SAN FRANCISCO, CA, August 20, 2014
Siluria Technologies, a pioneer in the commercial production of fuels and chemicals made from clean and abundant natural gas, announced today the initial close of its Series D financing round. The round was led by Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV), the venture investment subsidiary of Saudi Aramco, the world’s leading fully integrated energy and chemical enterprise, and included additional investments by all of the major existing investors in Siluria. The total raise for this initial close of the Series D financing was $30 million.
“We are very pleased to welcome SAEV as a major investor in Siluria, and look forward to exploring opportunities to work together on the strategic front,” said Siluria CEO Ed Dineen. “We are excited to bring additional industry capabilities to our company and our board as we continue to progress towards commercializing our process,” said Siluria Board of Directors Chairman Karl Kurz.
Siluria has developed a catalytic process for transforming natural gas—the most abundant and widely available hydrocarbons on earth—into transportation fuels and commodity chemicals in an efficient, cost-effective, scalable manner using processes that can be seamlessly integrated into existing industry infrastructure. Siluria has created a growing portfolio of process configurations with applications in upstream, midstream gas processing, downstream chemicals production and refining operations.
Recently, Siluria announced a partnership with The Linde Group, a world leading gases and engineering company, to offer an integrated package combining Siluria’s technology with Linde’s separations and recovery systems for licensing to the petrochemical industry at existing ethylene plants or for new world scale ethylene plants.
With this initial Series D financing, Siluria has raised just under $100 million since its inception. Siluria is currently in discussions with additional strategic and financial investors to complete a total Series D financing of approximately $50 million.
About Siluria
Siluria Technologies is pioneering the commercial production of fuels and chemicals made from clean, abundant natural gas. Siluria’s break through Oxidative Coupling of Methane ("OCM") process technology is believed to be the first commercially viable process to directly convert methane to ethylene. Siluria’s second process technology can convert ethylene to liquid fuels such as gasoline, diesel or jet fuel. This enables natural gas to potentially supplement petroleum as the worldwide basis for transportation fuels and commodity chemicals. Siluria’s revolutionary catalyst and process technologies uniquely combine nanomaterials, templating and chemical engineering, to convert natural gas into higher value products using efficient processes that can be seamlessly integrated into existing industry infrastructure.
About Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures
Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures is the corporate venturing subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco), the world’s leading fully integrated energy and petrochemical enterprise. Headquartered in Dhahran with offices in North America and Europe, SAEV’s mission is to invest globally in start-ups and high growth companies with technologies of strategic importance to its parent, Saudi Aramco.