Virya’s Portfolio
Some of our favorite investments are listed below. If you are interested in co-investing, or think you have a brilliant climate solution that we could accelerate, feel free to reach out.
Sage, based in Texas, is going to repurpose the oil+gas drilling industry to mass-manufacture clean power plants by installing geothermal wells in hot dry rock. Their core technologies, the HeatRoot reservoir and a supercritical CO2 turbine, make geothermal scalable today with off-the-shelf equipment. 24/7 geothermal electricity will now be affordable nearly everywhere in the world.
ThorCon, starting in Indonesia, is taking “mass-manufacture” to another level entirely, repurposing shipyards (known for on-time, at-cost delivery of large steel things) to rapidly produce standardized nuclear power plants. Their molten salt reactor incorporates the minimum possible engineering advances from what has already been tested, making them ready to demo and scale right away. If proven, ThorCon would be by far the cheapest and fastest-deployable reliable clean electricity ever.
Origen, based in the UK, is fully decarbonizing the production of lime (calcium oxide). Their oxycombustion and carbon capture technology allows the affordable production of higher-than-usual-quality and emissions-free lime in retrofitted or new facilities. Because lime usually creates emissions not only from fuel burned in the production process but by definition from the chemical reaction of the rock, Origen’s carbon capture method is one of the only ways to 100% eliminate emissions from this sector. The carbon-neutral lime can then be used in industrial applications or for direct air capture of CO2.
Azotic, based in the UK and Canada, is scaling up existing sales of a farm biological product – a bacteria that lives within plants and fixes nitrogen from the air. It is far cheaper than commercial nitrogen fertilizer and produces no runoff or extra N2O emissions (another greenhouse gas hundreds of times worse than CO2). Nitrogen is provided when and where plants need it. Azotic’s product can already replace around 20% of commercial fertilizer application (more for certain crops!) while maintaining or boosting yields on average.
SG H2, based in D.C., is commercializing a super-high-temperature process to turn waste biomass into hydrogen, destroying any toxic organic chemicals along the way. After multiple decades of development and tech proof, SG H2 is close to breaking ground on its first commercial plant in Lancaster, CA. While SG H2 is committed to sourcing only true waste biomass, it has also committed to using carbon capture and sequestration in every plant so that it can dispose of plastic waste as well while still producing carbon-neutral hydrogen. This means when used with bio wastes diverted from a landfill, SG H2’s hydrogen is in fact carbon-negative!
Ambient Carbon, based in Denmark, is piloting a system to destroy methane emissions at point sources. Methane is a greenhouse gas responsible for a third of warming to date, and its fast warming effect (~10 years) means methane emissions will very much determine whether the world blows past 1.5C warming or not in the next decade or two. While some sources of methane, such as oil wells, are concentrated enough to be flared, most are much more diffuse. Ambient Carbon is creating a solution for those lower-concentration sources: livestock barns, some coal mines, eventually wastewater facilities and possibly atmospheric methane.
Carbon Reform, based in the US, makes commercial HVAC systems more efficient and therefore cheaper by removing a pesky contaminant that would otherwise require more air to be dumped outside and new air processed… CO2! By capturing CO2 from HVAC air streams, Carbon Reform saves building owners money. And all the CO2 that is removed in this net-cost-saving process will be sequestered permanently and help reduce atmospheric CO2 levels.