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This is the one hundredth issue of the Green Molecules® Journal. One hundred issues is a milestone worth pausing on, not because of the number itself, but because of how much has changed in the years it took to reach it. When we started writing about the natural gas value chain, the subject was, to put it plainly, unfashionable. Today it sits at the center of the most important conversation in energy. This issue is about that shift: how it happened, what our portfolio has built along the way, and why we remain more convinced than ever that the future of energy expansion runs through Green Molecules®.
The idea for Energy Capital Ventures® began in 2020, when Rick Viton approached Vic Pascucci, Ray O'Connor, and Jeff Yingling with a question that, at the time, sounded almost contrarian. Venture capital had poured billions into electrons: solar, batteries, electrification, the whole green-electron thesis. Almost no one was asking the parallel question about molecules. Who was funding the early-stage innovation that would make natural gas, the fuel that already moves the majority of our energy, cleaner, more efficient, and more resilient? Who was building the front door between the startup ecosystem and an industry that had scale, infrastructure, and capital, but very little exposure to venture-stage technology?
The four of them saw the same gap. Natural gas was treated by much of the venture world as yesterday's fuel, something to be transitioned away from rather than innovated upon. We saw it differently. We believed, and still believe, that the world needs an energy expansion, not merely an energy transition, and that the molecule side of the ledger was both underfunded and strategically indispensable.
A year of conversations followed. Letters of intent were signed in 2020, and Fund I was off and running in 2021. We are proud to be backed by a group of publicly traded natural gas utilities who shared the conviction that the industry's future would be written, in part, by entrepreneurs. We had coined a term for the category we were building: Green Molecules®, our name for the innovation and resilience of the natural gas value chain. At the time, we spent a lot of energy simply explaining what we meant.
It is hard to overstate how different the reception is today.
In 2020, raising a fund dedicated to natural gas innovation meant swimming against the current. The prevailing narrative held that gas was a bridge to be crossed and then dismantled. Talking about gas at a climate-tech event was, frankly, not the popular position. The capital, the headlines, and the enthusiasm were pointed almost entirely at electrification.
The last few years rewrote that story. Natural gas demand and production reached record levels in the United States and globally, and prices firmed as supply and demand tightened. Far from fading, gas proved to be the dependable workhorse that keeps the lights on, particularly as wind and solar penetration rose and grid operators needed reliable capacity to balance intermittency. LNG exports expanded as Europe pivoted away from Russian pipeline gas and Asia kept growing, turning domestically produced gas into a pillar of global energy security.
Then came the demand shock almost no one had modeled in 2019: data centers and artificial intelligence. The digital economy's appetite for reliable, around-the-clock power collided with a grid that could not interconnect new load fast enough, and natural gas became the answer developers reached for. What had been framed as a fuel in managed decline was suddenly the fuel being asked to power the next industrial era. The conversation flipped from whether gas had a future to how quickly the value chain could scale to meet the moment.
That is the backdrop against which Green Molecules® moved from a phrase we had to define to a category the market now takes seriously. The technologies we back, the ones that make gas more sustainable, more efficient, more expansive, and more viable, are no longer nice-to-have experiments. They are becoming must-haves. Renewable natural gas is scaling, low-carbon hydrogen is gaining strong interest and investment, carbon capture is moving from pilots to projects, and legacy pipelines and storage are being reimagined as the infrastructure that carries all of it. The thesis we launched as a contrarian bet in 2019 has become, in 2026, consensus.
We deployed Fund I into nine companies, each attacking a different part of the value chain. Their progress is the clearest evidence that the Green Molecules® thesis was right.
Sapphire Technologies turns wasted pressure into clean power. Its FreeSpin® in-line turboexpander recovers the energy normally lost when high-pressure gas is stepped down at city gates, pipelines, and LNG terminals, generating electricity with no combustion, no added fuel, and no water. In 2025 the company raised an 18 million dollar Series C with strategic investors including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and expanded installations across North America and Asia. Its most compelling growth story is in data centers: in early 2026 Sapphire partnered with Anax Power to co-locate modular compute directly with pipeline pressure-regulating stations. With thousands of suitable sites across the gas network, each deployable in months, Sapphire has turned a sustainability technology into an answer for one of the fastest-growing loads in energy.
Osmoses is rethinking one of the most energy-intensive steps in the entire economy: gas separation. Spun out of MIT and Stanford, the company has built a membrane platform that purifies molecules like hydrogen, biomethane, and CO2 with a fraction of the energy of conventional processes, in a much smaller footprint. We led its 11 million dollar seed round, and the company has since added support from the Department of Energy, ARPA-E, and NSF, along with a state START grant in 2025 to build out its pilot manufacturing line as it moves from lab prototypes to field-scale modules.
Cemvita uses synthetic biology to turn carbon and waste into valuable products, and its real edge is the biomanufacturing platform and the microbial intelligence it has accumulated over years of development. That work has produced FermOil, a renewable oil made from waste feedstocks. This year, they demonstrated a 75,000 liter industrial scale up of their FermOil platform. Recognition has followed the science: in 2025 the company's cofounders were named to the Bioeconomy 500. As its microbes and processes have matured, Cemvita has built an engine for converting low-value carbon streams into high-value molecules, precisely the circular-carbon capability the industry will need at scale.
Furno Materials is reinventing one of the world's dirtiest industrial processes. Cement accounts for roughly 8 percent of global CO2 emissions, and Furno's modular "mini-kiln" produces it using clean gas-based combustion instead of coal, at a fraction of the capital cost of a conventional plant. We led the company's 6.5 million dollar seed round. In 2025 it produced cement at twice the ASTM standard while announcing their partnership with Maschmeyer Concrete Partners.
