$2m · Seed · Energy · Bray, Ireland
Bray-based Nernst Electric, which develops on-site oxygen generators for fish farms and heavy industry, has raised $2m in seed funding from Hatch Blue’s Blue Revolution Fund. Hatch Blue said the capital will fund a demonstration unit in a commercial farming environment, followed by customer trials if validation is successful.
The demonstration has to prove operating economics, not only oxygen purity
Fish farms need a continuous oxygen supply to maintain stock health and growth, but remote coastal sites can face high transport costs and dependence on deliveries of liquid oxygen. The alternative is to generate oxygen on site with pressure- or vacuum-swing adsorption equipment. Nernst is developing a different route: ceramic oxygen-transport membranes that separate oxygen directly from ambient air.
The company says its units can produce oxygen at more than 99% purity, use less than 200 kWh per tonne of oxygen and operate without moving parts. Those are company claims that still need field validation, but they define the commercial test for the seed round. A farm will care whether the equipment can deliver reliable oxygen through changing demand while reducing energy use, maintenance and exposure to tanker deliveries.
That makes the planned demonstration more than a technical milestone. It needs to establish performance under real farm conditions and generate the operating data required for customers to compare total cost, reliability and installation risk with existing supply options. If Nernst can turn that evidence into a standardised unit and a repeatable deployment process, commercial trials can become a route to orders rather than a succession of bespoke engineering projects.
Aquaculture is the first proving ground for a broader industrial platform
Nernst first entered Hatch Blue’s portfolio through its accelerator fund in 2025. The investor says the team progressed from a manufacturing concept to a working system ready for its first aquaculture deployment. Nernst’s own project page says its first operational pilot-scale unit is being built and deployed, so the current milestone remains validation rather than established commercial rollout.
The company also points to water treatment, mining, metallurgy and steel as longer-term markets that use large volumes of oxygen. Those sectors could expand the addressable market, but they will impose different flow, uptime and integration requirements. The near-term value of the aquaculture demonstration is therefore specificity: it gives Nernst one customer environment in which to prove that its membrane technology can move from laboratory performance to dependable on-site infrastructure before it raises a larger round for wider deployment.
