Agami Zero Breaks Through With Magnetic Hydrogen Advance

A startup team led by RASEI Fellow Oana Luca, called Agami Zero, has just secured seed funding after winning the 2025 CU Boulder Lab Venture Challenge. Their winning idea? A new way to produce hydrogen fuel more efficiently, a key mechanism for decarbonizing our energy economy.

Hydrogen is an essential puzzle piece in removing carbon from our energy economy and reducing pollution, but it is not without its challenges. While the overarching goal is to electrify as much of the economy as possible (like swapping gas central heaters for heat pumps), there are some critical areas, including sectors such as long-haul shipping, aviation, and heavy industry (steel / cement production), that are extremely difficult to power with electricity alone. While there are many researchers innovating in this space, and exciting discoveries that could lead to future alternatives, hydrogen, which is an energy-dense, zero-emission fuel, is one of our most promising solutions for decarbonization.

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What color is my hydrogen? There is a whole rainbow of hydrogen classifications, with over 10 different colors in total. Each color is defined based on how the hydrogen is produced.

Currently, most hydrogen produced today is Gray Hydrogen. This means it is produced from fossil gas using a process called steam-methane reforming (SMR). The SMR process is a significant contributor to industrial carbon emissions globally; 95% of hydrogen produced in the United States is from SMR.

Blue Hydrogen is generated using the same processes as Gray Hydrogen, using fossil gas, but the carbon emissions are captured and then sequestered or used in other processes.

The real goal is to produce Green Hydrogen using carbon-free renewable electricity. This is where the Agami Zero team is focused, using a clever application of fundamental physics, the Lorentz Force.

A key challenge with the Green Hydrogen process is one of efficiency. Gas bubbles forming on the electrodes create electrical resistance. The innovation from Agami Zero is a technology proven in space: magnetically enhanced electrolysis (MEE).

The team includes Oana Luca, RASEI Fellow; Hunter Koltunski, chemistry graduate student and scientific lead; and Jafar Makrani and Lyle Antieau of Agami Zero. The collaboration also includes Prof. Rich Noble, member of the National Academy of Inventors; and Prof. Ankur Gupta, a modeling expert.

“Early in May 2025, Jafar and Lyle reached out to discuss the idea of magnetohydrodynamic electrolysis (MHD) for hydrogen production.” Explains Luca. “Jafar and Lyle had put together a business case for why the MHD approach would be successful... and the rest is history.”

In October 2025 Agami Zero competed in the 2025 Lab Venture Challenge. Since 2018 CU Boulder has hosted the Lab Venture Challenge, funding more than 115 innovative projects and resulting in 70 new deep-tech companies.

The success of Agami Zero is a testament to how researchers can use scientific understanding to solve real-world problems. By taking a concept such as the Lorentz Force and applying it to a bottleneck in hydrogen generation, the team now has the opportunity to make a measurable difference in how we generate green hydrogen.