Kura Dynamics - Investment Notes

There is enough hydrogen locked in the rock beneath us to supply the world for generations. Nobody has worked out how to get it out reliably. That's the problem Kura Dynamics is solving, and it's why we've co-led their NZ$4.65 million pre-seed round alongside GD1, with investment from Outset, K1W1 and NZGCP. Kura is a spinout from Christchurch climate tech firm and existing Motion Capital portfolio company Aspiring Materials, building the control layer for making hydrogen and liquid fuels underground.

Hydrogen is meant to be the answer to parts of the energy system electricity can't reach - due to energy density, high intensity heat, heavy industry. The problem has always been that you can make it dirty and cheap, or clean and expensive, and neither gets you to scale. 

Geologic hydrogen however is a genuinely different starting point. Ultramafic rocks, found across six continents, sit at the centre of a set of natural reactions between rock and water that generate hydrogen underground. Global interest in this as a source of low-emissions energy has grown quickly. The hard part isn't the chemistry, which has been understood for a long time. It's that these are natural systems, and natural systems are complicated.

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Kura is taking on exactly that problem. The venture is developing a control system and technology platform designed to stimulate and recover geological hydrogen safely, sustainably and reliably, turning those natural reactions into an engineered system. It's not just hydrogen, there is potential to produce sustainable fuels as a by-product of the process. It’s still early in the journey, however the modelled economics (if proven) could be truly disruptive at a market level to drive investment into hydrogen infrastructure and adoption across industries. 

This is a hard problem, and hard problems need the right people. Dr Chris Oze has spent decades researching the chemistry of ultramafic rocks, and has already proven he can take that science out of the lab and into a company, he co-founded Aspiring Materials (Scaling toward commercial production). Peter Joynt brings deep expertise in geological data analysis and subsurface resource modelling.

Ambition this size comes with real technical work ahead, but transformative outcomes rarely come from incremental improvements - they come from questioning assumptions and rethinking what's possible. That's why we are excited to be supporting Chris, Peter, and Kura Dynamics.

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