Spark Cleantech closes €30M for heavy industry decarbonisation

Paris-based Spark Cleantech has closed a €30 million Series A funding round (including €17 million in equity). The round was led by 360 Capital and Taranis, with participation from the Île-de-France Reindustrialisation Fund (initiated by the Île-de-France Region and operated by Innovacom), alongside Asterion Ventures, the company’s long-standing investor.

Founded in 2022 in the laboratories of CentraleSupélec by Erwan Pannier and Patrick Peters, Spark Cleantech is a deeptech company focused on decarbonising heavy industries such as glassmaking, metallurgy, polymers, and batteries.

The company has developed a patented process based on pulsed plasmolysis that replaces fossil-fuel combustion in high-temperature industrial furnaces and materials production with an alternative that is fully decarbonised, economically competitive, and requires minimal changes to existing operations.

Spark Cleantech’s modules are installed between a client’s existing gas network and their high-temperature industrial burners. Using pulsed plasma, the technology removes carbon from the gas before combustion, leaving hydrogen as a fully decarbonised energy source. The extracted carbon is converted into a solid nanomaterial used in polymers and battery production, replacing a petroleum-derived material with a significantly higher carbon footprint.

This approach relies on proprietary pulsed plasmolysis technology, initially invented at Stanford University, further developed at CentraleSupélec, and industrialised by Spark Cleantech in France. It reduces the energy required for separation while generating a high-value carbon nanomaterial.

In practice, the process converts a hydrocarbon, without combustion, into two decarbonised materials, hydrogen and solid carbon, whose combined economic value is increased by a factor of four, while reducing emissions by up to 85 per cent. Spark Cleantech’s technology is currently being piloted with major customers in metallurgy, glassmaking, polymer production, and battery manufacturing.

The new investment will support Spark Cleantech’s next phase of growth, allowing the company to complete and operate its first production module before rolling it out across customer sites.

It will also fund the qualification of Spark Cleantech’s first commercial carbon grades, one of the two outputs of its pulsed plasmolysis process. In addition, the team will expand by around 20 new hires across commercial operations, engineering, and R&D.