Why we invested in atmio

It’s not very often that you encounter a startup with the perfect team for a particular problem, product, and market. But meeting Matthias and Marius, the co-founders of atmio, it was immediately clear that I had just found this perfect founder-market fit to solve one of the biggest climate problems on this planet: methane emissions. We are very excited to back atmio in their €5.1m seed round together with Notion Capital and to support them on this journey.

TLDR: atmio is building the operating platform to detect and reduce leaking methane emissions within the energy sector. These leakages occur primarily from natural gas escaping in the oil and gas industry. Being forced to comply with the new methane EU regulation, oil and gas operators need solutions to detect, repair, and report methane leakages, which arise along the entire value chain (from upstream to mid- and downstream, which is a €3bn market in Europe alone).

With a unique combination of hardware and software, atmio is enabling this industry to comply with the new regulation while automating and centrally managing all emission-related activities.

Methane, the overlooked climate polluter next to CO2

Over the last three years, I have met hundreds of early-stage ClimateTech startups, and I am still amazed by the amount of teams solving big climate problems.

However, there is a topic that has been rather overlooked in recent years: Next to CO2 emissions, methane emissions have received far less attention and, consequently, way less funding. Looking at climate impact, methane emissions are actually responsible for about 30% of global warming. This might be surprising, as methane is emitted in smaller volumes than CO2 and has a shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2. However, methane absorbs much more energy while being in the atmosphere and therefore contributes significantly to the global warming of our planet (on a 100-year timescale, methane has 28x and on a 20-year timescale 84x greater global warming impact than CO2).

So, where do methane emissions come from? They come from both natural sources and human activities. Approximately 40% of methane emissions result from natural processes and sources like wetlands (the thawing of permafrost). The other 60% result from human activity, of which the largest sources are agriculture, the decomposition of landfill waste, and the energy sector. The energy sector actually accounts for ~20% of global methane emissions, and pressure on oil and gas operators has increased significantly over the last years.

Why we need atmio now more than ever

So, who are these operators within the oil and gas industry, and where exactly are methane emissions leaking from? In Europe alone, atmio is addressing a €3bn market, but let’s break down the value chain and possible locations of leakages:

1. Upstream assets: exploration and production of oil and gas (wells or offshore platforms),
2. midstream assets: processing, storage and transportation (pipelines for transport, compressor stations, storage facilities, processing plants, LNG terminals, etc.), and
3. downstream assets: distribution and retail (distribution pipelines, reduction stations and plants)

Oil and gas operators in those three categories have reported methane leakages in the past, but often used rough estimates through emission factors and didn’t report on a regular basis.

With the new EU methane regulation coming this summer, oil and gas operators must implement Leakage Detection And Repair (LDAR) programs following strict frequencies. This creates quite a busy schedule for them: they need to carry out inspections every four and eight months (at different precision levels) and they have to repair the detected leakages within a few days. And, to force operators to report precise numbers, the LDAR methods outlined in the regulation require companies to carry out contact measurements for every single leak source in their assets. Hence, current solutions based purely on drone or satellite data won’t do the job.

LDAR is not a new methodology, but the way it is currently done is expensive, the equipment is heavy and outdated, and the processes are inefficient (pen and paper or spreadsheets).

Atmio is solving these inefficiencies with its unique combination of hardware and software:

• Easy-to-use hardware and high-precision sensor technology for the contact measurements of methane emissions at source level
• Mobile app with an intuitive leakage repair ticketing and maintenance system to log new leakages and automate documentation
• Operating system to centrally automate all LDAR operations: continuously monitor leakages and assets, automate the entire maintenance tasks and repair operations, and create one-click reports

Together, these products enable oil and gas operators to stay compliant while gaining efficiencies through the automation of all LDAR operations.

But the vision that Matthias and Marius are pursuing is far more exciting: atmio is building a data integration and automation platform. By building APIs and integrations to satellite, drone and stationary sensor data, they are creating a central data platform for their customers (this data will be crucial to detect high-level leakages from larger pipelines and wells, for example).

Additionally, the data collected by atmio enables predicting these leaks in advance and will be able to generate intelligence on component and equipment data regarding supplier quality and procurement, for example.

The perfect team to solve this problem

When searching for the best teams, we try to find a combination of authenticity, complementarity, and a strong drive to solve this particular (and urgent) problem.

And this is exactly what we have here: Matthias and Marius have previously built their own companies, know how to develop and sell hardware products and bring several years of experience from the industry.

Marius Krüger, COO & Co-Founder, and Matthias Schmittmann, CEO & Co-Founder of atmio

We believe that atmio has a unique positioning and advantage to become the global platform for methane emission reduction: regulatory pressure and legislation, a scalable platform and data integration play, immediate ROI, and a team solving an urgent pain in a market they know inside out.

We are very excited to back atmio in their €5.1m seed round together with Notion Capital and to support them on this journey.

Welcome to the SquareOne squad, atmio!