Alexander Girau is an Energy Transition Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin's Energy Institute and Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Group1, the company commercializing potassium-ion battery technology from the UT Austin laboratory of Nobel Laureate John B. Goodenough.
Goodenough, co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery and a UT-Austin professor for more than three decades, devoted his final body of research to potassium-ion as a safer and more scalable alternative to lithium. Girau licensed the initial material technology, improved upon that foundational work and built the path to full-stack battery systems product around it. Group1's full-stack platform—from its proprietary Kristonite™ cathode material through K-Pack and K-Cabinet systems—is engineered without lithium, cobalt, or nickel and is entering the market in AI data center power, defense, and mission-critical infrastructure. It is a direct continuation of Goodenough's research, carried from his UT laboratory into American manufacturing.
As a fellow, Girau works at the point where the Energy Institute's research meets commercial deployment. He brings an operating view of two of the institute's active research areas—powering data centers and battery production and critical minerals—informed by building the supply chains, intellectual property, and capital structures those technologies require to reach the market. He contributes to TEX-E, the Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange for Energy, and mentors UT Austin students building energy ventures, working alongside the institute to advance UT Austin's standing as America's preeminent energy university.
Girau has made this translation from research to industry twice. The first was Advano, built from his graduate research at Tulane University on nanomaterial processing and silicon quantum dots, which he redirected into silicon anodes for lithium-ion batteries. Both fields he has worked in—quantum dots and lithium-ion batteries—were later recognized with Nobel Prizes.
He has raised more than $40 million to commercialize energy storage and advanced materials technologies, including a National Science Foundation SBIR Phase II award. He is a named inventor on 17 granted patents and holds exclusive rights for his companies to more than 25 patents licensed from UT Austin, Tulane University, and Sharp Corporation. Earlier in his career, as a chemical process engineer for several of the world's largest oil and gas companies including Shell, he designed and improved more than $2 billion in downstream refineries and upstream production facilities—experience that informs how he approaches industrial-scale deployment today.
Girau holds an M.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Tulane University, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. before leaving to commercialize his research, and a B.S. in Chemistry (Honors) and Mathematics from Loyola University New Orleans. He is an alumnus of Y Combinator (S17), the Silicon Valley accelerator.