We invested in a brewery, albeit not the one you’d expect.
Nidobirds Ventures participated in the 1.8M€ seed funding round of Hamburg-based startup COLIPI GmbH. COLIPI’s patented Carbon Capturing & Biotransformation technology that will convert CO2 into Climate Oil, intended to have broad applications in consumer goods, alternative feedstock and Sustainable Aviation Fuels production. Other investors include the High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and the Innovationsstarter Fonds Hamburg.
The start-up founded in 2022, a spin-off from the Technical University of Hamburg, is, in a sense, a brewery for oils. Carbon is filtered from the air rather than pumped from the ground. CO2-containing industrial emissions and organic by-products, for example, from the agricultural industry, are converted by microorganisms through fermentations into valuable biomaterials like Climate Oil. The oil is more sustainable than crude oil and palm oil, considering the CO2 footprint and its impact on biodiversity. It is enabled by a patented bioprocess, a combination of a specially designed gas fermentation bioreactor and the world's fastest CO2-consuming bacteria. Industrial partners offering products such as cosmetics based on Climate Oil will be able to significantly reduce their corporate CO2 footprint.
The founders, Philipp Arbter, Tyll Utesch, Jonas Heuer, and Maximilian Webers, aim to produce many millions of tons of Climate Oil annually by 2039, avoiding multiples of that amount in CO2 emissions.
COLIPI aligns perfectly with our value investing philosophy. For us, the quality of the founding team always takes precedence, and this team has convinced us.