Rivan, a company enabling energy security through synthetic fuels, announced it has raised £10 million in funding led by Plural, with participation from 20VC, NFDG (Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross), and prominent angel investors Patrick and John Collison (Stripe).
How the funding will be used: The funding will be used for R&D on Rivan’s electrolyser, direct air capture (DAC) and Sabatier reactor modules, as well as scaling up its pilot plant to 1 MW.
What Rivan does: Starting with synthetic natural gas (SNG), Rivan addresses the 22% of global emissions that stem from heavy industry’s reliance on natural gas for steel, cement and chemical production. And these sectors cannot be easily electrified and have few cost-effective decarbonisation options.
Rivan’s modular plants, powered by off-grid solar and injecting SNG into pipelines across the UK and Europe, aim to provide that solution. Its three key modules — electrolyser, DAC and Sabatier reactor — are designed and manufactured by Rivan in the UK, accelerating cost-reduction and deployment speed.
Rivan designs and manufactures its systems at a 10,000 sq ft factory in Bermondsey, South London, and it has deployed its first 100kW pilot at a decommissioned UK military base. And this system demonstrates cost-effective, grid-specification SNG production with only air and water as inputs. Rivan is now aiming to scale the site to 1MW, while improving performance, enhancing integration and reducing manufacturing costs, ahead of larger commercial deployments in 2026.
Value proposition: Synthetic fuels are chemically identical, but carbon-neutral, substitutes for fossil fuels; they can flow through today’s power and pipeline networks with no modifications. And high input-energy costs made synthetic fuels uncompetitive. But over the past decade, solar power has experienced dramatic cost reductions, now reducing at a rate of about 1% a month based on massive production capacity and demand. This is opening a pathway for synthetic fuels to match fossil fuel costs within the next five to ten years.
Founder: Rivan was founded by Harvey Hodd, a serial entrepreneur with two successful tech exits, who is now focused on building the technology and infrastructure to aid the UK’s and Europe’s energy security. And over the past year, Harvey has assembled a multidisciplinary team of engineers, infrastructure specialists and solar planners to bring this vision to life.
KEY QUOTES:
“Capturing the 12 gigatonnes of carbon emitted every year by heavy industry is one of the defining challenges of our time. 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. My hope is that our technology, combined with the unbelievably talented and driven team I get to work with everyday, can forge that future a reality. This is particularly important in the UK and Europe — where low domestic production and limited storage have hurt industry, and where we hope to lead by example to show that synthetic fuels can be competitive with fossil fuels to deliver long-term energy security.”
Harvey Hodd, founder and CEO of Rivan
“Harvey embodies the entrepreneur we back at Plural: scar tissue from scaling previous businesses and the drive to positively impact GDP and the world. 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. 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.”
Taavet Hinrikus, Partner at Plural
