Joule Closes $30 Million Funding Round to Advance Renewable Solar Fuel Production

Joule Unlimited, a company advancing a process for the direct microbial conversion of carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons via engineered organisms, powered by solar energy (earlier post), has closed of a $30-million second round of funding. The round includes investments from undisclosed institutional and private sources that joined Flagship Ventures, Joule’s founding venture capital investor.

Joule is also implemented a corporate name transition from Joule Biotechnologies, Inc. to Joule Unlimited, Inc., effective immediately.

The proceeds will help to accelerate Joule’s advancements in a number of areas, including its pilot operations now underway in Leander, Texas, where the production process for its renewable solar fuels, including fungible diesel, will be tested. The funds will also support key developments in genome engineering, bioprocessing and hardware engineering to optimize productivity and generate product samples in quantities that will fully validate Joule’s process beyond the lab.

What Joule has developed is more than just another promising technology. It’s a commercial-ready system with rapid scale-up potential to transform domestic diesel production as soon as 2012. Propelled by this latest funding round, we intend to execute on an aggressive timeline to market by hitting key proof points that will substantiate the quality of our product and the scale and efficiency of our process.

—Bill Sims, president and CEO

Joule has achieved a solar platform that produces hydrocarbon fuels above ground in a direct, single-step, continuous process. Among the co-founders of Joule Biotechnologies is Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics George Church, who also co-founded LS9.