There is a certain kind of company that does not ask permission from the grid. It just walks into the blast furnace, looks at the off gas everyone else treats like exhaust, and says, that will do.
Utility Global just pulled a $100M first close on its Series D to take that mindset global. Houston born. Industrial by design. No cosplay climate tech. Real steel, real refineries, real biogas. And now real scale.
Congratulations to Parker Meeks, CEO and President of Utility Global, and to founder Matt Dawson, Ph.D., who started this whole thing back in 2018 with a simple but dangerous idea. What if the waste stream is not waste? What if the chemistry already sitting inside industrial off gases and biogases could be persuaded to do more?
Ara Partners and APG Asset Management saw it. Ara has been in the trenches of industrial decarbonization for years, and APG does not exactly throw pension capital at science projects. When capital that patient shows up, it is because the math works and the mission does too.
Utility Global’s eXERO technology, Electroless Coupled Exchange Reduction Oxidation, sounds like something you whisper in a lab. In reality, it is built to live inside the loudest facilities on earth. It converts off gases and biogases into high purity, low carbon hydrogen and a concentrated CO2 stream. No external electricity for the core conversion step. Let that breathe for a second.
While the world debates gigawatts and transmission queues, Utility Global looks at what is already flowing through pipes at steel mills, refineries, petrochemical plants, dairy digesters, wastewater facilities and says, we can work with this. H2Gen systems bolt in, integrate, and produce hydrogen onsite. Not as a science fair project, but as infrastructure.
The $100M is not a trophy. It is fuel. Manufacturing scale up with Kyocera in North Carolina. Stronger project delivery teams. Commercial deployments across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Partnerships already in motion with Kyocera, Symbio North America Corporation, Seongnam Municipal Government of Korea, Maas Energy Works, and ArcelorMittal.
This is what industrial decarbonization looks like when it grows up. Series B was $25M. Series C added $53M. Now Series D opens at $100M. At least $178M disclosed to date, and not a single vanity metric in sight.
The takeaway for founders building in hard tech is simple. Start where the pain is undeniable. Prove it in the harshest environment you can find. Partner with incumbents instead of preaching at them. Then raise growth capital when the platform is ready for deployment, not applause.
Utility Global is not selling hope. It is selling hydrogen pulled from what used to be thrown away, with a CO2 stream that is easier to capture and manage. For steel, refining, chemicals, mobility and upstream energy, that is not a press release. That is leverage.
