Austrian startup REPS secures $23.6M to generate electricity from road traffic

An Austrian startup has secured $23.6 million to scale a technology that turns road traffic into a source of electricity. The company, REPS, is based in Tyrol and has already installed its first “road power plant” at the Port of Hamburg. Now, the real test is whether the economics of this concept can hold up beyond that single location.

Founded in 2023 by Alfons Huber, REPS raised the equity round to expand its patented Road Energy Production System to ports, logistics centers, and urban environments. The company declined to name the lead investor. The premise is strikingly simple: embed a slab into the road, let heavy trucks drive over it, and capture the energy that would otherwise be lost as friction and heat.

This falls into a category known as energy harvesting, which has long promised more than it has delivered. For decades, the converters were too inefficient and short-lived for the numbers to work. Huber claims REPS spent six years redesigning the mechanical converter, and that the result is 254 times more efficient than the next-best system on the market. That figure comes from the company alone, with no independent verification yet.

The credibility, for now, rests on a single installation. Since November 2025, a 12-meter REPS unit has been operating at Hamburger Container Service (HCS) in the Port of Hamburg, on a stretch of road where empty-container trucks brake before entering the depot. REPS reports that more than 115,000 trucks have crossed it, generating over 6,700 kWh of electricity. Again, these numbers are self-reported.

“The installation at our facility demonstrates the potential of REPS: where vehicles have to brake anyway, clean energy is recovered and can be used directly where we need it,” said Justin Karnbach, CEO of HCS, in a statement. “Without any interference with traffic and without additional space.”

That last point is the commercial core. Solar requires land. Wind requires specific conditions. A road already exists. The traffic already moves, and the deceleration energy is otherwise wasted on brake pads. Where the volume of heavy vehicles is predictable and concentrated, the case is persuasive on paper. REPS says it is now in talks with more than 90 port operators across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America.

The longer-range claims demand more caution. REPS estimates that a full rollout of about 230 units across the Port of Hamburg’s public roads could generate roughly 10 GWh per year, enough to power about 2,800 households, with a payback period inside four years. At city scale, it pitches 64,000 units in a place the size of Dubai covering 10.8 percent of total electricity consumption. The company also cites a global theoretical ceiling of 5 percent of world electricity demand from road traffic alone. These are modelled figures, not measured ones, and they assume installations land in exactly the kind of brake-heavy, high-mass corridors where the physics is most favorable.

Austria’s state secretary for energy, Elisabeth Zehetner, framed the round as a test of whether the country can keep deep-tech work onshore. “A road becomes a power plant, and existing infrastructure becomes a building block for a sustainable future,” she said, calling REPS an example of what Austrian startups can do when scaling capital is available. The subtext is familiar across European capitals watching their best climate-hardware companies get pulled toward US and Asian buyers the moment growth-stage cheques are needed.

REPS currently employs twelve people and expects to reach fifty by the end of the year. Huber has said roads are only the first application, and that the underlying converter could eventually be deployed anywhere large masses move repeatedly over the same points. For now, the proof point is a single slab of asphalt near a container depot in Hamburg, and a spreadsheet projecting what happens if the slab works everywhere else.