Burges Salmon advises Nium on significant ammonia fundraising

By Peter Davison

20 June 2023

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Alex Lloyd

The corporate team from Bristol-based law firm Burges Salmon has advised Harwell, Oxfordshire-based nanotechnology company Nium on its $3 million seed funding, which will enable the company to scale-up its green ammonia technologies.

Leading global agri-food-tech venture capital investor AgFunder led the round and is joined by one of the world’s foremost deeptech investors, DCVC.

The Silicon Valley funds join existing pre-seed investors in the UK and Europe, including Carbon13, in supporting Nium in its next phase of growth.

With this capital raise, Nium is assembling its first ’minions’ - small scale, modular, low energy consumption reactors to produce ammonia.

The minions contain Nium’s patent-pending catalyst, delivering ammonia at a fraction of the price and pollution of traditional ammonia production methods.

Ammonia is critical to humanity but the challenge is in its production. Today, 96 per cent of Ammonia relies on Haber-Bosch, the most polluting chemical industrial process on our planet. It’s this problem that Nium aims to solve.

The low pressure and low temperature conditions of Nium’s system allows for onsite synthesis of ammonia, without emissions, powered by renewable energy.

Nium’s ‘Green Ammonia on Demand’ system offers a cost-effective storage and transport vector for hydrogen players while unlocking access to growing markets for green ammonia as a clean energy carrier, clean fertiliser feedstock and zero carbon fuel.

Burges Salmon’s support provided to Nium is another example of the firm's commitment to supporting high-growth businesses through its BScale platform.

The platform supports such businesses through the sharing of knowledge, provides free of charge legal documentation through the BScale Document Generator, provides high-quality legal advice at a price point that is realistic for early stage businesses, and enables Burges Salmon to build lasting and strategic relationships with the most exciting and innovative technology companies and their investors.

The Burges Salmon team advising Nium comprised corporate team members, partner Alex Lloyd and associate Niall Mackle.

Lewis Jenkins, CEO and co-founder at Nium, said: “This fundraising marks another significant milestone in the Nium journey and we are very grateful to Alex, Niall and the Burges Salmon team for their expert advice and support which has enabled us to continue to grow and will make a big difference to helping us accomplish our mission.”

Alex Lloyd adds: “What Lewis and the team at Nium have developed through nanotechnology is quite extraordinary. This funding will enable Nium to continue in its all-important production of green ammonia technologies and we are very proud to have played our part in helping progress this critical work.”

Nium was founded in 2022 in Cambridge by an entrepreneur, a nanoscientist and a former race car engineer.

The three met during Carbon13’s venture builder for the climate emergency, forming Nium around a common goal of eliminating emissions at scale.

By Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country.

An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts.

Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.