Author name: Paul Patrick

ZeroAvia, one of the leading zero-emission aviation companies in the world, just announced its largest financing round to date. The funding round was co-led by Airbus, Barclays Sustainable Impact Capital, and NEOM.

Other participants included Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Alaska Airlines, and the Amazon Climate Pledge Fund. No exact funding amount has been disclosed due to legal reasons, but a spokesperson for the startup confirmed to TNW that it is ZeroAvia’s largest to date, following a Series B of $72mn and a Series A of $56mn. 

Based out of Kemble, UK, and Hollister, California, ZeroAvia develops hydrogen-electric fuel cell propulsion architecture for aircraft. The funding will allow it to keep working on its first product, the ZA600. 

This is a 500kW to 750kW powertrain capable of powering a 9 to 19-seater aircraft, with the ambitious timeline of entry into service in 2025. Fuelled by gaseous hydrogen tanks, it will be able to carry passengers up to 300NM (555.6km). 

It will also allow the company to continue work on the 2-5.4MW modular powertrain ZA2000 program. This will first be used to retrofit a Dash 8 400 76-seat testbed aircraft, supplied by Alaska Airlines. 

“Anybody following the development of hydrogen aviation — and its potential to transform the industry — will see this investment as a positive step,” said Val Miftakhov, founder and CEO of ZeroAvia. “For ZeroAvia to now have investors such as Airbus coming on board is the strongest possible validation of the prospects for hydrogen-electric propulsion technology.” 

Airbus on board for hydrogen fuel cell certification pathway collab

European aerospace giant Airbus has indeed been bullish on hydrogen and its promise to decarbonise air travel. This includes the ZEROe program, which will use the very first A380 as a demonstrator aircraft, with the aim of delivering a commercial hydrogen-powered aircraft into service by 2035. The company recently ground tested its own 1.2MW hydrogen fuel-cell, the power its engineers believe it will take for commercial aircraft to fly.  

Meanwhile, ZeroAvia has already performed successful flights with a Dornier 228 testbed aircraft powered by the ZA600 and an electric engine on one of the wings. This, the VP of Airbus’ ZEROe aircraft, Glen LLewellyn, says puts the company in a strong position to take its technology to the next stages of development. 

“In addition, ZeroAvia is supporting the development of a wider hydrogen ecosystem for aviation — technologies, decarbonised hydrogen supply and certification of hydrogen propulsion systems — which all complement well with our own ambition to bring a ZEROe hydrogen-powered aircraft to service by 2035,” LLewellyn added.



Airbus and ZeroAvia have also entered into a partnership on certification approaches for hydrogen power systems, an area where established OEMs have significantly more experience compared to startups in the aerospace industry. The two will also work together on other critical technical areas, including liquid hydrogen fuel storage (which promises greater range compared to gaseous), flight and ground testing of fuel cell propulsion systems, and development of hydrogen refuelling infrastructure and operations.  

Treefera says it wants to transform the accuracy, transparency, and efficiency of the carbon offset industry with AI and data from a trillion trees across the globe. It just received a vote of confidence in the form of a €2mn seed round led by Concept Ventures and participation from the CTO of Intel, among others.

The practice of voluntary offsetting has faced criticism from various quarters, with concerns ranging from it being simply inefficient to directly detrimental to the quest for decarbonisation as a whole. Nonetheless, it is big business.

Most companies touting net-zero carbon emissions by 2035, 2040, or 2050 are factoring offsets into the equation. In 2021, the carbon offsetting market was worth nearly $2bn. With ESG pressure on companies from investors increasing, predictions say it could grow to as much as $40bn by the end of the decade, and hit a staggering $250bn by 2050.

At the same time, trust in carbon offsetting has taken a massive hit over the past couple of years — and not without cause. Not all carbon credits are created equal. The cheaper they are, the more useless they are likely to be. 

A study published last month in the journal Science found that only 5.4 million, or 6%, of a potential 89 million offset credits were linked to additional carbon reductions through preserved forests. The vast majority originated from projects that barely reduced deforestation. 

Treefera was founded in 2022 by Jonathan Horn, theoretical physicist and former Managing Director at J.P. Morgan, and Caroline Grey, former CCO at UiPath. 

Its AI driven platform measures, monitors, and verifies (a practice known as MRV) carbon credits. Having mapped a trillion trees globally covering jurisdictions (countries and large regions) as well as 197+ registered forest projects, the startup says it has an unprecedented repository of data. 

It then applies a combination of deep learning models and novel AI search techniques to determine the accuracy with which carbon credits are priced, based on information on things such as tree health and carbon sequestration and other important “reversal risks,” including fire, flood, and drought. 

“Treefera’s transformative AI tool has the power to revolutionise the world’s approach to forest data and conservation,” Horn said. “Our platform enables instant analysis and insights of carbon offset projects, and critically allows easy integration of that trusted data into our clients’ analytics environment through an API.”

The company, based out of London and New York, says it will use the raised capital to enhance platform capabilities, expand its team, and extend its global market presence.

Climate change anxiety is real, and it can cause feelings of powerlessness, or even apathy. While it is true that no soggy straws in the world will help as long as billion-dollar industries keep indiscriminately pumping oil out of the ground, it is also false to believe that our individual efforts do not matter. 

In a new game published last week, called The Time is Now: Toolkit for Change, the creators have taken to a good old low-tech tabletop approach to make people think about how, for instance, their relationship with technology can have a more positive impact on the environment. 

The idea is to gather a group of people — colleagues, friends or family — and to generate ideas and solutions, from an individual to a societal level, to what is undoubtedly one of the greatest generational challenges of our time. (Note: one of the game’s originators, Niels Sipkema, is the Director of TNW Programs, which is how we got our hands on a pre-release edition.)

Based on six of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the cards of the game present questions or problems involving an environmental component to be read out loud by one player. The others then pitch their solutions to the problem described on the card. 

The reader then picks a winner, who places the card on an “action canvas” along vectors of what can be accomplished by ourselves (cycling to work), what can begin tomorrow, (say, choosing a sustainable caterer for your company event), what needs some more time and planning (investing in carbon removal startups), and what can be done with some help (solar panels on the roof of your building). 

If you cannot think of anything technologically groundbreaking, the prompt from the game’s creators reads: “If you can’t be serious, be funny, blunt, green, or smart.” The TNW test group found themselves being all of those things — to varying degrees, depending on who you ask — during a runthrough of the game. 

The actions we take is a vote for the kind of world we want to live in

We may not all be quantum engineers that can develop the new clean fusion fuel of the future, but we can all make informed decisions and conscious choices in our relationship to the planet. (After learning about the carbon cost of digital clutter, at least one of the players rushed to delete a few thousand photos of their cat from the cloud.) 

Every action we take — what we choose to consume, how we choose to travel, and where we choose to invest — is a vote cast for the kind of world we want to live in. Pointing a finger and saying “but they don’t, so why should I,” simply isn’t good enough. 

But when choices regarding our habits are presented with an added appendage of guilt, or a serving of shame on the side, they become harder to maintain. Just look at yo-yo dieting. 

However, when introduced with a sense of agency coupled with positive reinforcement (for instance, such as winning a pitch), we are much more likely to stick to the habits we are trying to build. 

In either case, we have to have the, sometimes terribly inconvenient, conversations — for the sake of future generations. The Time is Now: Toolkit for Change is an effective approach to that end. 

The Time is Now: Toolkit for Change is created by Gerard Drost, Niels Sipkema, Johannes van der Erenbeemt, and Bjorn Uyens, a team that also made The Startup Game. It is published by BISPublishers and available here.