Climate tech startup Aether Fuels announced that it has raised $34 million in a Series A financing round, with procceds aimed at accelerating the scale-up of the company’s sustainable fuel technology for the aviation and ocean shipping industries.
Established in 2022 as a spin-out of Temasek’s deep-tech early stage investment platform Xora Innovation, Aether provides solutions aimed at improving the unit economics of producing sustainable fuels for aviation and ocean shipping. The company’s Aurora technology creates fuel from any feedstock that can be converted to CO, CO2, CH4,or H2, such as captured carbon dioxide, industrial waste gases, biogas, gasified municipal solid waste and waste biomass. Aurora, which leverages technology licensed from strategic partner GTI Energy, employs a transformed Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process that combines innovations in chemistry (catalysts), equipment (reactors), and process flows to reduce plant investment and operating costs, while driving up yield.
Aether said that it will use the new capital to further expand its R&D infrastructure, scale up its novel catalysts and process technology, and expand and accelerate the construction of a fully integrated 100 gallon-per-day (gpd) test production plant. The company is partnering with GTI to establish an Aether R&D center within GTI Energy’s Chicago-area campus, where an existing 1.5 gpd line, and the new 100 gpd plant under construction are located. Additionally, Aether said that it will begin developing a pipeline of commercial-scale production facilities that include projects in the U.S. and Southeast Asia to produce SAF and other high-value sustainable liquid fuels, in collaboration with select strategic partners.
AP Ventures led the round, which also includes Chevron Technology Ventures, CDP Venture Capital and Zeon Ventures. Series Seed lead investor Xora Innovation and other existing investors TechEnergy Ventures, Doral Energy-Tech Ventures, Foothill Ventures and JetBlue Ventures also participated.
Aether CEO Conor Madigan said:
“This is a group of financial and strategic leaders that see clearly the need to expand the supply of sustainable fuels. However, without dramatically scaling the capacity to produce the fuels, supply will remain seriously constrained, and the transition will be slow, if not impossible. This is precisely the problem we address with a disruptive scalable solution that encompasses novel chemistry, equipment, and process flows to simplify the conversion process, while enabling maximum carbon flexibility. The result: more product at vastly lower CapEx costs than existing approaches.”
AP Ventures’ Kevin Eggers added:
“Aether has assembled an exceptional team of energy experts, business leaders, and serial entrepreneurs. Their differentiated go-to-market strategy and disciplined execution are informed by a collective record of building energy and fuel projects worth tens of billions of dollars. Aether is advancing at pace, and we are excited to support their growth.”