Reverion raises $175 million Series B led by Kembara for German fuel-cell factory

Reverion, the Munich fuel-cell developer spun out of the Technical University of Munich in 2022, has raised $175 million in a Series B led by Kembara, a deeptech and climate fund, with most of the proceeds earmarked for a new German megafactory that lifts manufacturing capacity tenfold to 250 MW.

Built on solid oxide fuel cells, its power plants run on biogas, natural gas or hydrogen, converting the fuel into electricity while capturing the CO2 in the stream for re-use or permanent storage—a cycle the company says turns carbon-negative when the plant runs on biogas and the captured biogenic CO2 is stored permanently. The systems also run in reverse, switching from generation to electrolysis to draw surplus grid electricity into hydrogen or methane for storage, then switching back when renewable supply is short, so the same asset earns whether the grid is long or short.

Reverion puts the electrical efficiency of its fuel cells at 74.2%, a figure it calls a world record and nearly double that of conventional generators, though the coverage does not say whether the number has been checked outside the company.

Seven plants are in regular operation at customer sites, and Reverion says demand is arriving from outside Germany, with first international projects scheduled for delivery this year; the announcement names industrial sites and data centers as the customers, the latter part of the load-growth trade that has been absorbing capital across this beat all year.

Kembara led the round, with existing investors Extantia, Energy Impact Partners, UVC Partners, the European Innovation Council Fund, alfa8 and Possible Ventures following on, and Allianz, KfW Capital, Aurum Impact and Carbon Equity joining as new backers; Energy Impact Partners manages $4.9 billion, per ESG's records.

The syndicate pairs early-stage climate venture funds with the European Innovation Council Fund and KfW Capital, a mix that has become familiar in European transition hardware over the past year, while German public money has been moving into adjacent corners of the same problem: Germany, Austria and Luxembourg opened a $2.5 billion e-SAF price-gap scheme on 28 September, with Germany due to supply up to $2.4 billion of it and European Commission state aid approval still outstanding. The open question with vehicles like that one is whether they generate repeatable offtake or a one-off subsidy, and it sits under the Reverion round too.

The megafactory is going up in a country that has put an end date on fossil generation without pricing the path to it, and as this publication has reported, Germany's 2045 exit leaves gas a seven-year runway while the financing of grids, backup power and heat still rests on interim targets with no cost estimate attached. Reverion's reversible design is one answer to that gap: gas-compatible now, biogas and hydrogen later, plus an electrolysis mode that turns cheap surplus power into storable fuel, because a grid built for intermittent renewables needs something that can be switched on, and a gas-compatible fuel cell is cheaper to site than a new hydrogen network.

Form Energy's $750 million Series G, which funds an iron-air battery factory in West Virginia and pushed that company's equity past $2 billion, is the benchmark this beat has used for late-stage transition hardware, and Reverion's Series B is less than a quarter of that for a company whose entire fleet is seven units. Different stages and different technologies, but the same bet: capital committed to manufacturing scale before the order book exists.

The announcement does not carry a figure for how many plants the megafactory is expected to ship, nor a schedule beyond the first international projects due this year, and the 250 MW is factory capacity rather than generating capacity, with seven plants in regular operation as the baseline the tenfold expansion is being financed against. That baseline is what the next two years of Reverion reporting will be measured from.