SGInnovate leads $2m funding in cleantech startup SunGreenH2

Singapore-based cleantech company SunGreenH2 has raised $2 million in a seed funding round led by SGInnovate, with participation from Vinci VC, Cap Vista, Entrepreneur First, SOSV’s HAX, she1K, T. Chen Fong, and Apsara Investments.

This news comes alongside the announcement of a grant award the company recently received as part of the $8 million partnership between the Energy Market Authority (EMA) and Shell in Singapore.

SunGreenH2 is on a mission to unlock low-cost green hydrogen production. A carbon-free alternative to fossil-fuel manufactured hydrogen, green hydrogen uses clean energy sources like wind and solar to power electrolysis, the process that splits water into pure hydrogen and oxygen.

The major bottleneck for green hydrogen production today is that most electrolyser systems are either energy inefficient or rely too heavily on precious metals like iridium and platinum, which are loaded into catalytic electrodes, a key component of electrolysis systems.

The company’s technology utilises unique proprietary nanostructured electrodes that dramatically increase available surface area for water contact during the splitting reaction for a given size of active area, increasing current density output by almost 2x, while lowering precious metal loadings and energy use.

In this case, reducing the use of platinum group metals by an order of magnitude lower than the current industry standard means the materials can be scaled up sustainably from a mass-manufacturing perspective.

The technology is applicable to almost all commercially available electrolysers today, offering a much-needed pathway to lowering green hydrogen cost for wide-scale adoption in industry, and other promising applications which cannot directly be electrified with renewables.

“By providing more advanced technology than what is currently available, SunGreenH2 makes possible mass-scale up of electrolysers by directly causing electrolyser manufacturers to compete more effectively in the distributed hydrogen stack. This opens the door to widespread adoption of green hydrogen in industry, transport, and long duration energy storage,” said Tulika Raj, co-founder and CEO of SunGreenH2.