When discussing his nearly 20 years spent riding the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, Balki Iyer, MS '00, SD '19, likes to joke that each one of them has been 300 days of agony and 60 days of mediocrity. Then, after all that, five days of euphoria.
"Of course, those five days of euphoria are so wonderful that it's worth going through those 300 days of agony and 60 days of mediocrity," he says.
Iyer has led multiple businesses from conception to exit with the goal to speed up the world's transition to clean energy. His latest venture is Bridge Green Upcycle, which specializes in "Cleaning Up Clean Energy" by extracting critical minerals from batteries and reducing the need for additional mining or carbon emissions.
Iyer came to Binghamton University from India in 1998, graduating with a master's degree in industrial and systems engineering. He was later awarded an honorary Doctor of Science in 2019. Binghamton's leadership in battery research is why he chose to keep Bridge Green Upcycle in upstate New York's "battery valley," which offers a ready ecosystem of technology companies, researchers and workforce talent.
The startup is a member of the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator as well as an active participant in New Energy New York (NENY) programs like the Student Startup Experience, which pairs students to work with clean-energy companies. The NENY coalition, with support from 50 industry partners as well as the National Science Foundation and other funding sources, received federal designation as a Regional Tech Hub for lithium-ion battery production in 2023.
"I wanted to find a way to give back to the community, be part of the 'Battery Renaissance' and create American green-collar jobs while strengthening the domestic supply chain for critical minerals," he says. "What better place to do it than where I started my journey here in the U.S.?"
With a unique process using artificial intelligence, Bridge Green Upcycle gives end-of-life batteries a second lease. In the company's Infinity Lab, batteries undergo a 24-hour salt bath to fully discharge. Shredders and hammer mills progressively force them into smaller pieces, down to 2 millimeters, before machines resembling ovens and giant steam pots separate any remaining impurities.
The interim product is black powder from which chemical processes extract valuable minerals for batteries and other industrial applications.
Iyer's company is procuring more equipment and feedstock to ramp up production. He also works with three Binghamton faculty members - Distinguished Professor Mark Poliks and Assistant Professor Xiaotu Ma from Watson's School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, and Professor Nikolay Dimitrov from Harpur College's Department of Chemistry - to improve the process.
"At Bridge Green, we don't just wish for things," Iyer said on Dec. 5 to commemorate its first lab opening in Endicott, N.Y. "We create them."
Iyer began his career drilling oil for Schlumberger in Europe, moving between regions and markets globally. He later held leadership positions at GE steering the renewable energy transition. Through this experience, he began to see gaps between technology and its implementation.
"Large companies create the best technology," he says, "but what the world needed was to take this great technology and package it into a solution that you can offer in practical, bite-sized pieces."
His answer was entrepreneurship. When he crunched the numbers in 2010, Iyer determined he could make the greatest impact in India, where the lack of access even to fossil fuels heightened the demand for clean energy. Finding success was a skin-thickening and humbling process.
"Most of the time you're staring into the abyss, with a lot of uncertainty, setbacks, rejections," Iyer says. "The only thing that keeps you going is your own personal conviction, self-motivation and passion."
Throughout his time as a business leader in India and the U.S., Iyer has built everything from wind to solar to battery projects. However, that revealed another gap: Few companies considered what would happen when these projects ended.
Even with the ballooning supply of lithium-ion batteries cutting down on fossil-fuel usage, manufacturing new materials requires critical minerals, whose mining processes are resource-depleting, carbon-heavy and often in conflicted regions.
To Iyer, the question of achieving clean energy is also a personal one, having lost his father to a power failure in his home country. But the answer, he says, must solve the problem without creating a new one. Bridge Green Upcycle's mission addresses that global challenge by helping complete the full circle.
"It's not enough to build renewable projects and equipment," Iyer says. "It's even more important to make sure that these resources are returned appropriately or upcycled in the right way."
If Iyer's greatest passion is to foster a circular economy of clean energy, he similarly returns the favor at his alma mater, recruiting Binghamton students to intern at his company and offering them jobs once they graduate.
"When you reach your floor," he says, "you've just got to send the elevator back."
