Ammonia. A word most folks still associate with cleaning products or high school chemistry labs, not 300 kW trucks or tugboats that don’t belch black smoke into the ocean breeze. But Amogy Inc. saw it differently. Where others saw a smelly molecule, they saw energy density, infrastructure maturity, and a path to burn the carbon without burning the planet.
Founded in late 2020 by a crew of MIT PhDs who apparently didn’t get the memo that clean energy had to be incremental and polite, Amogy’s been coming for the hard-to-abate sectors with the force of a freight train, fueled by ammonia. CEO Seonghoon Woo, PhD, and COO Young Suk Jo, PhD, teamed up with fellow co-founders Jongwon Choi, PhD, and Hyunho Kim, PhD, to crack the code, literally, with a proprietary ammonia “cracker” that converts NH₃ into hydrogen and nitrogen. From there, it’s clean energy into fuel cells or hydrogen engines, minus the emissions and minus the hand-wringing.
Since 2021, the Amogy team has flexed a timeline of world-firsts that reads more like sci-fi than climate tech: a 5 kW drone, a 100 kW tractor, a 300 kW semi-truck, and, most recently, a full 1 MW tugboat called NH₃ Kraken, because subtlety is for startups that aren’t trying to decarbonize maritime shipping. The company isn’t just showing off, this is strategic proof-of-execution. And investors are clearly reading the fine print.
On July 15, Amogy secured another $23 million in equity financing, led by Korea Development Bank (KDB) and KDB Silicon Valley LLC, with returning support from BonAngels Venture Partners, Pathway Investment, and JB Investment. That brings Amogy’s total funding to just shy of $300 million, with names like Temasek, SK Innovation, Aramco Ventures, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, and Mitsubishi Corp. already on the cap table. Post-money valuation? $700 million. That’s not hype, that’s heat.
And let’s be clear: this isn’t some deep-tech vanity project destined for a whitepaper graveyard. The use case is here. Distributed stationary power in South Korea (hello, 40 MW plant in Pohang by 2029). Maritime retrofit kits shipping out globally. Plug-and-play modular units that take ammonia in and spit hydrogen out, no NOₓ, no emissions, no excuses.
CTO Greg Johnson, PhD, and CSO Maciek Lukawski, PhD, are steering the next-gen R&D while VP of Business Development Stone Zhang, EMBA, works the strategic levers. With offices in Brooklyn, Houston, Oslo, Singapore, and Japan, this isn’t a startup waiting for the green wave, they are the wave.
There’s a lesson here for founders and operators chasing the climate dragon: scalability doesn’t just come from vision, it comes from proof. From showing you can go from lab-scale to ship-scale without missing a beat. From building systems that don’t just work, but win. Amogy isn’t pitching a concept. They’re commercializing momentum.
