London-based climatetech Rivan has raised £10 million in a funding round led by Plural, with participation from 20VC, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross (NFDG), and angel investors Patrick and John Collison, co-founders of Stripe.
The company is developing modular synthetic fuel plants powered entirely by off-grid solar energy, aiming to address energy security and industrial decarbonisation in the UK and Europe.
Rivan’s solution combines direct air capture (DAC) of CO₂ with green hydrogen, produced through electrolysis, to synthesise carbon-neutral fuels. These fuels are chemically identical to their fossil-based counterparts, making them drop-in replacements that can integrate directly with existing infrastructure, a key advantage for sectors that are notoriously hard to decarbonise, such as steel, cement, chemicals, and aviation.
“Capturing the 12 gigatonnes of carbon emitted every year by heavy industry is one of the defining challenges of our time,” said Harvey Hodd, Rivan’s founder and CEO. “For hard-to-abate industries like steel, cement, aviation and chemicals, neither carbon credits nor batteries paired with renewables provide a realistic solution. Until we develop cost-effective synthetic fuels from carbon captured from the air, we can’t expect industry to decarbonise.”
What sets Rivan apart is its vertically integrated, solar-powered production model. All three core components - the electrolyser, DAC unit, and Sabatier reactor - are designed and manufactured in-house at the company’s 10,000 sq ft factory in Bermondsey, London. Its modular plants are built to operate off-grid, using falling solar energy prices to achieve fuel cost parity with fossil sources.
“Rivan is manufacturing vertically-integrated machines in Bermondsey and deploying them to solar-powered, off-grid sites to make carbon capture economically viable and achieve optimum costs and performance,” said Taavet Hinrikus, Partner at Plural. “With this ambition and Harvey’s background, I’m excited to be a part of Rivan’s mission to transform energy security and tackle the climate crisis once and for all.”
Rivan has already deployed a 100kW pilot plant on a decommissioned military base in the UK, producing synthetic natural gas (SNG) from only air and water. The new funding will support scaling this to a 1MW plant, with the aim of achieving commercial-scale deployments by 2026. The company plans to expand from SNG into liquid synthetic fuels, such as e-fuels for aviation, in the near future.
Synthetic fuels are gaining traction globally as a key decarbonisation lever for industries that cannot easily transition to electrification. However, high costs have historically been a barrier. Rivan is betting that the rapidly declining cost of solar energy, which is falling at around 1% per month, will soon make synthetic fuels cost-competitive with fossil alternatives.
The European Union has set ambitious targets for reducing emissions from hard-to-abate sectors, and the UK’s energy security concerns, exacerbated by supply chain disruptions and geopolitical tensions — make alternatives like Rivan’s particularly timely.
Rivan is entering a space that includes startups like Germany’s Ineratec and Switzerland’s Synhelion, both of which are also developing synthetic fuel technologies.
The startup is currently hiring across a range of engineering roles and will use the capital to accelerate research and development on its core modules and improve production efficiency.
Rivan’s long-term vision is clear: “We hope to lead by example to show that synthetic fuels can be competitive with fossil fuels to deliver long-term energy security,” said Hodd.
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