NZTC Cleantech Connect 2024

CleantechConnect

Discoverthestart-upsunleashing innovationforanetzerofuture.

Warning

The content of this promotion has not been approved by an authorised person within the meaning of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. Reliance on this promotion for the purpose of engaging in any investment activity may expose an individual to a significant risk of losing all of the property or other assets invested.

This promotion is made by Net Zero Technology Centre Limited (company number SC531384), incorporated in Scotland with its registered office at 20 Queens Road, Aberdeen, Scotland, AB15 4ZT. If you would like further information or have any other enquiry relating to the matters to which this promotion relates, please contact us at TechX@netzerotc.com.

About NZTC

Anetzeroworld,poweredbytechnologyinnovation

The Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC) is a non-for-profit organisation working with industry, government and academia driving technology innovation to accelerate the energy transition to net zero.

Technologydevelopment

Based in the heart of Europe’s energy capital Aberdeen, NZTC is co-investing and collaborating with industry and government to develop and deploy new technologies. Our research and insights assist the Scottish, UK and other governments in achieving their net zero ambitions, delivering a decarbonised and net zero energy system, maximising economic recovery and competing in international markets.

Technologyservices

Helping organisations navigate and accelerate their decarbonisation goals through advisory solutions

NZTC’s Technology Services provides expert insight and foresight on current and emerging technologies, helping businesses to enhance decision making and evolve towards net zero.

Gain clarity on your technology future. Read more on the other services we offer:

www.netzerotc.com/technology-services

Technology Due Diligence

Providing investors with accurate analysis and evaluation of technology during any stage of the investment process, to support in identifying gaps in readiness and scalability.

Horizon Scanning

Providing organisations with regular and bespoke insights on emerging technologies, industry trends, global projects and policy, supporting them in shaping their diversification strategy.

About NZTC

Acceleratingthestart-ups advancingcleanenergy

NZTC’s TechX Clean Energy Accelerator is an intensive 15-week programme, equipping start-ups with the funding, tools and resources they need to evolve and grow, accelerating their path to commercialisation and beyond.

Through TechX, NZTC is unearthing new solutions propelling CCUS and carbon removal, low carbon hydrogen, renewable power, alternative fuels, decarbonised heat and digital solutions.

57

start ups

accelerated

£5.7M

invested in start-ups

£106M 7

equity raised by TechX start-ups start-ups have reached commercialisation

Mark Anderson Chief Acceleration Officer and TechX Director

To address the energy trilemma, we must collaborate and draw on the widest sources of talent. Entrepreneurs, with their agility and risk-taking mentality, matched with their tenacity and commitment to the cause, are a force to be reckoned with.

At NZTC, we see start-ups as key in accelerating clean, affordable and resilient energy. I am excited to present 10 innovators who are doing just that. Through their disruptive technologies and novel business models, these companies are at the forefront of driving the energy transition. Participants in our TechX Clean Energy Accelerator, they are all making great progress. However, as with any early-stage venture, they require support.

I hope you enjoy meeting and getting to know them.

Discovermoreonthepotentialthese start-upsoffer,andhowtheycanhelp accelerateanetzeroenergyindustry.

Start-up showcase

Developing robust drones designed for more reliable and safer offshore infrastructure inspection.

Team: Matthew McLean, MD and Chris Fowler, Technical Director

Location: Glasgow, UK

Website: https://airspection.co.uk

Technology readiness level: 6

Technology focus area: Digital solutions

Accessing remote infrastructure such as offshore wind turbines for inspections and maintenance poses challenges in terms of unreliability, time consumption and hazards, with up to 80% of the associated costs attributed to access. Currently, vessel launched drone inspections are required, which are infrequent, leading to high repair costs, operational inefficiencies and even risk of blade failures.

Airspection is developing a remote launched drone service, flying tough endurance drones from accessible locations to remote infrastructure. This solution provides reliable and safe inspections, with the ability to navigate challenging environments, and can inspect up to 3x faster than conventional methods, allowing for predictive maintenance.

Airspection has recently demonstrated a successful prototype drone inspecting a turbine blade, and has filed a patent. Having received a letter of support from a global customer, they are raising a pre-seed round for early customer trials.

Current fundraising stage:

Current investment being raised: This round would provide a 18-month runway, building a team to develop the technology, achieving initial regulatory approval and conducting an offshore trial with potential customers. Following this, the company will seek an additional £1M to scale operations in the UK.

