SAF start-up Aether has secured $34 million in Series A financing from a syndicate of global investors.

AP Ventures led the round, which also includes Chevron Technology Ventures, CDP Venture Capital and Zeon Ventures. Series Seed lead investor Xora Innovation and other existing investors TechEnergy Ventures, Doral Energy-Tech Ventures, Foothill Ventures and JetBlue Ventures also participated.

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With this financing, Aether plans to accelerate the scale-up of Aurora, the company’s proprietary technology to create sustainable fuels for the aviation and ocean shipping industries. The product technology licensed from Aether’s strategic partner, GTI Energy, delivers breakthrough economics via a transformed Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process by combining innovations in chemistry (catalysts), equipment (reactors), and process flows to slash plant investment and operating costs, while simultaneously driving up yield. It is also highly flexible, enabling the conversion of a wide range of abundant waste carbon feedstocks into jet fuel and other liquid hydrocarbons and therefore overcomes the supply constraints faced by many other sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production processes.

In welcoming the new investors, Aether CEO, Conor Madigan, also recognized the existing investors for their enduring support. “This is a group of financial and strategic leaders that see clearly the need to expand the supply of sustainable fuels. However, without dramatically scaling the capacity to produce the fuels, supply will remain seriously constrained, and the transition will be slow, if not impossible. This is precisely the problem we address with a disruptive scalable solution that encompasses novel chemistry, equipment, and process flows to simplify the conversion process, while enabling maximum carbon flexibility. The result: more product at vastly lower CapEx costs than existing approaches.”