This month, we are excited to feature Vema Hydrogen, a startup whose mission is to revolutionize the hydrogen industry by producing Stimulated Geologic Hydrogen, offering the world clean, abundant, and cheap H2 to help decarbonize the planet. Vema Hydrogen recently announced the close of a $13 million Series Seed investment round, co-led by our client Extantia, a venture capital firm backing pioneers in climate as a long-term partner, providing hands-on support across commercialization, scaling, and fundraising.
Co-leading the funding round with Extantia was Propeller, alongside new and existing investors such as Zero Carbon Capital, Pace Ventures, Marble, and the Grantham Foundation. Vema Hydrogen stated that “This investment marks a significant step forward, allowing us to move into the field and demonstrate that clean, reliable, and affordable geologic hydrogen at scale is possible. It will also strengthen our research capabilities as we continue to push the boundaries of innovation.”
The Series Seed investments will be used to advance Vema Hydrogen’s goal of producing cheap and clean hydrogen by exploiting naturally occurring reactions in the subsurface and then supercharging them. This innovative technology promises a levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) of less than $1/kg with an energy requirement below 3 kWh/kg. This makes hydrogen a viable pathway to decarbonize industries in hard-to-abate sectors and opens up the possibility of hydrogen as an energy source, rather than an energy vector.
Extantia’s Carlota Ochoa and Paola Brenni remark, “The demand for hydrogen is expected to grow from 97 megatonnes (Mt) in 2023 to up to 600 Mt in 2050, driven by climate targets and emerging applications such as steel production, long-haul transportation, aviation, shipping, and electricity generation for energy storage and grid balancing. However, realizing this potential requires an abundant, affordable, and clean hydrogen source.” They note that Vema’s approach, coined as “orange hydrogen” (contrasted with green, grey, or white hydrogen), meets these needs with much upside while simultaneously overcoming typical downsides of currently explored hydrogen alternatives: “We’re thrilled to join [CEO Pierre Levin and CTO Florian Osselin] and the entire Vema team on their journey.”
Mintz is proud to work with Extantia to support the Vema Hydrogen team in their mission to unlock thousands of years of clean, abundant, and cheap hydrogen by harnessing naturally occurring chemical reactions – a game-changer for global decarbonization.
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