The SAF Podcast

The SAF Podcast: Avioxx - Developing cleantech and the learnings from fintech

• SAF Investor • Season 3 • Episode 31

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On this week's episode of The SAF Podcast Chris Hancock, Avioxx joins Oscar to share their waste-to-fuel technology and their UK project development strategy. 

Chris begins by sharing his journey from fintech entrepreneur to cleantech innovator, explaining some of the parallels between the early days of fintech and today's nascent SAF industry.

We also dive into Avioxx's off-grid approach integrating Fischer-Tropsch reactors with solid oxide fuel cells, enabling the plant to generate its own electricity and potentially achieve an 80% reduction in electricity costs. The result aims to tackle the two hardest cost drivers in SAF—purchased power and hydrogen balance—while building a real circular economy around waste.

Integrating AI and digital infrastructure is a fulcrum of Avioxx's expansion to accelerate design timelines, reduce costs, and mitigate risks. Chris explains how this feeds into their UK focused expansion plans from a small scale demonstrator, to a mid-scale plant producing 5,000 tonnes per year, up to a 32,000 tonne per year facility consuming 300,000 tonnes of waste each year.

We finish by discussing capital raising, the pre-seed investment from Trailfinders and the current ongoing raise for their Series A-B rounds. Chris explains the types of capital they are looking to attract in the balancing of equity and senior debt. 

Check out the full episode to find out more on whatever site you prefer to frequent. 

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the SAF podcast. In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Chris Hancock from Aviox.

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, Oscar. How are you doing? It's great to be here. Thank you so much for the invite, and I'm very much looking forward to having a chat with you about what we're or the exciting activity we've got on uh Aviox at the moment.

SPEAKER_00:

No, we're we're delighted to have you. Thanks so much for sharing your time. I'm conscious that lots of the listeners aren't necessarily UK-based or European based. We've got lots of international listeners. So I'm gonna get you to explain what Aviox is to those that don't know. But before we get there, do you just want to give everyone an idea of your background and how you ended up working in the SAF space?

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. So I am an um environmental engineer uh academically from uh Nottingham University uh quite a while ago now. And I actually went into uh tech and uh software and um built and exited a venture-backed uh business, a fintech company, and spent the last uh decade or so uh building that up until uh the Aviox opportunity came along, where I uh decided to apply my environmental credentials to something that I'm absolutely passionate about, which is uh the planet and uh planet Earth and the uh the climate emergency that we face with uh uh exponentially rising temperatures, if you look at the recent data from NASA. So, really, that's for me is the real driver to move into uh cleantech and out of fintech. I'm still a little bit involved with fintech, and um um, but uh what I can do is bring a different perspective on venture building to perhaps a more traditional uh oil and gas and and environmental sectors. So that's really where I'm I'm looking to apply my skills and and and where I think I can help grow the grow the business.

SPEAKER_00:

Awesome. Um and what would you say are are the differences between working in the fintech space on as a fintech venture versus a clean tech venture? Or are there sort of differences and similarities that you can pick out?

SPEAKER_01:

There are absolute similarities. It's very, very similar. However, it reminds me, clean tech reminds me of where fintech was in uh you know post-uh global financial crisis between sort of 2008 and 2012, when there was a real emergency on for uh stabilizing global capitalism and making sure that there was uh you know a supply of of capital for for businesses and and and people. Uh and and really it was fintech was very nascent in 2012 when I started my first fintech company. And uh with a venture-backed business, it's very dynamic and fast moving and agile. And um, and especially in those early days of fintech, I can see that cleantech and especially synthetic fuel production and sustainable fuel uh uh production is uh is in those early days, in the nascent years. I know that it's been around for a long time, but really it's started to accelerate over the past three years, three, four years maximum. And it's sort of it's it's gone through those very early stages and is now starting to mature into a sector, an ecosystem, collaboration between uh you know the big uh oil and gas giants who are you know incredibly important and who are our clients, but the and developing an ecosystem where it goes hand in hand to support the industry with innovation and development and progression, which is where the startups and the early stage businesses come in. And it it reminds me, you know, back in fintech, it was about small fintech companies uh supporting the the big uh global institutional banks to help them to develop and and build new products, and it's very similar. Um, so I'm really enjoying it and sort of bringing that experience and that uh those insights and that um the the the the process and the methodology to developing ventures in the clean tech space is very exciting.

