Newlight raises $9m seed after 8,500-mile hydrogen test voyage
A Bay Area startup injects hydrogen into cargo ship diesel engines. It ran the system from Singapore to Ghana before taking investors' money.
Newlight has raised a $9 million seed round to sell a hydrogen injection system that bolts onto the diesel engines of existing cargo ships.
The round closed after the company put its hardware on a working vessel rather than a test bench.
Newlight installed the system on a 650-foot Lomar Shipping bulk carrier and sailed 8,500 nautical miles from Singapore to Ghana. The voyage took a month.
On the company's account, fuel consumption fell 24% and carbon dioxide emissions fell 28% over that trip.
The pitch to shipowners is that nothing structural changes. Newlight says the retrofit takes under two weeks and does not require a dry dock, which is where marine engineering bills usually go to die.
The system monitors the diesel engine and picks moments, down to the millisecond, to inject compressed hydrogen. It reads exhaust temperature, combustion pressure and air intake pressure, adjusting hydrogen flow on every piston stroke.
The engine is then told to draw less diesel, because the hydrogen is doing part of the work.
Co-founder Evyatar Cohen explained it to TechCrunch by comparing it to the nitrous button in a Fast & Furious car, with the logic inverted: the boost is spent on burning less fuel rather than going faster.
Newlight says the retrofit cuts fuel use and emissions by more than 20% and can save some vessels as much as $500,000 a year. Those are company projections, not audited results.
The seed round includes lomarlabs, the venture arm of the same Lomar Shipping whose vessel carried the test rig. BIRD Energy, a joint venture between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Israel Ministry of Energy, also invested, alongside Undeterred Capital, CiRi Ventures and Fusion VC.
Both co-founders previously served in the Israeli Navy. Haran Cohen Hillel is chief executive; the team is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and is described as small.
The company says it has signed agreements to fit the system on 12 vessels across several companies, with wider fleet rollouts planned for next year. No customer names beyond Lomar have been disclosed.
Rivals are attacking the same problem with ammonia or methanol injection. Newlight's argument is that hydrogen demands fewer modifications to the diesel engines already sitting in cargo ships.
Hillel says the company sees uses beyond shipping, including data centres and trains, but intends to stay at sea until it has scale.
The founder's lesson here is the sequencing. Newlight ran a paying customer's ship across two oceans and had a number to show before it asked for a cheque, and its strategic investor supplied the ship. For hardware sold into a conservative industry, one real deployment is worth more than a year of lab data.