Austrian startup REPS raises $23.6m to turn road traffic into electricity

This article was published on May 22, 2026 Tyrol-based REPS has plugged its first “road power plant” into the Port of Hamburg. The next test is whether the economics survive contact with anywhere else. Tyrol-based REPS has raised $23.6m to scale a technology with an unusually literal premise: install a slab into a road, let trucks drive over it, harvest the energy they would otherwise waste in friction and heat. The Austrian startup, founded in 2023 by Alfons Huber, said on Friday the equity round will fund the rollout of its patented Road Energy Production System to ports, logistics hubs, and cities. It declined to name the lead investor. The pitch sits inside a category called energy harvesting, which has spent two decades being interesting in theory and disappointing in practice. The converters were inefficient and the lifespans were short, so the economics never worked. Huber says REPS spent six years redesigning the mechanical converter itself, and that the result is 254 times more efficient than the next-best system on the market. That figure is the company’s own, and there is no independent benchmark yet. The credibility, for now, comes from one site. Since November 2025, a