Ki 13 raises £3.7M seed led by HICO Investment Group to make green hydrogen and CO₂ from biomass
September 2, 2026
Ki 13, the London cleantech company producing green hydrogen and biogenic CO₂ from waste biomass, has raised £3.7 million in seed funding in a round led by HICO Investment Group, with Burgest, Triple Impact Ventures, GiTV and Desai Ventures participating alongside non-dilutive match funding from Innovate UK.
Synthetic fuels have an arithmetic problem. Making e-SAF, e-methanol or e-methane requires two expensive inputs — hydrogen and carbon dioxide — and the conventional route to each is electricity-hungry. Hydrogen comes from splitting ultra-pure water; carbon comes from pulling CO₂ back out of the atmosphere. Feedstock cost, not demand, is what keeps these fuels from competing with the fossil versions they are meant to replace.
Ki 13 collapses those two steps into one. A single low-temperature electrochemical reaction takes in lignocellulosic biomass and releases hydrogen and biogenic CO₂ as separate streams at the same time. The feedstock is agricultural and forestry residue and other leftover organic material, so nothing is grown specifically to feed the process. The company puts the energy draw at roughly 25 kWh per kilogram of hydrogen, against around 50 kWh for water electrolysis. On the carbon side the gap is wider still: 300 kWh per tonne of CO₂, compared with the 2,000 to 3,000 kWh direct air capture can consume. Its customers are the fuel and chemical producers buying those feedstocks, not the end users of the fuel.
The company was founded in December 2022 by Koji Muto, formerly of ExxonMobil, and Michael Stanton, whose postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge into waste-to-hydrogen systems became the basis for the technology. It went through the Carbon13 venture builder and raised a $1.1 million pre-seed in 2023, backed by Desai Ventures, SFC Capital, HICO, G-Force and Carbon13. It has since grown to around a dozen people and rebranded from Ki Hydrogen.
HICO and Desai Ventures both backed the company at pre-seed and returned for this round. "We have long held the view that the biggest barrier to scaling green hydrogen and synthetic fuels is not demand, but economics," said Christopher Hartnoll, CEO and Managing Director at HICO Investment Group. The seed money funds an industrial pilot plant — the step that moves biomass electrolysis out of the lab and into a scale that prospective customers and later-stage investors can inspect for themselves.
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