Sora Fuel Secures $6M Seed

CAMBRIDGE, MA – August 1, 2024: Sora Fuel, a startup producing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) using only water, air and renewable energy, today announced it has raised an oversubscribed $6 million seed round. The Engine Ventures led the round, with Wireframe Ventures and others participating. The funding will be used to expand Sora Fuel’s Boston-based team, develop commercialization partnerships and further advance the company’s novel technology.

Aviation emissions have quadrupled since the 1960s, with aircraft currently accounting for 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions and approximately 4% of global warming. As demand for air travel continues to surge, SAF will play a crucial role in decarbonizing this hard-to-abate sector. However, existing SAF production processes are fundamentally constrained, requiring vast amounts of energy, feedstocks and investment to make a meaningful impact. For example, today’s only commercially viable SAF, the Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA) process relies on limited waste oil feedstock that alone can cost $3.50 per gallon, while the alcohol-to-jet process competes with agriculture and leads to soil degradation. Waste gasification and point-source power-to-liquid processes are less reliant on valuable resources, however both provide limited greenhouse gas reduction potential, as the underlying feedstocks of both processes contain / rely on non-biogenic sources of carbon.

Sora Fuel offers a new path for producing SAF by capturing and using atmospheric CO₂ at costs that are an order of magnitude lower than existing processes. The company’s novel technology includes a liquid bicarbonate electrolyzer that delivers direct air capture (DAC) CO₂ at just $20 per ton, operating in a fully closed-loop system that uses only water and renewable electricity to produce syngas. Compared to incumbent DAC solutions, Sora Fuel’s DAC-to-fuels approach dramatically reduces overall energy inputs, eliminates the need for feedstocks (other than air and water), and provides a scalable process for efficiently and cost effectively producing SAF and any other downstream products of syngas.

“Sora Fuel’s technology eliminates 90% of the energy currently required in standard DAC processes, opening up an entirely new and more sustainable path for producing carbon negative fuels,” said Gareth Ross, co-founder and CEO of Sora Fuel. “Our patented, closed-loop system enables the direct generation of an economical product and overcomes widespread feedstock constraints, allowing us to produce SAF at prices comparable to current Jet A fuel.”