Our Story

Tony is an accomplished deep-tech entrepreneur who spent 15 years commercializing industrial innovations for oil and gas. With M1 Catalysts, he aims to offset his carbon footprint by making clean hydrogen the preferred energy carrier of the future.

Tony earned awards for technology development and implementation at ConocoPhillips, is a technical journal author, and invented several mechanical and electro-hydraulic patents that are generating royalties around the world. He holds an MBA from Kellogg School of Management and a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from Vanderbilt University.

Anthony Kent

Founder & CEO

Prathima Kapa has over 15 years of experience in material manufacturing, specializing in scaling up new materials, optimizing manufacturing processes, and handling EHS regulations. She holds an MBA from Kellogg School of Management, a Masters in Molecular Sciences and Nanotechnology and a Bachelors in Chemical Engineering.

Prathima Kapa

Nanotechnology advisor

Dr. Yuehe Lin is one of the most cited researchers in the field of electrochemistry and materials science with over 90,000 citations and is ranked in the Top 100 Scientists in the world by research.com. He was welcomed to the National Academy of Inventors as a Fellow in 2019. Dr. Lin has extensive experience in the fields of electrocatalyst development for fuel cells and water splitting at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where his research was funded by DOE-EERE, Ballard, and Hyundai, and earned him PNNL’s highest scientific rank of Laboratory Fellow.

Dr. Lin is the editor of Handbook of Electrochemical Nanotechnology and one of the section editors of Encyclopedia of Microfluidics and Nanofluidics. He also serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of 20 international journals. He has over 20 patents, half of which have been licensed to industrial partners for commercialization, including M1 Catalysts where he serves as a scientific advisor.

Dr. Yuehe Lin

Primary investigator
WSU

Over the past three years across Washington State University (WSU) and Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Linan’s work has focused on electrochemical energy materials and manufacturable device architectures. At WSU, he developed earth-abundant electrocatalyst platforms for water electrolysis, including transition-metal nitrides/phosphides, multi-metal doping, and high-entropy alloy systems to catalytic performance and stability.

At INL, Linan’s work focuses on proton-conducting ceramic electrolysis and fuel cells, optimizing electrolyte–electrode compatibility, interfacial polarization, and transport losses. He fabricates full cells using screen printing to build key functional layers and engineer electrode microstructures, enabling simultaneous improvements in performance, durability, and scalability toward practical deployment.