Pre-seed Pre-seed £500K

Diesel engines have provided a significant low cost, highly reliable and effective power unit for over 100 years. However, this technology cannot help decarbonise heavy-duty operations. Whilst batteries and fuel cells can help decarbonise light load, short range applications, they cannot economically or practically scale to larger scale requirements. The most effective way to decarbonise heavy-duty applications is with highly efficiency, clean combustion engines.

Carnot has developed a revolutionary engine technology, capable of reducing fuel consumption by 50% compared to traditional engines. The company’s fuel agnostic engines are optimised for a range of decarbonised fuels including hydrogen, ammonia, methanol and bio-fuels. Through the technology, Carnot can decarbonise maritime, off-grid power and HGV operations whilst reducing operator costs.

Developing a fuel flexible engine that halves fuel consumption and can run on hydrogen, ammonia, methanol or biofuels to decarbonise heavy-duty operations

Team: Archie Watts-Farmer, CEO, Nadiur Rahman, COO and Francis Lempp, CBO

Location: London, UK

Website: https://carnotengines.com/

Technology readiness level: 5

Technology focus area: Low carbon hydrogen

Current fundraising stage:

Current investment being raised: This round will enable Carnot to complete three funded customer pilot trials, build a pilot production line and reach commercialisation with the company’s first 50kW engine product.

EarlyseriesA £5M

Developing a novel catalyst and electroplating process for alkaline electrolysers.

Team:

Augusto Bartolome, CEO, Alfredo Saenger, COO and Claudio Picchi, CTO

Location: Oxford, UK

Website: www.electrogenos.co.uk

Technology readiness level: 4

Technology focus area: Low carbon hydrogen

Today, 96% of hydrogen produced comes from fossil fuels. Technology progress is needed fast and at large scale to meet governments’ green targets and ambitions, and to fight the climate change crisis. Electrolysis enables the clean production of hydrogen, however the industry’s progress is hindered by two main issues: cost and efficiency.

Electrogenos’ alkaline electrolysers achieve over 90% efficiency, rivalling PEM at a fraction of the cost. The novel catalyst is precious-metal-free and simple to scale up due to a unique manufacturing process. Its stack architecture is based on a simplified design, reducing further the cost of our stacks.

Created in 2022, Electrogenos has since raised €1.5M, opened their own research and development facility and grown the team to seven employees. After innovating on the catalyst, they proved their concept with a first electrolyser stack prototype in January 2024, which gave ground-breaking results since then validated by a national laboratory.

Current fundraising stage:

Current investment being raised: This round will enable Electrogenos to establish its first pilot plant to scale up prototypes to MW size and to produce its first Proof of Concept, a 5MW stack, by the end of 2025, as well as recruiting a Head of Stack Development. The company has stated that this will bring them to commercialisation in 2026.

The number of offshore assets is set to increase significantly. Inspection of this infrastructure is challenging due to hazardous conditions and cost, but it is critical to the continued safe, reliable and sustainable operation of the marine economy. A new approach to subsea inspection is necessary to address this growing need.

Frontier Robotics has developed software that provides Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) with autonomous and advanced inspection capabilities. The solution easily integrates onto almost any ROV, enabling a plug-and-play upgrade to the global fleet of thousands of ROVs. The solution improves inspection speed and quality, scales inspection quantity, and reduces safety risk and carbon emissions.

Frontier Robotics was started in 2023 to commercialise technology developed at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University in collaboration with industry. The company has received almost £550K of public innovation funding, which has supplemented almost £1M university research funding received for the technology, carried out several field trials and has strong interest and engagement from several potential customers.

Developing platform-agnostic software and associated hardware for autonomous underwater inspections.

Team: Dr. Jonatan Scharff Willners, CEO and David Wavell, COO

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Website: https://www.frontierrobotics.ai/

Technology readiness level: 5-6

Technology focus area: Digital solutions

Current fundraising stage:

Pre-seed £800K

Current investment being raised: This funding will provide a 36-month runway, allowing the company to grow their team to 13 people, including both technical and non-technical support, and provide necessary overheads, hardware and trial support. Frontier Robotics plans to enable its customers to carry out fully autonomous marine inspection and generate sustainable revenue from this funding.

Developing a power management control system to increase hydrogen production for dedicated solar-tohydrogen.

Team:

Dr. Thomas Delaney, CEO, Ugo Manfredi, CTO, and Niall Haughian, COO

Location: Bedford, UK

Website: www.hywaves.com

Technology readiness level: 5-6

Technology focus area: Low carbon hydrogen

Current fundraising stage:

Current investment being raised:

Producing hydrogen by electrolysis requires multiple electric power conversion steps, resulting in significant efficiency losses and high costs.

