Hamburg-based atmio, which offers a software platform to automate the detection and reporting of methane leaks in the oil and gas industry, has raised €5.1m in seed funding led by Notion Capital. Other investors included SquareOne and previous backers HCVC, Robin Capital and VOYAGERS.
The company plans to use the fresh capital to finance its go-to-market strategy, grow the team across marketing, customer success and engineering and product.
The methane problem
Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas contributor after carbon, and 80 times more potent when it comes to its warming effects on the planet.
“I was surprised about the global warming potential of methane, even though I worked in gas before. The leverage is much bigger [than CO2]” says cofounder and CEO Matthias Schmittmann.
One of the more well-known sources of these emissions are cows, and solutions are popping up to tackle this side of the issue: Sweden-based Agteria, for example, is developing a patented molecule that, when combined with feedstock, reduces the gas that cows release.
But flatulent cows aren’t the only offender. 60% of global methane emissions result from human industrial activity, which includes agriculture — and a third of that comes from the energy sector.
Much of these energy-related emissions come from methane leaks from natural gas supply for electricity generation and heating, which happen because of faulty equipment or maintenance issues. This leak issue is where atmio is focusing its efforts.
To date, natural gas companies have had to rely on manual labour to identify where these leaks are coming from and fix them one-by-one. The effort required to manually identify the leaks means that the focus tends to be on the larger leaks that could cause safety issues, rather than smaller ones that eventually accumulate to have a significant environmental impact.
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Atmio’s all-in-one solution digitises that process with handheld and stationary monitors, a mobile app and an integrated management platform working together to automate the detection, reporting and fixing of the leaks.
Regulation pressures
One barrier that the company has faced since launching in 2023 is that, in the absence of regulation mandating accurate reporting, their customer pool was limited to early adopters keen to get ahead of the game.
But with a new EU Methane Strategy focused on emission reduction introduced in May 2024, that is set to change: “Going to market right now, the timing is extremely critical — but it’s in our favour,” says Schmittmann. “Regulation is getting into force right now and that was a barrier before, as some customers wanted to start early but some wanted to wait for the regulation.”
The new regulation includes mandatory leak detection and repair, holding companies accountable for any accidental emissions caused. Currently, the manual nature of the checks mean that numbers aren’t always accurate; atmio’s automation ensures that companies have access to precise figures without the human error, allowing them to comply with these reporting requirements.
“As an operator [working with] natural gas you have thousands of potential sources [of leaks], and now you need to measure, and document that you measured and reported on this. If it wasn’t for automation, that task would just be enormous,” he adds.
Alongside expanding the engineering team to take the product from early MVP iterations to a commercially scalable solution, Schmittmann says that they plan to hire a marketing team to educate clients on compliance. “This EU regulation is also new to our customers, and sometimes they’re bombarded with new frameworks alongside many other topics that they have on their table,” he says.
By enabling easier detection and reporting of smaller leaks, he says the company is hoping to make a real and measurable impact on decarbonising the industry: “it’s the most direct way you can tackle climate change: we need to stop greenhouse gases going to the atmosphere, and that’s directly what we do.”
And there is potential — and reason — for this solution to eventually be rolled out worldwide, he adds. “It’s a global issue — not just Germany or Europe where the regulation hits, but also in the US, in South America, Africa, China. All countries care about this, which is also great for us: that’s an opportunity for us to build a global company with global impact.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/atmio-methane-seed-round-news/
