£2.1m · Pre-Seed · Cleantech · Cambridge, UK
Cambridge-based Neela Biotech has raised £2.1m in pre-seed funding to move its waste-to-fuel process from the lab into a pilot-scale trial at a biogas plant over the next two years. Elbow Beach led the round with £1.5m; Ascension, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Ventures Together and strategic angel investors also participated.
The company uses an AI-guided microbial process to convert food, agricultural and forestry residues into fatty acids. Those molecules can serve as feedstock for the established HEFA pathway for producing sustainable aviation fuel, replacing some of the waste cooking oil and animal fat on which HEFA plants currently depend. The financing will fund scale-up toward the pilot rather than commercial fuel production.
Using biogas plants as the deployment route
Neela calls its process Controlled Microbial Upcycling. Instead of proposing a standalone fuel refinery, it plans to integrate the biology with existing biogas plants. The company says this can reduce new capital requirements, give plant operators another revenue stream and enable more distributed feedstock production. The premise is commercially important: a startup can reach more sites if it adds a process step to installed infrastructure rather than financing each plant from scratch.
That model also sets a clear test for the new capital. A laboratory process has to remain productive when it meets variable waste inputs, larger vessels and the operating conditions of a live biogas facility. The pilot must show not only that the microbes produce suitable fatty acids, but that the output is consistent enough for downstream HEFA conversion and economical for both Neela and the host plant. Until that evidence exists, claims about cost parity and large-scale fuel supply remain targets.
From university research to an industrial pilot
Neela was founded in 2025 by Deepanshu Singh and Friederike Nintzel, who met through University of Cambridge founder programmes. Earlier work won the 2025 Cambridge Zero Climate Challenge, and the company later secured grant support from Innovate UK and the Henry Royce Institute. It is also part of the IAG innovation programme, giving the team access to aviation-industry questions around fuel supply chains, certification and commercial demand.
Those relationships help the company frame the right pilot, but the pre-seed round is still financing technical de-risking. The most useful milestone will be evidence that one host plant can accept real waste streams, operate the microbial process reliably and produce a feedstock that fits the next step in the SAF chain. A repeatable integration could make existing biogas capacity a distribution advantage; a highly customised pilot would point toward a slower and more capital-intensive path.
Sources checked:
Cambridge Enterprise · Elbow Beach · Neela Biotech · University of Cambridge · Tech Funding News · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
