Sirona Technologies, a Belgian climate tech founded by former Tesla engineer Thoralf Gutierrez, has raised a €6m equity seed round led by global investor LocalGlobe and Franco-German VC XAnge.
The company, which develops direct air capture (DAC) technology to remove carbon dioxide directly from the air, will use the capital to open its first production plant in Kenya.
How does Sirona’s tech work?
The technology used by Sirona to remove carbon dioxide from the air is already well-established; the company’s machines suck air through fans and then trap CO2 molecules thanks to specialised filters. The carbon dioxide is then injected and stored permanently in rock formations, where the company says that it eventually transforms into rock.
This is similar to the method employed by other DAC startups, including Swiss company Climeworks — Europe’s best-funded direct capture company, which last raised a $650m round in 2022.
“There is no technology breakthrough,” says Gutierrez. “It’s rather about how we are executing to bring down costs and scale faster.”
While most other companies in the space create a new version of their machines on average every 18 months, says Gutierrez, in Belgium Sirona has launched three prototypes in one year. Its latest machines can capture up to one tonne of CO2 annually, and Gutierrez says that the startup is weeks away from finishing its fourth prototype, which will capture 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
“We’re steepening the learning curve to reduce costs faster,” says Gutierrez.
Tesla’s learnings
Gutierrez says his approach to Sirona is taken from lessons he learned after five years at Tesla’s HQ in Silicon Valley, where he led a team of engineers; he left in 2022 and founded Sirona last year.
“What matters the most is how quickly you can iterate on a technology,” he says. “The faster you do prototypes, the faster you learn, and the faster the technology gets better.”
Gutierrez says that this has enabled Sirona to improve scalability by building ‘plug-and-play’ machines that can be added incrementally to the startup’s DAC plants to increase their capacity.
“Competitors build a plant, and then if they want to add capacity, they have to build a new one,” says Gutierrez. “We have modular machines that we can add on, meaning that we can scale as fast as we can.”
Heading south
The seed round will enable Sirona to go from prototype to production, says Gutierrez. The company is planning to build its first production plant in Kenya.
It’s not the only DAC company to head south: Climeworks, which already has a DAC plant in Iceland, is also building its second production site in Kenya.
Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, a big, intra-continental crack in the Earth that runs through the country from north to south, has rich geothermal potential — and one of the by-products of geothermal is steam production, which is used to power DAC machines.
It also contains certain kinds of rocks that make it easier to inject captured CO2 underground.
“We think Kenya’s one of the best places in the world to do this,” says Gutierrez.
The road to commercialisation
The founder expects the Kenyan pilot plant to have one low-capacity DAC machine up and running by the end of 2024. The objective is to remove 5,000 tonnes of CO2 annually from early 2026.
By that point, says Gutierrez, Sirona will be able to start commercialising. Like many other DAC companies, this will mean selling carbon credits (based on the amount of carbon removed) to customers — usually companies that need to offset their own emissions.
The startup currently has one customer, according to the founder, and is in talks with others.
In Iceland, Climeworks is removing 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. The company previously told Sifted that the plan is for its plant in Kenya to remove at least 100k tonnes of CO2 per year from 2028.
But Gutierrez is confident that Sirona’s operational model means that it can keep up. “As we build machines, we’ll add them on top, so that capacity will just grow exponentially,” he says.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/sirona-6m-seed-round-news/
