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The time had finally come to ship our first modular pilot device - Honu, named after the endangered Hawaiian sea turtle - into the real world. What had long been a commitment to move from controlled lab experimentation to true commercial deployment suddenly became tangible. Every real-world test offers data that helps us improve our system, but this time we were stepping outside the safety and familiarity of our Mountain View lab. What we had rehearsed dozens of times was now unfolding at an actual customer site, under real production requirements.

Our first commercial pilot took place at an aerospace heat-treatment facility - an environment where precision is non-negotiable. A five-person team carefully disassembled Honu, loaded the components into a shipping container, and reassembled the system onsite. After three full days of installation and integration, Honu was online and delivering cleaner, lower-cost hydrogen directly into the customer’s brazing furnaces. When the first batch of hydrogen-treated components passed inspection with perfect specifications, our entire team - both onsite and back in Mountain View - exhaled in unison. It was a quiet, collective acknowledgment that the transition from prototype to real-world solution had begun in earnest.

Hydrogen has immense potential as a fuel and energy carrier, but its promise has been held back by how difficult it is to produce, transport, and store safely. Truck delivery is expensive and unpredictable. Scheduling is cumbersome. Supply chains are fragile. Safe storage requires stringent infrastructure. We’ve heard this consistently from customers across California, Kentucky, Texas, and beyond. Fourier was built with this mission in mind - to solve exactly these problems across different applications. Our approach reverses the traditional model: generate hydrogen at the point of use, minimize storage, eliminate logistics complexity, and offer customers a reliable, predictable supply without operational strain. For this deployment, Honu operated directly within the customer’s facility, connected to their electrical panel, water supply, and hydrogen manifold. Day after day, the system delivered 0.5–1 kg of high-purity hydrogen per hour - quietly, consistently, and without disruption (even if several nights blurred into early mornings, sustained largely by DoorDash lattes).

Honu “cooking” hydrogen

Our objective was simple: demonstrate that on-site hydrogen generation could reliably meet the customer’s brazing requirements with the purity and uptime their process demands. The system did exactly that. It integrated seamlessly with their furnaces, met every technical specification, complied with stringent safety protocols, and reduced their hydrogen cost by more than 50% (no subsidies needed). More importantly, it validated that on-demand hydrogen can function as a dependable, utility-grade resource - stable, predictable, and always available. Honu performed exceptionally - better than we could have expected for a first commercial deployment. And with this pilot complete, the standard is set for every installation to come.