Arbor Energy just lit up the grid with a $55M Series A that feels more like ignition than investment. Co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Voyager Ventures, with Gigascale Capital and Marathon Petroleum Corp in the mix, this round is pure thrust for a team that swapped rockets for reactors and Mars shots for megawatts. Founded in 2022 by Brad Hartwig (CEO/Co-Founder) and Andres Garcia-Clark (CTO/Co-Founder), Arbor’s story reads like aerospace meets apocalypse recovery. Hartwig built Crew Dragon engines at SpaceX, flew test crafts for Kitty Hawk, then watched California wildfires torch his backyard and decided the real frontier wasn’t the stars, it was survival. Garcia-Clark brought 17 years of turbine mastery from GE Power and SpaceX, turning hot gas paths into power cycles that actually respect physics and the planet.
From that fusion of rocket science and climate urgency came HALCYON, a modular, zero emission turbine that runs like a vegetarian rocket engine. It burns fuel with pure oxygen, spins supercritical carbon dioxide, captures more than 99% of emissions, and leaves nothing but clean power and water. Each 25MW unit can stand alone or stack to more than 1GW, giving data centers, utilities, and heavy industry a new way to chase reliability without wrecking the atmosphere. And yes, it’s built right in El Segundo, using 3D-printed precision parts from local suppliers who don’t wait 3 years for a supply chain miracle.
Arbor’s already moving from prototype to proof. Microsoft inked a multi-year deal for 25K tons of permanent CO₂ removal starting in 2027 while pulling 5MW of clean electricity. Then came Frontier, the climate Avengers funded by Stripe, Google, Meta, Shopify, McKinsey and more, dropping a $41M offtake to lock 116K tons of removal between 2028–2030. Those aren’t press releases; they’re purchase orders that say this tech’s real, repeatable, and ready for scale.
That $55M raise finishes the 1MW ATLAS pilot and powers HALCYON’s commercial rollout. The first full-scale facility in Lake Charles, LA goes live in 2028, starting with 5–10MW and scaling to 100MW by 2030 while scrubbing approximately 2M tons of CO₂ per year. By 2032, Arbor plans to ship more than 100 HALCYON turbines annually, more than 1GW of new carbon-negative capacity every year. In a world where AI data centers are about to triple U.S. electricity use by 2028, that’s not just innovation, it’s insurance.
Arbor Energy isn’t chasing hype; it’s building hardware that runs hotter, cleaner, faster. They’re not just producing power, they’re producing possibility. Because the future doesn’t wait for permission, it runs on clean combustion.