SPEAKER_00:

So, do you want to give everyone an understanding of what Aviox's proposition is, what the you know, what the feedstock, the technology pathway you're looking at developing, and you know, the market you're looking to enter into.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so we I I have a very simple way of of putting this is that we're focused on developing a higher quality product at a lower price to fossil derived uh kerosene. Uh, we've demonstrated that at our pilot facility, which is in Cheshire, and also theoretically, using advanced modeling tools like Aspen Tech, we can clearly demonstrate that the patented process and the methodology, the way that we're producing the fuel allows us to meet or aim to meet at scale price parity with fossils. So for me, this is a massive, massive opportunity to uh significantly change the fuel supply uh around around the world and to make it um uh high quality, sustainable, and um and within a circular economy. So that's the the the top line of where we are. A little bit in the detail, the way that we do that is by using more traditional um systems such as the Fischer trop reactor, which has been around for a hundred years and gasification, which has been around for for even longer, uh, but actually integrating an electrochemical aspect to it. So we introduce what's called a solid oxide fuel cell. Now, this is new, relative, well, it's been around for a while, but it's it's it's new in from a commercial sense. So it's commercially proven technology. Uh, but what it does is it allows us to generate electricity within the process. So uh the as as uh people who operate and work in SAF will know that with most pathways, there are vast amounts of energy that needs to come from somewhere to go into the fuel. And most processes rely on purchasing that uh that electricity from the grid. And that's why SAF currently is so expensive because all that electricity needs to be paid for in the UK at high prices. But actually, if you can develop a system where you generate the electricity within the process, there's no need to have to purchase that external electricity. So that's really what's unique, and we can only do that now that this new technology is proven and available. So that's really the the differentiator here.

SPEAKER_00:

And what what are the degrees of saving that you get from self-generating this electricity? Because you mentioned that a lot of people, the challenge is bringing in outside energy and that's driving the cost done. But what degrees of savings are we talking about?

SPEAKER_01:

By far the uh most expensive component with most pathways. Uh, the other um beauty of what we do at Aviox is by using waste as a feedstock, we actually generate uh a revenue from processing that feedstock as well. So there's a secondary revenue stream. We're solving a second problem here, which is about waste disposal, which is a horrific problem globally. Um so that's a secondary uh revenue stream. And based on our calculations, you know, some might say, okay, well, we need to, there's a higher capital expenditure for the plants because we need more reactors. Yeah, that's true. But also, if you need elect if you need to purchase electricity, someone's still got to build and pay for the power plants uh that need to be able to provide that electricity, arguably. So uh what we've done is by taking into account the additional capex cost of the solid oxide fuel cells for a commercially sized plant, it's a dramatic potential 80% reduction in the electricity cost, is what we're looking at.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow, that's a huge, huge and presumably that means there's a significant OPEX saving as well, consistently for the operation of the plant as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely, yeah. And you, you know, I mean for some people uh you know it sort of sounds ridiculous, but no, it's not. And we've we've been working on this for three years now. We have a pilot facility in Cheshire that we are going to be hosting uh people to come and visit. Um, we've got some really exciting, well-known companies that are coming to see us uh very soon, which is very exciting. Um, but also we work with some of the most respected engineering companies around the world. So NIRIS have been appointed as our uh engineering and construction partner. They are possibly the world's leading sustainable infrastructure engineering and construction um company based out of Copenhagen. And we all know that the Danes are renowned for their ability to uh to build sustainable infrastructure. And then also uh people like Holtberg Chemistry and Engineering based in Sweden. Uh Professor Christian Holtberg has been very supportive and uh does a lot of external audit and validation of the processes and the systems. So we're absolutely confident and uh that that this can be delivered. Uh, there are undoubtedly going to be challenges along the way, and risks need to be de-risked and mitigated. But I think there's a bigger philosophy here that it's about innovation. We don't just accept that SAF is going to be between three to five thousand pounds per ton. We innovate and we develop and we've solved the problem, which is the climate emergency, energy security, and uh the circular economy and the waste management issue. And we do all that in in one fell swoop.

