expansion of renewable energy. Britain's power needs are increasing and according to research getting to 80% wind and solar power may require a ten fold expansion in storage. 

“We used to generate power from big power stations with predictable supply patterns. Now with wind, solar, EV charging and data centres, supply and demand is all over the place. Storage is needed to bridge that gap,” notes Journee.  

Existing solutions have drawbacks. Lithium-ion batteries are the fastest growing storage solution, yet they wear out, require an ongoing supply of minerals, and carry significant recycling and safety concerns. For use cases that demand constant, high-intensity cycling, batteries are often uneconomical.

Levistor’s flywheel energy storage solution doesn’t wear out in the same way. “Where lithium-ion batteries degrade after maybe 1,000 charge cycles, we can get a million or more. For applications where you have to charge and discharge all the time, hundreds of times a day, batteries aren’t viable,” Journee explains. 

Flywheels are not new and the principle on which they operate dates back to Babylonian pottery wheels. Levistor’s innovation has been to modernise the design using advanced materials and electronics. The company’s breakthrough is its “shatterproof flywheel”, says Journee, solving a historic weakness of flywheels.

“If you’ve got a big wheel spinning at jet engine speeds, the forces are enormous. In the past, the potential of failures meant flywheels had to be buried underground or wrapped in concrete,” he says. 

Levistor’s patented rotor design prioritises safety by stacking steel laminations so that a local fault does not cause total failure, but can be pinpointed and resolved. “We’ve designed a flywheel that can’t come apart. That takes safety off the table and brings costs down dramatically. Suddenly you can use low-cost steels instead of expensive alloys.” 

From rail to data centres

There are various applications of the technology. Levistor has proved the technology in rail applications, where trackside flywheels capture energy from braking trains, releasing it to accelerate the next departure. “If you can reduce the acceleration energy by 30%, that’s the low-hanging fruit for decarbonisation,” Journee explains.

Other use cases include EV charging hubs, where flywheels can deliver bursts of high power, and data centres, where their ability to provide ultra-fast backup could help operators keep up with demand. Levistor is taking a modular approach, manufacturing small flywheel units that can be stacked in shipping containers to deliver the required power.

“We don’t want to build one giant flywheel,” Journee notes. “We want a design like an AA battery, mass-produced at low cost, then clustered together for whatever the customer needs.” 

Levistor’s path to scale mirrors strategies in the advanced manufacturing sectors. The company builds prototypes in-house to refine design and quality, but ultimately aims to transfer manufacturing to established partners.

This model allows Levistor to focus on intellectual property, innovation, and partnerships, while avoiding the capital burden of building factories. It also aligns with investor preferences. “Investors don’t want to fund huge factories, and neither do we. Our job is to prove the recipe, then scale through partners,” Journee adds.

Listen to the full episode here. 

Investor momentum

Levistor  is currently raising a seed round to complete customer trials and prove its manufacturing pathway. Institutional funding is expected to follow once pilots convert into commercial sales.

Investor interest in the flywheel sector is rising fast. “We’ve just seen a US flywheel  company raise $200 million at a billion-dollar valuation,” Journee notes. “That has completely repriced the opportunity. The space is open, and if you get it right, you can dominate sectors like rail energy recovery, where no technology currently does this at scale.”

Looking ahead, Journee frames Levistor’s mission in the stark terms of whole economy transformation. “We have built our entire civilisational energy infrastructure on fossil fuels. And now we have to change it to electricity in 10 years. The size of that problem is massive.”

If Levistor can achieve its ambition of mass-producing flywheels at scale, it could play a defining role in that transition. “Nobody has ever mass-produced flywheels, and it was always our aim to be the first. I’d love to see a production line turning out 100,000 units a year”.

Listen to the full episode here. 

Sustainable Startup Investment Summit

1 October 2025, 18:00–22:00London

Register Now

This article is sponsored by Sustainable Wealth Group.