Reverion secures more than 7 M€ seed funding

Funding
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Reverion, a spin-off company of the Technical University of Munich and technology provider for biogas companies, has successfully completed its seed financing round. The Berlin-based climate tech investor Extantia led the round and has been joined by Landwärme, Doral Tech Ventures, Possible Ventures and five selected business angels.

Through the seed round, a previously successfully acquired funding by the Federal Ministry for Economics and Climate Protection (BMWK) and the European Social Fund (ESF), as well as prize money from the XPRIZE Carbon Removal Challenge of the Musk Foundation, Reverion now has a total of over € 7 million for the scaling of their specially developed technology available. The first plant for CO2-negative electricity and hydrogen is to be built as early as next year.

Reverion’s technology enables electricity generation from biogas with unprecedented efficiency of 80%, which is a doubling compared to conventional methods – a real revolution in energy technology. This optimization is made possible using special fuel cells in a novel system design, which can also be used reversibly. This means that while conventional biogas plants have so far only acted as electricity producers, a Reverion plant can directly reverse electricity production into electricity consumption. Thus, it uses excess electricity from wind and sun for an electrolysis process in which either green hydrogen or renewable natural gas substitute can be produced. Reverion systems are ideally suited to both stabilize the power grid and store energy seasonally.

Synthetic, renewable gas from Reverion plants can be used for electricity, heat or mobility across sectors all year round via the existing natural gas grid. By using the existing gas infrastructure, a long-term storage effect is automatically achieved. In Germany alone, the existing infrastructure has a storage capacity of around 400 TWh, which is 100,000 times the total installed battery storage system. Since each Reverion plant can flexibly switch between natural gas and hydrogen production, all plants are always ready for the transition to a green hydrogen economy. In addition, the Reverion technology completely dispenses with conflict materials and thus counteracts problematic dependencies.

“In order to further reduce the dependencies of the German energy system, it is essential to raise all potential in the energy sector – including biogas and renewable energies. The potential for generating electricity from existing biogas plants alone can be increased with Reverion plants from around 5.5 GW today in Germany to up to 11 GW - and that without a single square meter of additional land consumption! If we even use the full flexibility of the technology, even 20 GW of electricity can be generated at peak times, up to 30% of the total electricity consumption in Germany. With a Europe-wide roll-out of the technology, it would also be possible to separate more than 100 million tonnes of CO2 annually as real negative emissions and to save 10% of the total European CO2 emissions by additionally displacing fossil fuels.”

Sebastian Heitmann, Partner at Extantia, adds: “Base-load renewable energy from local resources is the most interesting of all alternatives in the energy sector, not only because of the current geopolitical situation. On top of that, Reverion is able to offer a very flexible system that can be perfectly integrated into existing infrastructure.”

The Reverion technology was already successfully technically validated in the autumn of last year and is now being scaled further to the market-ready size. To this end, a new development and production site is currently being set up in Eresing near Munich and the team will be continuously expanded over the next 12 months, from originally five founders to an expected 25 employees.

About Reverion
As a spin-off of the Technical University of Munich, Reverion has developed and patented a technology for generating electricity from biogas with revolutionary efficiency and unmatched flexibility. With a founding team with more than 30 years of experience in the energy sector, the company opens up new optimization potential in the biogas market and heralds a new era of highly flexible and efficient, decentralized energy supply.

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By Felix Fischer
Co-Founder & COO