SPEAKER_00:

One of the interesting aspects that you guys are sort of pioneering in, and it's I suppose it crosses over slightly to the sort of your fintech previous days is the digital infrastructure that you're using alongside to help model and understand the process before you you get to the construction phase to help you sort of I suppose pitch the idea and how how the technology is going to work, but also understand how it behaves in with different metrics. Do you want to explain to everyone sort of what that is, how you do it, how it works, and the benefit that it brings during this the phase you're at right now?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. So having um two decades worth of experience in software and fintech and uh and so on, we are a digital first business uh that brings uh significant benefits from a design um and implementation and operational and um measurement perspective. Uh we're working with several tech companies. Aviva are um a well uh established and well-renowned company based out of Cambridge that provide a lot of control systems for refinery development and design build and management. Uh and then there's the open AI and AI component of what we do. Uh there are uh two genuine use cases where we're using OpenAI. The first is at the Runcorn Cheshire facility, the uh the the tech system in the lab and the physical infrastructure and reactors that are in the lab are designed and built with uh machine learning uh and AI at the core. And that allows us to really understand to a uh a level of detail that has never been achievable, really, uh, in terms of how chemical reactions occur across different reactors. So from that, and we can do it very quickly. So obviously, there have been expertise around for a long time to understand how reactors are modeled and so on. But I think the key point is that we can do it very quickly and very cheaply uh in terms of analysing that data, uh, looking for anomalies, optimizing the uh the conditions that, for example, a fissure trop reactor needs to needs to behave at with a specific catalyst. So it's really understanding data gathering and interpretation of that data is the primary use case that we're that we're using at the moment, and that's in partnership with Aviva, whose systems allow us to uh to gather the data from the reactors. And then I think the the second main use case is actually with the uh the engineering design uh and and and build of the of the plant, we're able to um to use AI to um dramatically accelerate and operate in a hyper-efficient way when it comes to uh design, um engineering, detailed engineering design of a of a commercial refinery, but also in a in a way that is de-risked from human error. Now that's I'm not necessarily saying that it's zero risk. Obviously, when we develop first-of-a-kind systems, there's always risk, but having that additional tool of of AI really allows us to help mitigate and manage and reduce that risk, but also dramatically accelerate the delivery timelines and efficiency of the design and build.

SPEAKER_00:

I think this is the first time we've had a conversation on this podcast around this notion of digital infrastructure and the use of AI and understanding processes and using software, which I've the amount of producers we've had it, they might be using it, but it hasn't come up. Do you think this is potentially an avenue that isn't being explored enough by new technology developers to help expediate, manage costs, mitigate risks, and help develop projects potentially at a faster rate than what we're seeing now?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh well, I know that uh a lot of institutions genuinely recognize the power of AI, but bigger institutions, unlike an early stage company like Aviox, uh naturally take longer to transition their operating model. I'm confident that uh that that larger institutions and engineering design companies are um you know I are using AI. Um but I think as a as a small agile team, we can implement it um quickly and you know we can build it at the core of the business rather than having to transition a 125-year-old operating model to using AI, we go tech first and digital first and AI first. Uh, and that's that's really where the benefits are. But I think everybody recognises the benefits, but it's but it's about changing these the big the big organizations changing to to do it in a way that's de-risked for them, um, properly considered, etc. etc. Whereas we can uh de-risk it and properly consider it in a much more agile way.