Renewable energy sources and the hydrogen production plants are often separated by long distances, resulting in the use of the electrical grid to deliver power to the plant. The net efficiency loss between the PV plants and the electrolysers amounts to approximately 10%, with high grid connection costs.

HyWaves has a novel power management and control architecture for connecting electrolysers to renewable power sources, designed for maximal production of green hydrogen and offering a significant reduction of up to 25% LCOH (Levelised Cost Of Hydrogen) over current technologies.

The company promotes the end-to-end use of direct current, which makes it possible to eliminate many hydrogen system CAPEX elements, while the absence of DC-AC and AC-DC power conversions maximises the overall system performance while minimising energy losses.

HyWaves has raised a total of £1.15M funding to date.

HyWaves has significant UK government support over the next 12-24 months, and are looking for funds to act as match funding (30%). The funding would allow the company to leverage the UK government grants and develop its pathway to market by the delivery of two demonstration sites. Pre-seed Seed

Fuel cells represent highly promising clean technologies poised to replace the likes of diesel generators, potentially offering 10x more autonomy than batteries, with zero emissions. Despite these advantages, they are not yet readily available in the market due to their high costs, low maturity and limited accessibility.

INERGIO is producing fuel cells that are fuel-flexible. This capability enables the company to merge the accessibility advantages of diesel generators with the efficiency, noise reduction, and emission-free benefits of fuel cells. The technology can currently utilise commercial fuels like propane and natural gas, with seamless adaptation to future green energy carriers such as hydrogen, biogas and ammonia once they become available in the market. Importantly, no additional technical adjustments are required for this transition.

A spin out of Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) from Switzerland, INERGIO recently launched a pilot test in January 2024 demonstrating their fuel flexible power generators in the field.

Developing a novel system design that combines advantages of fuel cells and diesel generators for sustainable offgrid and backup power solutions.

Team: Mahmoud Hadad, CEO and Luc Conti, CTO

Location: Lausanne, Switzerland

Website: www.inergio.ch

Technology readiness level: 5-6

Technology focus area: Alternative fuels and green chemicals

Current fundraising stage:

Seed £3M

Current investment being raised: The seed round would provide a 24 month runway, allowing INERGIO to extend its tech team to 10 engineers to finalise the design and testing of the technology to achieve TRL 8. It will also allow the company to hire two additional staff members to support business development, two application engineers and two technical sales to prepare for market entry.

Developing floating 5G network on a buoy that enables high-speed reliable connections for remote systems.

Team:

James Thomas, CEO

Location: Cornwall, UK

Website: www.jet-eng.com

Technology readiness level: 7

Technology focus area: Digital solutions

High-speed, reliable connectivity at sea could enhance safety, protect the environment and ensure the stable growth of a global blue economy and digital ocean.

In support, JET Connectivity isdeveloping 5G mesh network floating buoy technology that will make telecoms at sea a reality, uniquely utilising 5G to increase the level of bandwidth available. The technology enables the offshore wind industry to speed up the installation and commissioning of new wind farms, using drones and autonomous vessels to cut costs and carbon emissions, and enable more offshore renewables deployment.

Having started out building floating 5G use cases for offshore wind, JET have built an entire 5G stack and floating infrastructure to support windfarm build, with several patents filled and with floating prototypes.

Current fundraising stage:

Current investment being raised: The seed round would provide a 24 month runway to finalise the company’s technology, and allow them to build up commercial revenues at scale to start merging or acquiring complementary technology businesses to build out their IP from the core.

Pre-seed Seed £5M

Solutions to produce fossil-free steam either require the equivalent space of a tennis court, or are very costly. Major costs are associated with the burning of natural gas to raise steam for the drying process in the likes of paper machines.

MECHAPRES is developing a high-temperature heat pump with integrated thermal storage. The system generates fossil-free steam by recycling waste heat. The novel design provides higher efficiency, with potential to achieve payback time in under 2 years. The compact design (in a 20 foot container) and low safety requirements make it easy to integrate, minimising disruption to plants’ operations.

Developing a high-temperature heat pump with embedded thermal storage for industrial heat decarbonisation.

Team:

Anastasios A. Vasilopoulos, Managing Director

Location: Cambridge, UK

Technology readiness level: 4

Technology focus area: Decarbonised heat and cooling technologies

Current fundraising stage:

Seed £800K

Current investment being raised:

MECHAPRES’ seed round would provide an 18-month runway. This would allow the company to reach TRL 6, finalise the design for TRL 7, hire key team members, develop two software products (modelling tools and smart control), develop legal agreements with partners, file at least one new patent and progress lead generation.

