Dioxycle – a French-American start-up that transforms carbon dioxide emissions into high-value, sustainable chemicals – recently announced the successful closure of its Series A funding round of $17 million. The funding round was co-led by renowned climate tech investors Lowercarbon Capital and Breakthrough Energy Ventures Europe (BEV-E), with participation from Gigascale Capital. This funding round propels Dioxycle into an exciting new development phase towards a first-of-its-kind industrial-emission-busting demonstrator.
Launched in January 2021, Dioxycle has been developing a world-first technology to produce sustainable ethylene from recycled carbon emissions at equal or lower costs to fossil equivalents. Effectively, a ‘green discount’ provides an immediate and built-in competitive advantage, as opposed to the ‘green premium’ that usually hampers the adoption of sustainable products. With a market size of some $180 billion, ethylene is the world’s most consumed organic chemical, used in producing textiles, plastics, furniture, and construction materials, but it has a hefty carbon footprint. By removing fossil fuels from ethylene production, Dioxycle has the potential to slash CO2 emissions by 800 million tons every year, representing over 2% of the global total.
This is possible due to Dioxycle’s breakthrough low-temperature electrolyzer that generates high-value chemicals from carbon emissions, water, and renewable electricity. And this proprietary electrolyzer relies on a unique integrated approach that combines cost-effective catalytic technologies, proprietary high-efficiency stack design, and advanced process integration schemes. This approach positions Dioxycle to provide the most energy-efficient and cost-efficient means of producing sustainable ethylene and other key commodity chemicals with a system design tailored to scale.
And by developing the electrolyzer to make a green discount possible, Dioxycle combines decarbonization with profitability and aims to trigger fast adoption even in regions with limited carbon reduction incentives. Having scaled from lab trials to the first electrolyzer stacks in 2022, the Series A funding will now enable the company to move to the first on-site demonstrators and an industrial prototype before preliminary commercialization within the next five years.
To achieve these ambitious goals, Dioxycle is seeking to expand its team, currently composed mostly of PhDs from world-leading institutions in both Europe and the US. And the company will focus on hiring profiles with extensive industrial experience in electrolyzer scale-up and process integration towards the first on-site demonstration of Dioxycle’s technology.
KEY QUOTES:
“Given how much our society runs on carbon, CO2 emissions could be considered an incredible resource, but only with a highly efficient CO2-conversion technology to take advantage of them. To this end, we continually asked ourselves how we can push this device to the maximum energy efficiency possible. Now, two and a half years later, we are ready to build an electrolyzer with the carbon-converting capabilities of about 20,000 trees, focused on the production of sustainable ethylene,”
— Co-founder and CTO David Wakerley
“Our vision is to become the INTEL Inside of the CCUS industry (Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage), the trusted technology provider empowering chemical manufacturers to reinvent chemical processes based on emission recycling rather than fossil fuel extraction. To reach our climate goals, we must disrupt the processes of incumbents instead of rebuilding the industry from the ground up. Leveraging existing industrial assets will allow us to scale sustainable technologies at the required speed.”
— Co-founder and CEO Sarah Lamaison
“Global ethylene supply chains face two critical problems: dependence on volatile fossil fuels and highly centralized production. Dioxycle is solving both of those problems at the same time. With a modular process powered by just water, electricity and waste CO2, Dioxycle is uniquely positioned to undercut legacy ethylene production, decentralize supply chains, and capture a $200 billion market.”
— Clea Kolster, Ph.D., Partner and Head of Science – Lowercarbon Capital
“Dioxycle is the most exciting electrolysis-based carbon capture and utilization company we have come across. The team has developed a low-temp electrolyzer to convert carbon emissions into commodity chemicals with impressive economics unlocking the potential to disrupt the $5T+ commodity chemical & fuel industry. And most importantly, we see this low-cost CCU solution as a pathway to mitigate up to four gigatons of CO2-equivalent emissions in the manufacturing space, where efforts are essential to combat climate change.”
— Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures
“Dioxycle combines a world-class technical team with a breakthrough technology to convert carbon emissions into useful products at a lower cost than existing high-carbon alternatives. They stand to disrupt a $200B market with a simple pitch: our product is cheaper and also can mitigate gigatons of emissions.”
— Mike Schroepfer of Gigascale Capital