SPEAKER_00:

What about the what about the investor sort of side of things? When you sort of speak to investors and you say, look, we've done all this software modeling, are they on board with that? Do they understand it? Do they require a little bit of convincing to go sort of understand what it's actually telling you and sort of almost for them to believe the the data that you're you're gathering? Because it is a bit of a slightly new water for them potentially in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and you know, the the the AI uh is just one um pillar of of what we're of what we're of what we have. We also have very, very experienced, well-seasoned, some of the best chemical engineers, in my opinion, uh, in the country, if not further afield, you know, two PhD Cambridge uh qualified uh chemical engineers who uh who apply more traditional methods to chemical engineering. So the AI is validated or is validating more traditional methods of of chemical engineering and and process engineering and uh refinery uh design and build. Uh so you're absolutely right. There's it's not the end the the be-all and end all, and all work needs to be peer-reviewed internally, whether it's a seasoned chemical engineer that's developed a novel process, uh that you know it all all deliverables and ideas need to be reviewed um you know by other teammates, and the AI is a great system to to you uh we treat it as another teammate in a way that gives us another perspective and another opinion, but we don't we don't take it as red. Anything that any um any team uh produces needs to be validated and checked from a quality assurance perspective. So having that quality assurance layer within the um within our delivery methodologies is absolutely key.

SPEAKER_00:

What what hallucinates more, the the chemical engineers or the AI? Good question. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01:

We've got we've trained the AI well, we've been training it for about uh for about um uh about two years now, so it's uh it it but we're good at spotting a hallucination. Um uh you're talking about the AI or the engineers now?

SPEAKER_00:

The the AI, the AI, yeah. So moving on, do you you've got big plans for a lot of projects, and all of them are seem to be centered on the UK. Do you want to just explain the the thinking behind that strategy? Because a lot of other producers they look at a first project in one country and then often look internationally, whereas you're very much UK focused in the expansion strategy.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think for us, we're a uh UK business, we're UK founders, and with our founding investors are a British company. Um, so we are focused on the UK. We recognize that there's a uh a really critical need and opportunity for self-sufficient energy security within the UK. And synthetic crude is a key component to that, the government recognized that. And um at the moment, we've got one plant which is operating in the northeast of the UK. So uh I see it as a huge opportunity and a risk, and it's something that we're deeply passionate about supporting and and you're playing our role in in getting it delivered. Um, you know, we're we're we're we're we're from the uh the the three founders are from the north um west of the UK, um so the Mersey estuary, and as a lot of people may or may not know, that's a uh very historical region for chemical engineering. Um the Stanlow Refinery is there, which is the second largest refinery in the UK, but a local industry in Cheshire on the south side of the Mersey that's been around for um you know a hundred years really. uh with the shell having a a big presence there. So it's uh and and there's a lot of fascinating history. In uh the Second World War the chemical engineers uh up in um uh at the refinery up there were tasked with developing a high quality fuel so that the Spitfires were able to give that extra punch to the Luffwaffers back in in the in in in the Battle of Britain so it's really within our DNA that that um region is um is supported and modernized and um and developing synthetic crude up there is uh is a key first step. So just going back to our scale up plan the the the way that we've delivered this is that we've designed three uh different uh refineries based on the novel and patented Aviox process for the production of off-grid uh synthetic crude production the first is a uh a small modular plant uh which will produce a small amount of fuel so just 600 tons per year of fuel about two tons a day and um uh and that's really for demonstrating the uh the production of the fuel at industrial scale but very small industrial scale and there's a second there's a secondary um uh proposition with that uh and that's that the uh the the the the the plant is a mobile and modular plant it's about the size of a uh a football pitch and the idea is that if you are for example an island in the Caribbean and you need uh fuel production you don't have to ship in the uh the the the the crude oil you can actually manufacture the crude yourself from waste that the island itself may be producing or you can put the plants these small plants into uh areas like a you know a landfill site theoretically where you can actually produce the uh you process the waste and and produce the high value product so that's the first plant that uh we're designing we're building we'd like to build the first one um on uh on an airport which I think would be very interesting and a great demonstration of how the circular economy can genuinely work. The second plant is our medium sized plant and that's a 5,000 tons per year of SAF but also approximately uh 8,000 tons per year of e-diesel and e-gasoline and that is a plant that's about um 20 acres of on 20 acres of land and it will process about 5000 tons of waste and again operate completely off grid uh so no external energy supply required um there is however a carbon capture um requirement with that plant to make sure that 90% of the carbon that is the CO2 that's produced within the process is um is captured and ideally disposed of that's why again the Northwest is a really important region because of the high net infrastructure so HiNet comes online um I think in about uh between 2028 and 2030 and HiNet is a new system that is actually um going to take the CO2 from um factories and and and uh refineries and plants that are built uh within the Northwest and actually dispose of it uh beneath the the RSC which is a critical component and a really important piece of infrastructure for the larger plants and then we've got our 32000 tonne per year plant and this is our commercial scale plant it also produces e-gasoline and e-diesel it will consume uh around uh 300 000 tons of waste per year and uh it will uh it will again operate uh independently and without any external need for uh for hydrogen or electricity now we've decided this scale up plan because we feel that uh from observing the industry that a lot of people uh sort of try to go from the the sort of the uh the the design philosophy and design concept and the basis of design all the way through to a very large half billion pound plant. So again coming from a an agile tech background we think that having a step-by-step process allows us to gather the learnings from each step but then also uh feed that into the next phase of the of the design and de-risk it for investors crucially uh you know this is a new industry it's new technology and investors are naturally going to be cautious so by doing it step by step it means that we can uh really learn from those uh from that those developments and um and and hopefully get to the destination in a lower risk way and hopefully in a quicker way the famous sort of example of a an ex a jump that's potentially was unrealistic was the the Fulcrum Bioenergy their project was deemed to have run into technological challenges because they made a an excessive jump to their commercial well I think there's there's that and but I'm hugely respectful of the uh the the the leadership team at Fulcrum and I think that the learnings um that they uh that that they have are very valuable they have they have progressed the industry significantly uh they put waste to fuel uh on the map so yeah I think there's a lot of a lot of good things that have that have come out of it and yes there was uh sadly a loss for uh for investors um but I I still see that the upside from an industry perspective is absolutely enormous you know it's a currently a about a$300 billion uh dollar a year business that is set to double over the next decade you know 80% of people on the planet haven't been on a plane yet so this is a a huge market and I think the learnings from Fulcrum are essential and we can talk about it technically as well because it's it's really key to the Aviox system um that uh the the the and you know this is this is just our opinion based on our external analysis of um of a uh of a pathway uh a simplified but established pathway which is gasification through to fissure trot and to explain this really simply with that pathway uh there is simply not enough hydrogen within the synthesis gas that is generated from uh the gasifier so because you don't have the the the the golden two to one ratio of hydrogen to carbon monoxide when that and when that syngas enters the fissure trot reactor you either get very low yields or ineff you know ineffective yields um or you need to purchase hydrogen or electricity to make hydrogen from the grid which makes the fuel very expensive so what we do is the get the I think that the the ratios are about between 0.5 to 0.8 to one. So you it's there's about a 65% deficiency in hydrogen from syngas uh which is which is uh waste derived syngas produced in a gasifier so what we do is we take 50% of that syngas and that's what powers the solid oxide fuel cells to generate the electricity needed to create the additional hydrogen so uh that's the main insight from the more traditional uh you know gasification to fissure trop and that's why we've uh presented this new way of doing it which we're very confident um is the answer fascinating um the I want to go back to a scale up strategy what's the timeline for each of those those projects when are you sort of planning for them to to come online yeah so the smaller mobile modular plants uh we're in a position to ideally start construction of that imminently we've uh we've got the partners in place uh some of the most talented uh engineering companies uh in the world that we've carefully selected and and partnered with uh who will be focused on providing you know their components to the system uh so we're we're looking to start that very soon we have the option of developing that at the current site in Cheshire and there is space there to to build that and also pre-existing infrastructure and so and those that that site has the required permissions etc um the the the medium sized plant uh the 5010p plant we would like to start uh development in uh 2027 ideally um and we estimate that the development timeline for that will be uh two years and then by 2030 is when we want to have completed the development of the commercial scale plant and that's in line with the uh UK SAF mandate uh of uh uh a 10% SAF requirement so let's just take a step back here the real driver apart from the climate emergency is the uh the SAF mandate that has been put in place and um uh and that's really what creates a you know a significant market uh uh uh in the UK and across Europe uh by 2030. So that's really what what where we're aiming for.

