London-based Rivan has raised $34 million in a funding round led by IQ Capital. Other participants include existing investor Plural, new investor Fundomo, and angel investors Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer at Hugging Face, Matt Clifford, co-founder of Entrepreneur First, and Markus Villig, CEO of Bolt. This brings Rivan’s total funding to $46 million.
With the UK imports 42% of its natural gas, battery storage alone is insufficient to power blast furnaces, and carbon credits cannot replace the gas these industries require. Harvey Hodd started Rivan in 2024 to tackle this problem.
He brought together a team of more than 30 engineers from electrical, chemical, and mechanical backgrounds and chose a vertically integrated approach from the beginning. Rivan designs and builds all its systems in-house at its London facility, which helps it control performance, costs, and deployment speed.
The technology works in three steps. First, solar energy runs an electrolyser that makes green hydrogen from water. Next, a direct air capture system uses calcium-looping chemistry to pull CO₂ from the air. Finally, a Sabatier reactor combines hydrogen and CO₂ to produce synthetic natural gas that is chemically identical to fossil gas.
The process produces 99.9% pure SNG, which the company claims can be injected directly into existing pipelines without any changes. The only inputs needed are air and water, and the result is a carbon-neutral gas when burned.
Over the past year, Rivan moved from running a 100kW pilot at a former military base in Wiltshire to building a 1MW plant, which is now the largest synthetic natural gas facility in the UK. Its main design approach is to use affordable, widely available parts to build systems that may not be the most energy-efficient in the lab but are easy to scale and cost-effective in use.
Rivan’s competitors include Germany’s Ineratec and Switzerland’s Synhelion, which are also working on synthetic fuels but with different methods. Rivan, in comparison, makes everything in-house and uses only solar power.
With the new funding, Rivan will work with Wales & West Utilities to launch the UK’s first grid-connected commercial SNG project. The money will also help build Europe’s largest synthetic natural gas plant, a new 50,000-square-foot manufacturing site in London, and grow the team to more than 100 people.
