Freya Burton, Chief Sustainability Officer and Head of Europe at LanzaTech, discusses carbon recycling, sustainable aviation fuel, and the 20-year journey from a four-person startup to a public company on Episode 27 of Scaling Green Tech, a podcast by Adopter.

Burton describes how LanzaTech captures waste carbon from industrial sites such as steel mills and uses microbes to ferment it into ethanol, a process she likens to brewing beer with carbon instead of sugar and bacteria instead of yeast. She traces the company from its 2005 founding in New Zealand by Dr Sean Simpson and Dr Richard Forster, through a 2008 pilot and a 2012 demonstration plant in China, to its first commercial plant in 2018 and six plants today. The conversation turns to why LanzaTech narrowed its focus to sustainable aviation fuel after listing on the Nasdaq, and how it reframes its work around energy security and economic value rather than emissions alone. Burton also explains why getting fuels policy right has taken more than a decade of work across the UK, EU and US.

This episode is relevant for founders scaling capital-intensive climate tech, carbon capture and utilisation investors, sustainable aviation fuel producers and buyers, and policymakers working on fuels regulation.

Guest profile

Freya Burton is the Chief Sustainability Officer and Head of Europe at LanzaTech. She joined the company in 2007 as one of its first four employees, working in borrowed lab space, and has since held roles spanning safety, human resources, external affairs and policy. She previously served as the company's Chief People Officer and spent a long period based in the United States before moving into her current sustainability and Europe-focused leadership role.

LanzaTech is a carbon recycling company that converts waste carbon from industrial emissions into ethanol and other chemicals using a gas fermentation process. Founded in New Zealand in 2005 and now listed on the Nasdaq, the company operates six commercial plants worldwide across steel mills, ferro alloy mills and a refinery. It supplies ethanol made from recycled carbon, and related materials, to consumer brands in fashion, fragrance and household goods.

Explore the LanzaTech website.

Find Freya Burton on LinkedIn

Topics covered

• Explaining complex deep tech simply

• How carbon recycling works: the brewery analogy and the microbes

• Reaching commercial scale with a first-of-a-kind technology

• A non-linear founder journey: finding problems and solving them

• Building company culture and the risk of leader burnout

• How commercial strategy shifts from startup to public company

• Narrowing focus to win a single market

• Leading with value and energy security, not sustainability alone

• Building partnerships on data and proof points

• What investors prioritise at different stages of growth

• Funding capital-intensive tough tech, and marketing it to mainstream audiences

• Navigating regulatory uncertainty and advice for the next stage of scaling

Dr Robert Sorrell, CEO of the Royce Hydrogen Accelerator at the Henry Royce Institute, discusses materials innovation and the hydrogen value chain on Episode 26 of Scaling Green Tech, a podcast by Adopter.Sorrell treats hydrogen as one part of the wider energy mix rather than a fix-all. The strongest near-term use is as a feedstock for ammonia, fertilisers and industrial chemicals. Long-duration storage of surplus offshore wind is another priority, particularly in the UK. Shipping and aviation also stand out, because batteries cannot match the energy density needed for large vessels or long-haul flight. The episode also covers the $1-2 per kilogramme cost target for green hydrogen, the materials problem of cryogenic storage at -253°C, and the funding gap atthe proof-of-concept and prototyping stages.The episode is useful for hydrogen founders, deep tech investors, electrolyser and fuel cell developers, and policymakers working on the UK's hydrogen strategy.

Karen Polizzi, Co-Director of NAPIC (the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre), and Prithvi Kodialbail, Head of Partnerships at Extracellular, discuss the commercialisation of cultivated meat on Episode 25 of Scaling Green Tech, a podcast by Adopter.The first cultivated meat burger cost approximately $27,000 to produce. Since then, regulatory approvals have come through in Singapore and the US, cultivated products have appeared in restaurants, and an infrastructure layer of companies has begun filling the gap between R&D and commercial scale. Polizzi and Kodialbail trace where the bottlenecks remain - manufacturing costs, regulatory harmonisation, and access to facilities - and describe how NAPIC and Extracellular are each working to close those gaps in the UK. The conversation also makes the case for food security, rather than sustainability, as the most compelling argument for alternative proteins, set against real long-term agricultural risk in the UK.This episode is relevant for cultivated meat founders, alternative protein investors, food science researchers, and policymakers working on UK novel foods regulation.Find out more about Adopter here: https://www.adopter.net/Explore NAPIC here: https://napic.ac.uk/Discover Extracellular here: https://www.extracellular.com/

Mahima Sukhdev, Chief Growth Officer at GIST Impact, discusses the evolution from ESG 1.0 to ESG 2.0, nature value at risk, and what it takes to grow a data company in an emerging market on Episode 24 of Scaling Green Tech, a podcast by Adopter.

Sukhdev argues that ESG 1.0 was designed to produce glossy numbers for glossy reports, and was never intended to change how decisions are made. GIST Impact was built on a different premise: that climate, nature, and social data should be traceable, methodologically rigorous, and fed directly into the places where decisions happen - portfolio construction, stewardship, capital allocation. Founded 18 years ago as a research lab, GIST has watched this shift play out in real time. A major Indian bank is already seeing default rates rise in its agricultural loan book in ways that can only be explained by climate and nature risk. Clients like Allianz and StoreBrand are now using nature data to build portfolio-level analyses that would have seemed out of reach just a few years ago. GIST's recently launched Nature Value at Risk (NVaR) Solution - built on 25 critical ecosystem services and the Natural History Museum's Biodiversity Intactness Index - is its most detailed attempt yet to put a financial number on what happens when ecosystems fail.