SPEAKER_00:

And of course 2030 is when the the heifer cap starts to kick in in the UK as well which is the unique bit of bit of the mandate. So alternate forms of SAF like saffron waste using fissure drops or you know ESAF or other biomass pathways become all the more valuable because that's when the heifer pathway becomes capped and eventually starts to trickle down as well. Yes exactly so I want to change tack and go look at the sort of the investment side and of Aviok. So last year I believe you received pre-seed investment from trailfinders is that right was it last year?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah it was pre-series so the the the business has been going for three years um we uh last year we did receive uh pre-series A not pre-seed we did a seed round uh a couple of years ago um so um trailfinders are a uh fantastic strategic investor they're one of the largest if not the largest independent travel companies um private travel companies in the UK um it's got a great leadership forward thinking leadership team there and uh the environmental and the sustainable um sustainable travel aspects of what they offer is something that they recognize um having um you know uh having to sell a lot of flights to British travelers so they're a great investor and they're strategic because they have uh pre-existing relationships with all the airlines around the world uh they've been uh uh very um uh helpful with helping facilitate introductions to some of the largest airlines uh around the world so that we have been able to progress our off-take agreements uh for the fuel uh so uh we're very lucky to have that um you know that corporate investor on board uh so going forwards we're uh we we're in the process of raising a uh a a series a round uh that is a 10 million pound 13 million uh US dollars and that is to develop the first um mobile and modular plant uh for uh industrial demonstration purposes now what we're likely to do is couple that with a further 90 million so the series A B round is a hundred million and that will take us all the way through to construction of the large demonstration plant. Now the 100 million is a mix of debt and equity based on achieving uh specified uh milestones and investment gates uh so that's really where we are and then once we've delivered the uh the the um the the large demonstration plant which I should add is um is uh um delivering fuel at uh we hope and we're confident at near fossil fuel parity price is commercially viable so this is a big opportunity for an investor to come along and support the development of one of the first uh plants of its kind um we have obviously existing and uh other investors who are very interested um in taking part um in this uh incredibly exciting innovative uh journey uh and what it does is the Series C then allows us to uh to construct the half billion pound a uh plant which is a 32,000 uh ton pie refinery and uh that will operate on a pure sort of project finance basis and I think what's important as well is that uh the these rounds are a combination of both debt and equity there are further things to that are coming into place next year from an investor perspective uh such as the revenue certainty mechanism uh which again de-risks it from from from an investor perspective um so uh investors that do come in early uh benefit from the opportunity to access the equity component of the round but also uh institutional um you know senior debt funders are also interested in taking part in the in in in the investment so it's very very exciting and we've got lots of people who we're speaking to for us it's about working with the right partners who we can ensure that this gets delivered um on time and on budget is the is the debt portion conditional on getting a certain amount of equity investment or a certain sort of type of debt equity investors sort of involved you mentioned that there's sort of conditions on that or are they sort of coming in together and not necessarily overly concerned about who comes in before how can you just explain yeah so well we've obviously got trailfines who are a serious you know billion revenue a year business uh who we're already uh partnered with um but yeah uh what will make sense is that there's going to be a lead involved who's gonna um you know help pull it all together um you know multiple multiple investors and um the equity component obviously from a founder's perspective and an existing shareholders perspective the less the less dilution the better so the more debt the better um so the pricing of the round and the valuation of the business is is key um we have a the the financial models are uh uh very clear on the percentage split between debt and equity um and are based on justifiable valuations that are tied to um to revenue uh to revenue multipliers uh so i if there are investors around there uh around there or out there then you know we who are serious and interested in um in learning more then we can obviously share what the equity roadmap looks like what dilution looks like but it's very attractive um for um for for a equity investor to come in at this stage uh the ambition is not to just build one first of a kind plant the the uh the mission and the objective here is to develop a global standard for off-grid uh synthetic crude synthetic and sustainable fuel production and as I said before that is a huge huge market and um we're at a relatively early stage but I know that this has been de-risked significantly from you know one two three years ago when we first started uh so you know I'd be happy to share you know a one pager or a pitch deck um you know with uh credible investors who are suitable and who are who are interested in in in being part of a you know fast-paced um SAF scale up you mentioned that trailfinders are very much strategic in their nature and in the the investment they've made are you considering strategic investors in sort of looking at leading the the series A the A B the equity portion of of that round or is it not necessarily a need for strategic because you've got strategic I think the trailfinder I think don't mind so my philosophy uh having been through the the the the scale up process uh previously is that the more involvement genuinely the more involvement that uh an investor can can provide uh through network through brand through credibility through resource the better uh you know so the the so so when we say strategic what I mean is that we're looking for smart money and we're looking for money that the the that and capital that can that can also help with this massive task. So we recognize that but we also recognize that if investors want to be hands off then that's tot that's completely fine as well. And you know for example we um are speaking with a hugely respected um climate tech VC uh based in um uh San Francisco uh who I'm sure a lot of people will have heard of um that's headed up by somebody that's that's highly respected and it makes not sure saying climate tech based in San Francisco headed up by someone respected narrows it down that much quite a lot of them so so uh yeah so what so so we're having uh really you know good conversations with with those guys and um uh you know a lead investor like that for the A B round I think would be absolutely ideal uh but then also not just um you know we we're also well and deeply engaged with um one or two global banks who obviously have funds to allocate within this sector and uh it also makes sense for a instant you know an institutional level senior debt lender to be to be part of the mix as well sure uh

