Featured Founder: Halo Industries CEO and Founder Andrei Iancu

This month, we sat down with Halo Industries Founder & CEO Andrei Iancu about how his family fled communist Romania, overcoming supply chain issues, and why respecting diverse viewpoints is critical.

Tell me a bit about your background?

I’m an engineer at heart with a deep passion for solving hard problems in clever and efficient ways. Having been born in communist Romania and making it to the US through the asylum process after the bloody revolution there, I’ve generally always had to work within resource constrained environments. Growing up in the midwest in Illinois and Iowa, I excelled in academics with a focus on electrical engineering and aerospace engineering then tied those degrees together through my subsequent work at Boeing where I contributed to a number of interesting projects such as various classified satellites, the X-37 miniature space shuttle, and the Future Combat Systems project. Boeing graciously funded my graduate studies at Stanford University where I shifted my focus to advanced materials, solar cells, fuel cells, batteries and semiconductors in my PhD work.

What inspired you to start Halo?

Having personally wrestled with the wastefulness of many allegedly modern technologies, Halo was born out of a desire to have a powerful, lasting, positive impact on the world through the development of highly efficient laser-based manufacturing processes. I feel incredibly lucky to work alongside my amazing co-founders as well as spectacular partners, such as Prime Movers Lab, the US Department of Energy, the California Energy Commission and Fontinalis, that share the same passion for improving humanity and our environment.

Explain the impact of Halo’s breakthrough tech on the solar, power electronics, and semiconductor industry?

This is actually a question I struggle with quite a bit because of the breadth of the answer since our technology at Halo is very much a picks-and-shovels play that adds value at the core of essentially every modern technology. Whether you’re interested in the integrated circuits that go into your phone, solar cells on your roof, power electronics that drive your EV or latest flexible displays in your living room, the advanced materials in these products, such as silicon, silicon carbide, sapphire and so on, are the building blocks for all downstream functionality. At Halo, we radically redefine how these critical elements are made by manufacturing with light instead of traditional mechanical processes. This reduces costs, increases adoption, unlocks higher performance, and enables unique new form factors to create entirely novel products and markets.

What advances do you expect to see over the next ten years because of your tech?

In our beachhead power electronics market, we will exponentially expand the deployment of advanced power products that enable a number of breakthroughs, including EVs with longer range, ultra-fast charging of energy storage devices, highly efficient electrical grid infrastructure, next-generation electrified rail, and much more. However, we don’t plan on stopping there, and we’ll keep the hits rolling by dramatically reducing the cost of solar while improving its overall performance, enabling broad adoption of flexible electronics and displays, integrating diamond into everyday usage to improve the durability of products and catalyzing breakthroughs that we haven’t even been able to dream of yet. Although this all seems excessively grandiose at first blush, since we innovate at the base of such a broad array of technology trees, the benefits we bring to the market branch out in dramatic fashion as our momentum builds so the future is incredibly exciting.

What was the least expected challenge you’ve overcome to reach this point?

The last two years have been unexpectedly and painfully more difficult due to unprecedented logistics challenges that have truly upended not just Halo but essentially most of the companies in the world. Capital equipment that used to be delivered in 3 to 5 months now takes 12 to 16. Certain critical hardware components are often next to impossible to find due to byzantine supply chain contortions. Planning and execution in this type of environment is strained at best, but we have persevered through clever engineering and alternative solutions despite the hits we’ve taken to our schedule.

Who inspires you?

When first embarking on the entrepreneurial journey back in 2014, my co-founders and I joined a founder community called StartX that has played a pivotal role in shaping our experience. We have remained deeply engaged with this wonderful, talented, and passionate group of individuals over the years despite the toll that running a rapidly sprinting start-up inevitably takes. I am always inspired by the countless entrepreneurs that I have met that deeply believe in their vision of a better world and the lengths they go to in order to see it come to pass. Some have raised billions and some have only bootstrapped, but they all have an easily recognizable fire inside them driving them faster and further. I never feel alone or overwhelmed because I know that there are many others on the same journey and that we are all willing to help each other out in any way, at any time, regardless of difficulty or circumstance.

What social causes do you care about and why?

I strongly believe that we need to give every human being the opportunity to succeed. Regardless of the circumstances in which someone is born, enabling them to develop into the best version of themselves and giving them the chance to pursue their ambitions should be the ultimate goals of our society. Unfortunately, inequality, scarcity, and oppression are still difficult challenges that the world is grappling with. Technology has historically been proven to help alleviate these issues and it’s our hope at Halo that our efforts will significantly contribute to progress on this front.

Have you read anything lately that inspired you?

As a deep-tech start-up founder in the middle of a light-speed sprint toward high-volume manufacturing, I find myself reading primarily legal and technical documents nowadays, which generally don’t tend to be very inspiring. However, I do follow a number of spectacular podcasts while exercising or driving, and my favorite is All-In with Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg. I have a ton of respect for these four investors and really appreciate their ability to debate on a wide range of issues without destroying their friendship in the process. In the current, highly polarized world, it’s refreshing to see that diverse viewpoints can coexist and that we can always find a middle ground somewhere in the center that is rational and broadly accepted even if we don’t agree on every single point.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.

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