Developing microbial electrolysis cells for green hydrogen production from wastewater.

Team:

Martyn Lathbury, CEO, James Stratford, CTO and Daniel CarlottaJones, Chief Engineer

Location: Coventry, UK

Website: www.wastewaterfuels.com/

Technology readiness level: 6

Technology focus area: Low carbon hydrogen

Wastewater treatment is an energy hungry industry making up to 3% of the UK’s energy use. This is due to

the use of aeration – blowing air into sewage to treat it. This process fails to recover value from the waste and instead consumes energy to dispose of potential fuel.

Wastewater Fuels are developing a treatment technology that recovers hydrogen while processing waste. The efficiency is higher than other methods of hydrogen generation, producing more energy than it consumes thanks to microorganisms. The company can reduce the energy consumption of sewage treatment by 7x, turning wastewater works to power plants.

Wastewater Fuels have taken their technology from academia to a deployment at a sewage works at TRL6 in 18 months. Having closed on 80% of their current raise of £1.1M, they are now looking to complete the round with £270k to cashflow their Innovate UK grant and deliver TRL7 by Q2 2025.

Pre-seed Seed

Current fundraising stage:

Current investment being raised: This raise will provide an 18 month runway and cash-flows

£270K

Wastewater Fuels’ Innovate UK grant to develop new materials for its technology and finalise its TRL7 design for market entry.

Ocean waves bring much energy to the nearshore. However, this energy often causes coastal erosion. Fighting waves with walls has failed, and bringing back sand with trucks is harmful and expensive.

WaveX is developing inflatable structures that can bury themselves under the seabed and change how nearshore waves dissipate their energy. Coastal communities can now use waves to move sand towards the coast and produce electricity. In both cases they reduce their bills and their carbon footprint.

Since 2021, WaveX has worked with leading coastal erosion and wave energy conversion experts to design a new way of harnessing wave energy. Having received help from the NZTC, Imperial College London, Wave Energy Scotland and leading climate-tech incubators, they are raising pre-seed funding for a pilot installation.

Developing a foundation-free wave energy converter, to be deployed within the seabed.

Team: Olivier Bourdin, CEO and Clement Puech, CSO

Location: London, UK

Website: https://www.linkedin.com/company /wavexocean/

Technology readiness level: 5

Technology focus area: Renewable power

Current fundraising stage:

Pre-seed £500K

Current investment being raised: This pre-seed round will allow the company to run a beach nourishment pilot that reproduces at scale patterns already demonstrated in the coastal flume tank of Imperial College. It will also allow the company to progress its wave energy converter from TRL 4 to TRL 5.

Our 2024 cohort is currently underway, with more game-changing solutions.

Drones designed for more reliable, more robust and safer offshore infrastructure inspection

Platform-agnostic software and associated hardware for autonomous underwear inspections

Novel system design that combines advantages of fuel cells and diesel generators for sustainable off-grid and backup power solutions

Leveraging construction waste for secure carbon capture and storage in a novel carbon-negative composite

Technology to convert renewable energy, carbon dioxide and water into zero carbon jet fuel

Power management control system to increase hydrogen production for dedicated solar-to-hydrogen, and lowering cost

High-temperature heat pump with embedded thermal storage for industrial heat decarbonisation, with heat and steam as service potential

Novel solar thermal technology for buildings that harvests carbon neutral heat all year round

Carbon-zero industrial process heating using low cost, integrated heat pump technology

Fuel-flexible power generator targeted at ports offering full control over the combustion process to operate at high efficiency with zero carbon emissions

Smart, battery-equipped containers for cost-effective electrification of shipping vessels

Lower cost green hydrogen production technology using a recirculating catalyst with intrinsic hydrogen storage capability

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persons who have professional experience in matters relating to investments falling within Article 19(5) (Investment Professionals) or Article 49 (High Net Worth Companies, Unincorporated Associations etc.) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotions) Order 2005 (as amended) (‘the Order’); high net worth individuals within the meaning of Article 48 of the Order; certified sophisticated investors and self-certified sophisticated investors within the meaning of Article 50 and Article 50A of the Order; associations of high net worth investors or sophisticated investors within the meaning of Articles 51 of the Order; and any other person to whom it may lawfully be communicated (together, the ‘relevant persons’).

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