SPEAKER_00:

Last thing before we finish, I want to touch on the public and the governmental relationship, the implementation of the mandate and the ongoing work around the revenue certainty mechanism and help build an environment where a producer can flourish in the UK and how significant that has been.

SPEAKER_01:

We have been working with the Department of Transport on a separate program, which is about the quality and the testing of the fuel that we're producing. We don't actually receive any funds directly from the government. The funds go to the external labs that are testing the uh the fuel. So our collaboration with government is more around compliance and um working with the SAF Clearing House, who um who are affiliated with the with the Department of Transport and testing the fuel that we're producing to make sure that it's to the ASTM standards. Um because we recognize that we are one of the only producers in the UK currently. Yes, it is low low volume. Uh, however, uh the Department of Transport have been very um helpful and supportive uh along with the SAF Clearinghouse in testing the fuel and also the compliance side of things, because I could say here, oh yes, we're making fuel, etc. etc. What the government and the SAF Clearing House do is that they validate that from a compliance perspective. So that's really where we are receiving a little bit of government support, not directly from the government. Um so uh so yeah, I mean the and and and and and actually the broader regulatory infrastructure that's in place is absolutely critical. And uh the government, I don't think you know, really need you know the what's more important is the uh things like the uh the SAF mandate, um things like the revenue certainty mechanism. So policy is more important than than taxpayer funds from our perspective. Sure.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, totally get that. That's that's actually really interesting because you do get a dichotomy. There is a bit of a split in terms of producers that go, we need more government support financially, and some that say policy is doing enough, and the market and the private markets in terms of investment will will do the rest. You just need to set the policy in the right right direction, and you're definitely on on that side of the argument as opposed to the the former.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely, because you know, I think that you you know, from a philosophical perspective, the the industry needs to stand on its own feet, and um, and it is a genuine commercial opportunity, especially when we can demonstrate that the the fuel can be the same price as fossil. It's a genuine market. Um, so you know, the the SAF mandate, if that's 10% of the UK's and Europe's fuel demand, that's a lot of capital, billions. Uh, and that's really where the the the the value is in terms of government and policy, and also regulation, making sure that the fuel and the feed stock uh that we're consuming is uh compliant and the the the the feedstock and the ISCC and um all that sort of stuff, the carbon uh the carbon uh credit trading system. I mean, that's a completely different conversation as well, but it's also important from a policy perspective to get right.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep. Chris, thanks so much. That was uh an excellent deep dive into what everything that Eviox has got going on. And if there are any credible investors that want to reach out, I'm sure Chris would be very willing to have a conversation. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Oscar. It's been uh really uh great to speak to you. Thank you so much for the opportunity.