EcoNomad raises £400,000 for farm-scale anaerobic digester
The Harpenden company sells a shrunken version of a technology normally built for industrial sites. Its target buyers are livestock farms too small to justify one.
EcoNomad Solutions has raised £400,000. The company is based in Harpenden and was founded by Dr Ilan Adler of University College London.
Its product is the BioNomad, a scaled-down anaerobic digestion system. The company holds a patent on it.
Anaerobic digestion breaks down organic matter without oxygen and produces gas that can be burned for energy, plus a residue that can be spread as fertiliser. The plants are usually large, and the capital cost has kept them on big sites.
EcoNomad's pitch is that smaller agricultural holdings can run one too. The company says the system cuts methane emissions from livestock waste and reduces farms' energy and fertiliser bills.
Those are the two costs that have moved most sharply for farmers in recent years, and slurry is a problem a farm has to deal with either way.
The investors behind the £400,000 have not been named. Nor has the company set out how the money will be spent, or how many units are in the ground.
The first customers have not been identified either. For a hardware product sold to farms, that is the number that matters: a digester either runs on a working holding through a winter or it does not.
Founders watching this one should note what a £400,000 round buys in agricultural hardware. It is enough to build and place units with early adopters, and not much more.
The next test is a named farm, a payback period and a price. Until those exist, the case for the BioNomad rests on the company's own account of it.