Analyzing Metafuels’ $8 million seed deck for climate technology

Approximately 2% The world’s CO₂ emissions come from pressurized, jet-driven sausages traveling through the air. Earlier this week, he covered Metafuels, a startup that believes it has a solution to reducing aircraft emissions.

I also negotiated with the company’s founders to provide them with pitch materials for their $8 million seed round, allowing me to take a closer look at the materials the company used to raise money.


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This deck slide

Metafuels was kind enough to share its entire deck with TechCrunch+ for this teardown. There are some minor edits, but the majority of this slide deck remains intact.

  1. cover slide
  2. Market size slide
  3. Product/Technology Slide 3
  4. product manufacturing slides
  5. Unit economics (large scale production numbers)
  6. unique selling point
  7. technology roadmap
  8. Business model slides (production version)
  9. Business model slide (license)
  10. Commercialization slide
  11. Market traction slide
  12. team slide
  13. end slide

3 things to love

If you’ve been reading my Pitch Deck Deconstruction article, even just skimming the list of slides above, you’re probably thinking, “Oh, Haje won’t be happy with this, there’s a ton of information missing!” . And yes, you would definitely be right. However, this is an interesting challenge for deep tech startups. If it takes a long time to get your product to market, by definition you’re missing a lot of things.

Is it a bird? Is it an airplane?No, the market size is skyrocketing

It takes special chutzpah to say “all aviation fuel” is your market, but that’s what Metafuels is doing here.

[Slide 2] Aiming for 70% of the aviation fuel market is quite bold. I like that. Image credits: meta fuel

Currently, the market size for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is quite limited. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), around 300 million liters of sustainable aviation fuel will be produced in 2022, doubling to more than 600 million liters this year. This is equivalent to a drop in the ocean of all the fuel used in the world. Although there was a significant drop during the pandemic; Approximately 360 billion liters of fuel were used by commercial airlines in 2019.

In other words, SAF represents approximately 0.17% of the total aviation fuel consumed.

It is therefore no surprise that Metafuels has decided to start forecasting from 2030. That’s when the company really ramps up production, and that’s when the market is likely to take off. A major enforcement feature is the RefuelEU aviation regulation, which sets targets for blending sustainable fuels with petroleum-compatible fuels.

Metafuels tells its story well. It provides a comprehensive picture of a rapidly growing market, in which the company has established itself as a key player.

From this slide, you can learn how to connect the “why now” part of your story to broader macro changes. If you know which way the wind is blowing, you can set up your company to make the most of it.

Let’s get geeky about technology

When building a deep tech company, the tallest pole in the tent will always be the technology itself.what do you have you Did you notice that no one else has been able to identify it?

[Slide 4] Oh yeah, talk about nerdy stuff, baby. Image credits: meta fuel

Metafuels has discovered one exception to the “investors don’t care about your product” rule. Metafuels is a deep technology company, and its failure or success will be based entirely on its ability to deliver on the technology side. Refreshingly, the three-slide set (slides 3-5) explains the process itself, how it works at scale, and how the company can produce fuel at an affordable price. is.

clear roadmap

[Slide 7] I like the clarity of Metafuels’ plan. Image credits: meta fuel

Make it work, then make it work on a small scale, then scale it to production scale. This is a very obvious route, but it’s rarely explained this clearly. Slide 10 details how the company scaled up from his 50 liters per day to 700 million liters per day. This is a tremendous scale operation.

The main takeaway from this part of the deck is to look to the future and how it can be expanded upon. In particular, having a clear understanding of unit economics (i.e., how the financials of your product change as you start increasing volumes) is often a key part of the story.

Here, Metafuels is talking about producing 1-2 liters per day and scaling it up to 700 million. That’s… a tough job. And while the manufacturing processes and factories to produce that much fuel will be more expensive, the cost per liter will be significantly lower. Metafuels tackles that beautifully with this deck.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Metafuels could have improved or done differently, as well as its full pitch deck.

Source: techcrunch.com

Metafuels invests $8 million in sustainable aviation fuel industry

meta fuel aims to change the landscape of sustainable jet fuel and has just received an $8 million suitcase from local ZRH baggage carousel 3. Ah, Zurich. The company is literally turning the skies green with a new fuel called Aerobrew. Sure, it might sound like a French press, or even a boomerang, but the company has a few tricks up its sleeve, and it’s a sustainable aircraft made using renewable electricity. We are creating fuel, or eSAF.

The company is focusing on jet fuel as its main product and has purchased tickets to produce jet fuel that complies with aviation standards. That’s a tall order. Fuels must operate in all kinds of harsh environments. From the freezing cold of the highlands and blues to the sweltering heat of the Houston runways and everything in between.

“From fuel handling on the ground to combustion performance at high altitude, operational safety is paramount,” said Leigh Hackett, co-founder and CCO of Metafuels.

The company aims to produce a viable 100% synthetic jet fuel alternative by 2030, which will seamlessly integrate into existing global renewable energy systems and replace traditional fossil fuel supplies. The company claims to offer energy solutions that operate outside the chain. Competitors in this space include LanzaJet.

The new $8 million investment is a major boost to Metafuels’ ambitious plans. The company sees rising costs of conventional fuels, impending environmental taxes and increased stakeholder pressure for sustainability as factors that will offset ISAF’s initial production costs. This round was led by energy impact partner and contrarian venture.

Metafuels’ eSAF technology uses a process developed to convert green methanol to eSAF, enabling a seamless transition from fossil-based kerosene. Methanol is hydrogen (H2) and provide sustainable carbon dioxide. green H2 Can be produced from water electrolysis and CO using renewable electricity2 In the short term, it can be captured from biological sources such as waste and residues. The long term plan is to start direct air capture, which seems nice and poetic to me. It captures gas, puts it into an airplane, flies it through the air, and puts it back into the air.

It could be an interesting stepping stone before battery- or hydrogen-powered planes really take off — the magic of Metafuels’ Aerobrew is that it can fuel aircraft without modification, the company says.

“Once we get past the building blocks of choosing sustainably sourced carbon and hydrogen, we move on to the relatively simple but breakthrough technology of converting those ingredients into jet fuel.” Metafuels Saurabh Kapoor, CEO and Co-Founder of “And because this is a type of kerosene, we can use the same pipelines, infrastructure, storage, transportation and aircraft.”

Source: techcrunch.com