Can you tell us about what you’re building at Rivan?

At Rivan, we’re building the infrastructure to produce synthetic fuels domestically in Europe, using renewable energy and carbon captured from the air. The timing matters because energy security has never been more important. Europe is still heavily reliant on imported fossil fuels and the shocks of the past few years have shown how exposed that makes the system. At the same time, solar keeps getting dramatically cheaper, which opens up a new way to make synthetic fuels commercially viable.

‍What did you see that others missed?

A lot of people looked at synthetic fuels and concluded they were too expensive, too energy-intensive and too hard to scale. My view was that this changes if you vertically integrate to very cheap energy, in this case solar, and in-house all manufacturing to reduce the cost of the hardware. 

We think the breakthrough is not one magic technology, but a different way of combining proven systems at scale, namely solar generation, electrolysis, direct air capture and fuel synthesis.

‍Was there a fundamental breakthrough or shift that made this possible?

The biggest shift is the falling cost of solar energy. Once you assume energy becomes radically cheaper, you can rethink the whole system, from hydrogen production to direct air capture to fuel synthesis. 

Our first plant is 1MW and we’re now building towards 1GW scale and the first direct injection of our synthetic natural gas into the grid. We have significant offtake agreements already in place, and critically, this is all possible without needing to replace existing infrastructure like hydrogen does. That is what makes it possible to vertically integrate the process and build a system that we believe can reach cost parity with fossil gas in Europe within the next few years.

‍What needs to go right for this to work at scale?

This now comes down to execution. That means scaling manufacturing, deploying larger plants and showing that synthetic natural gas can move through existing infrastructure without requiring a whole new energy network. Our new £25m Series A gives us the capital to start deploying at industrial scale. 

‍How does the world change if you are successful?

If we succeed, countries across Europe, including the UK, can produce far more of their own energy domestically instead of remaining exposed to imported fossil fuels and geopolitical shocks. Heavy industry gets a realistic path to decarbonise without waiting for a complete rebuild of existing infrastructure. 

Longer term, it means synthetic fuels can become a genuinely new energy category - one that improves energy security while cutting emissions at meaningful scale.

‍Why are you the team to achieve this?

I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was about 17, having now built and exited two companies before starting Rivan. I enjoy working on difficult challenges that others aren’t willing to get involved in, so I wanted my next company to be more focused on long-term impact on humanity than anything else. After looking at many problems to try to tackle, I came to the conclusion that synthetic fuels will be one of the most important innovations of the 21st Century, enabling life to be sustainable on Earth, so I went after that. 

We’ve built Rivan with a bias toward execution from day one, designing, manufacturing and integrating the whole system ourselves rather than outsourcing the hard parts and building a team around that ambition. In the ~620 days we’ve been alive, we’ve gone from first principles to the UK’s largest synthetic natural gas plant, signed multi-year customer contracts and now we’re on track to scale our technology further.

‍What does the next 12 to 24 months unlock?

The next phase is about moving from early deployment to industrial scale. This round enables us to open a new 50,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in London, deploy Europe’s largest synthetic natural gas plant and work toward the first injection of synthetic natural gas into the UK gas grid. That is the moment Rivan moves from being a promising technology story to becoming a serious energy company.