Cleantech startup Vema Hydrogen announced that it has raised $13 million in a Seed funding round, with proceeds aimed at supporting its efforts to produce low-cost carbon-free hydrogen.

Hydrogen is viewed as one of the key building blocks of the transition to a cleaner energy future, particularly for sectors with difficult to abate emissions, in which renewable energy solutions such as wind or solar are less practical. Around 90 million metric tons of hydrogen are produced annually, although the vast majority is extracted using fossil fuels, which create pollutants and GHG emissions.

The development of clean hydrogen capacity, however, such as green hydrogen, which uses renewable energy to power the process to extract hydrogen from other materials, will require massive investments in areas including infrastructure, electrolysis, and transport. Low carbon hydrogen production is also too expensive to be competitive, at around $5/kg for most current production methods. Alternatively, “white hydrogen,” produced by drilling for hydrogen that has naturally accumulated in underground reservoirs, faces challenges including high energy use, exploration risk, high transport costs, and low hydrogen concentration.

Vema was established in 2024 at the Paris-based Marble Climate Tech Venture Studio by Florian Osselin and Pierre Levin to develop a method to extract hydrogen at scale from geological resources, in order to produce a long-term affordable, and carbon-free hydrogen source through the acceleration of naturally occurring chemical reactions in the subsurface.

The company’s Stimulated Geologic Hydrogen process produces hydrogen by injecting water and a catalyst into iron-containing rock formations, leveraging naturally occurring geochemical reactions, stimulating the chemical reactions to produce hydrogen in a controlled and scalable way, rather than waiting for the hydrogen to be produced naturally.

According to Vema, the technology can produce hydrogen at a cost below $1 per kg, and can enable long-term production, with enough hydrogen in the ground for thousands of years of production, even if it were to replace all fossil resources.

Vema CEO Pierre Levin said:

“The energy transition and emerging uses of hydrogen have spurred demand for clean hydrogen. However, existing decarbonized hydrogen production methods simply don’t work—they are too costly and energy-intensive. Vema is here to change that. It’s time to unlock a new era of scalable, low-carbon hydrogen.”

The round was co-led by Extantia Capital and Propeller, with additional participation from Zero Carbon Capital, Pace Ventures, and returning investor The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.

Yair Reem, a partner at Extantia Capital, said:

“The way that we see it, if white hydrogen is like digging for gold, Vema’s approach is like alchemy. They don’t rely on exploration luck but rather create their own luck and will almost always strike ‘white gold.’ It’s a game-changer for what is poised to be the most important discovery in energy in our lifetime.”