Metafuels’ journey from funding to commercialisation
More than halfway through the current decade, let’s start by going to its start. In 2020, three former carbon capture engineers were plotting a contrarian bet in Switzerland. Their target: decarbonise aviation through sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Their approach: go against the grain.
“Back in 2020, Fischer-Tropsch was the name in town and anybody who wanted to do something else was probably an outlier,” Saurabh Kapoor, CEO and co-founder of Metafuels tells SAF Investor. “People would say, ‘We don’t know what you’re trying to do.’ Even big names who are our competitors now were not out there in the market on campaigns.”
Despite the naysayers, Metafuels has raised $22m from prominent climate investors. Just last month, it announced a major engineering contract with McDermott for its first commercial facility in Rotterdam.
The founders, Kapoor, Leigh Hackett and Ulrich Koss, met at train manufacturer Alstom, where the company was developing carbon capture and storage technologies.
“We always wanted to develop a technology of our own because what we were doing was OK, but it was not that great,” Kapoor explains. “There’s a lot more in adding value, giving birth to something than writing reports and papers.”
When they turned their attention to SAF in 2020, they saw limitations in existing technologies. “To meet market needs and deliver SAF at a competitive price, we needed a technology that was selective towards SAF,” Kapoor explains. “What was needed was high carbon efficiency and high energy efficiency.”
The team chose methanol-to-jet as their pathway as methanol already benefited from existing logistics infrastructure and an active value chain. This allowed Metafuels to focus exclusively on what was missing: selective production of SAF from methanol. They called their technology Aerobrew.
But identifying the technology was the first step. After this, Metafuels faced what Kapoor calls its biggest early challenge: raising money. For Kapoor and his co-founders, two factors proved decisive: technology thesis alignment and team credibility.
“I think the biggest challenge is always the first round,” Kapoor reflects. “An alignment of views between us and our investors that the future of e-fuels and biofuels is SAF. Selectivity is the name of the game. Our assessments and their assessments matched.”
Metafuels raised an $8m seed round in December of 2023, led by global investment firm Energy Impact Partners (EIP) and climate-tech venture capital fund Contrarian Ventures. While the technology is important, execution remains a key challenge in startups. This is where Kapoor said his team’s industrial pedigree helped.
“We come from a world where these things have been done, or we ourselves have done similar things before,” Kapoor explains. “So we could avoid the pitfalls most startups or people who just come out of PhDs would have.”
Metafuels’ founding team has immense experience in process engineering, project development and scaling industrial facilities. This, Kapoor says, gave investors confidence.
“A lot of these things that typically people discover on the way, we couldn’t foresee everything, but a lot by design of our programme, we could attend to very efficiently,” Kapoor says. “So from an investor’s perspective: A, technology; B, the team.”
By January 2025, Metafuels raised its oversubscribed $9m Series A round led by investment management firm Celsius Industries. RockCreek, Fortescue Ventures and Verve Ventures joined the round alongside existing investors Energy Impact Partners and Contrarian Ventures.
With total funding of $22m raised in just over two years, including a grant from the Swiss government, Metafuels is moving rapidly from concept to commercialisation. The company installed its 50-litre-per-day demonstration plant at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. But the real milestone is its first commercial facility, the Turbe plant in Rotterdam.
In December 2025, Metafuels awarded McDermott a front-end engineering and design (FEED) contract for the Turbe project, marking a major technical and financial commitment. The plant will be built at the EVOS terminal in the Port of Rotterdam, leveraging existing methanol storage and handling infrastructure.
“Port of Rotterdam is a fantastic location,” Matthias Schnellmann, senior project development manager for the site tells us. “What we do is a tank-to-tank transformation starting with methanol and finishing with SAF. Rotterdam today has extensive infrastructure to import and handle methanol.
“Our plant will be right next to the methanol storage tanks there. That means we can focus on investing in the project rather than having to also invest in lots of ancillaries like tanks and offloading facilities.”
The site also benefits on the downstream end since Rotterdam already houses SAF blending infrastructure as most of the Europe’s jet fuel flows through the port. “So we can plug into those supply chains again,” he adds. The first phase of the facility is expected to produce 10 tonnes of e-SAF per day at the site in 2028, with plans to scale tenfold in a second phase.
The FEED phase represents a significant upfront investment to de-risk the project before a final investment decision. “It’s not a commercial project. It’s a first-of-a-kind project,” Kapoor emphasises. “FOAK projects, they tie very tightly with technology development effort. We have to make this project happen for the technology to go commercial.”
So the world may look back at 2020 as the year when sustainable technologies were developed.
Subscribe to our free newsletter
For more opinions from SAF Investor, subscribe to our email newsletter.