This episode is for asset managers, impact investors, corporate sustainability leads, and founders building in the ESG data or nature risk space.

Find out more about Adopter here: https://www.adopter.net/

Explore GIST Impact here: https://www.gistimpact.com/

Rami El Geneidy, Technical Director at EnergyHub and exited co-founder of Kapacity.io, discusses energy flexibility, heat pump control, and the startup journey on Episode 23 of Scaling Green Tech, a podcast by Adopter.

El Geneidy traces how Kapacity.io grew from PhD research at the London-Loughborough Centre for Energy Demand Studies, through Conception X and Y Combinator, to acquisition by EnergyHub. Kapacity.io built technology to reduce energy costs and emissions from heat pumps in commercial and residential buildings. The company validated demand by selling building readiness surveys before the product existed, then built first for commercial real estate before pivoting to residential heat pumps when per-building integration barriers limited growth. To crack the conservative energy company market, Kapacity.io first released a consumer product that demonstrated real cost savings to homeowners - then used that proof to sell through energy companies. After five years, the founders accepted an acquisition by EnergyHub, where the two companies' visions for energy flexibility at scale aligned.

This episode is relevant for energy technology founders building hardware-adjacent software, PhD researchers considering the startup route through programmes like Conception X or Y Combinator, and climate tech operators navigating pivots, fundraising timing, and acquisition decisions.

Find out more about Adopter here: https://www.adopter.net/

Explore EnergyHub here: https://www.energyhub.com/

Dr Simon Thomas, Co-Founder and CEO of Paragraf, discusses scaling graphene from a Cambridge University invention to a commercial semiconductor foundry on Episode 22 of Scaling Green Tech, a podcast by Adopter.

Thomas traces Paragraf's eight-year journey from university spin-out to opening the world's first graphene foundry in Huntingdon, UK. The company's core breakthrough is the ability to deposit uniform, wafer-scale graphene directly onto substrates compatible with standard semiconductor manufacturing equipment - solving the "lab to fab" problem that has blocked graphene commercialisation since the material was first isolated at the University of Manchester in 2004. Paragraf has raised approximately $150 million in total across seed, Series A, Series B ($60 million led by New Science Ventures), and Series C ($55 million led by Mubadala), and has expanded internationally with operations in San Diego, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi. Thomas argues that graphene devices could reduce the computing industry's share of global energy consumption from approximately 20% to under 2%, while also enabling new product categories in medical diagnostics and next-generation battery technology.

This episode is relevant for deep tech founders navigating multi-stage fundraising, semiconductor and advanced materials investors, climate technology founders building hardware companies, and anyone working on energy-efficient computing, point-of-care diagnostics, or graphene electronics.

Find out more about Adopter here: https://www.adopter.net/

Explore Paragraf here: https://www.paragraf.com

Theresa Hoffmann, CEO and Co-founder of Nanoplume, discusses bio-based aerogel insulation, deep tech commercialisation, and the realities of early-stage founding on Episode 21 of Scaling Green Tech, a podcast by Adopter.

Hoffmann explains how 80% of the insulation market remains dependent on petrochemical materials, despite the thermal insulation industry growing toward a $100 billion market by 2030. Nanoplume's answer is a bio-based nano-porous material that is three times as insulating, 60% lighter and thinner, and 100% biocompatible - and around 75% cheaper than silica aerogels and other super-insulating materials. Rather than targeting the built environment first, Hoffmann describes a deliberate beachhead strategy in pharmaceutical cold chain logistics, chosen for clearer economics and lower mechanical requirements, with a roadmap toward truck insulation, warehousing, and eventually buildings. The episode also covers co-founder dynamics, founder identity, and how to validate market assumptions through early customer case studies.

This episode is relevant for deep tech founders at pre-seed and seed stage, materials science entrepreneurs, cold chain and pharmaceutical logistics investors, built environment innovators, and anyone navigating co-founder relationships, accelerator programmes, or early-stage commercialisation strategy.

Find out more about Adopter here: https://www.adopter.net/

Explore Nanoplume here: https://www.nanoplume.com/

Connect with Theresa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theresa-hoffmann/

Martin SFP Bryant, Founder of PreSeed Now, discusses what investors and journalists look for from early-stage startups on Episode 20 of Scaling Green Tech, a podcast by Adopter.

Bryant draws on nearly 17 years as a technology journalist - including covering ElevenLabs before the launch of ChatGPT - to explain what separates pre-seed startups that attract backing from those that stall. He argues that the strongest founders compress their value proposition into a one-to-two sentence "micro-pitch," citing Stripe's early line ("take payments on your website with a single line of code") as an example of a pitch that immediately communicates both the product and its scale potential. The conversation covers why climate tech companies lose traction when they lead with environmental impact rather than economic value, how the contraction of the tech media landscape has changed founder media strategy, and what Bryant looks for when selecting startups to profile on PreSeed Now from a pipeline of hundreds.

This episode is relevant for pre-seed and seed-stage founders preparing to raise investment. It is also useful for climate technology companies refining how they communicate value to investors, customers, and the media. Matt Jaworski hosts.

Find out more about Adopter here: https://www.adopter.net/

Explore PreSeed Now here: https://preseednow.com/