Highwood Emissions Management builds the software that lets operators measure, manage, and reduce methane with credibility. We led its first external funding, a 3 million dollar seed round, and the company has since become a trusted partner on measurement-informed methane intensity, serving as a technical backbone for major industry initiatives. In 2025 it launched its MILE program, a compliance and emissions management tool aligned with OGMP 2.0 and tailored to natural gas distribution networks, and continued adding SaaS contracts. As emissions scrutiny becomes a commercial gating factor, Highwood sits exactly where the industry needs it.
Actual gives enterprises and utilities a way to plan and track decarbonization in the real world. Its AI-driven capital transformation platform integrates technical, financial, and scientific inputs so organizations can model emissions outcomes and optimize capital decisions in real time, across more than 15 billion dollars of planned sustainable transformations. In 2025 the platform saw rapid adoption across energy, infrastructure, and industrial sectors, with growing demand from both corporates and municipalities looking to operationalize net-zero goals rather than just declare them.
Vertus Energy makes existing biogas infrastructure work harder. Their BRIO
technology allows AD plants to process three times more waste in the same sized tank while delivering biogas with 60% more energy potential. We led the company's 8.75 million dollar seed round, and in 2025 Vertus announced a major partnership with Verdalia, Goldman Sachs' European biomethane platform, alongside field results validating its performance gains.
Eclipse Energy is turning the industry's largest liability into one of its most promising assets. The company uses bioengineered microbes to produce clean hydrogen directly inside depleted oil reservoirs, generating it in situ from existing wells with no new drilling, no electrolysis, and no energy-intensive surface facilities. In 2025 Eclipse completed the world's first field trial of subsurface bio-stimulated hydrogen production, in a legacy oilfield in California's San Joaquin Basin, validating a pathway to some of the lowest-cost low-carbon hydrogen anywhere. By one estimate, California's depleted oilfields alone could yield up to a quarter of a trillion kilograms of clean hydrogen. Late in the year the company announced a partnership with and capital investment from Weatherford to accelerate commercialization, turning yesterday's end-of-life infrastructure into tomorrow's energy supply.
The traction from Fund I let us gauge appetite for a second fund, and the answer was a resounding yes. We have deployed Fund II into four companies, extending the Green Molecules® thesis into carbon management, industrial chemistry, water, and next-generation power.
CarbonQuest brings carbon capture down to a scale the industry has largely ignored. CarbonQuest makes compact, modular, point-source capture for the distributed emitters, boilers, combined-heat-and-power systems, and mid-size industrial and food and beverage facilities, that most technologies overlook. It captures CO2 at the source and purifies it on-site to beverage-grade standards, giving food and beverage producers a resilient, certified supply of Sustainable CO2™ and insulating them from a volatile CO2 market, one of the most economically compelling applications in carbon management. The company has raised 20 million dollars with our participation, alongside Riverbend Energy Group and Aligned Climate Capital, and now has multiple systems operating commercially with more in development.
enaDyne is electrifying chemistry itself. The Leipzig-based company has developed fully-electric, non-thermal plasma catalysis reactors that convert CO2 and process gases into valuable chemicals such as syngas, methanol, and ethylene, while abating notoriously hard-to-treat emissions like CF4 and PFAS. We co-led its 7 million euro seed round with Amadeus APEX in 2025. With modular systems slated for pilot deployment at an industrial site by mid-2026, enaDyne is a bet on a fully electrified, decarbonized path for one of the world's most fossil-dependent industries.
Capture6 solves for carbon and water at the same time. The company's integrated system takes the waste brine that desalination and wastewater plants normally pay to dispose of and turns it into a solvent that mineralizes atmospheric CO2, recovering more than half of that brine as fresh water in the process. We participated in its 27.5 million dollar Series A and project funding round in 2025, capital that is advancing projects in California and Asia, including a partnership with a California water district to eliminate the need for sprawling brine ponds. Capture6 was recently acknowledged as one of the Top GreenTech Companies of 2026 by TIME.
Our fourth Fund II investment is a next-generation fuel cell company that we will be announcing soon. Fuel cells have crossed from pilots into primary power for data centers, and next-generation designs promise to push efficiency and cost further still. We could not be more excited to share more in the near future.
An investment thesis is only as strong as the community around it, and one of the developments we are proudest of since 2020 is the ecosystem that has grown up around Green Molecules®. What began as a handful of partners explaining an unfamiliar idea now convenes hundreds of people each year: utility executives, founders, policymakers, co-investors, and technologists, all working the same set of problems.
Our Green Molecules® dinner at CERAWeek has become a fixture, drawing more than a hundred attendees for candid conversation about the future of gas in a decarbonizing world. Our LP roundtables give the gas utilities who back us a working forum on emerging technologies that are changing the industry.
Our annual general meeting brings LPs, advisors, and founders into the same room to trade progress and pressure-test what comes next. And our team has grown alongside all of it, adding the people and expertise that support our founders well beyond the check. Some of them have been with us nearly from the start, including Vice President Stefano Galiasso, who was instrumental in the firm's early days and continues to help drive its work today.
That convening power is not a side activity. It is the mechanism by which startup innovation meets industrial scale, which was the entire point in 2020.
Back in 2020, natural gas was not a comfortable theme to build a venture fund around. One hundred issues of this journal later, it is the fuel being asked to power data centers, reindustrialization, and the broader energy expansion, and the innovation making it cleaner and more efficient has moved from the margins to the mainstream.
We are not marking this milestone by declaring the work finished. We are marking it because the thesis we launched against the grain has been validated by the market, by our portfolio, and by the sheer scale of the energy challenge ahead. The molecules that move most of the world's energy still need to become more sustainable, more efficient, more expansive, and more viable. That is the work of the next hundred issues.
To our limited partners, our founders, and everyone in the Green Molecules® community: thank you for being part of the first hundred.
