Newcastle startup Facet Amtech has raised a $3 million seed round from Main Sequence and Uniseed to develop a catalyst that makes ammonia directly from steam and air, AgFunderNews reported in August 2026.
Ammonia is the base ingredient in nitrogen fertiliser, which underpins a large share of the world’s food supply. Producing it at scale today relies on the century old Haber-Bosch process and a chain of expensive, energy hungry equipment. Facet is trying to collapse that chain into a single step.
How it works
A conventional plant needs three main pieces of kit: an electrolyser or other hydrogen plant to produce hydrogen, an air separation unit to pull nitrogen out of the air, and a reactor to combine the two. Facet says its catalyst splits hydrogen from water or steam and reduces nitrogen from air on the same surface at the same time, removing the need for the separate hydrogen and air separation stages.
Co-founder Dr Peter Richardson told AgFunderNews the catalyst carries out two different reactions, water splitting and nitrogen reduction, simultaneously. The process runs under milder conditions than Haber-Bosch, though it still needs heat and pressure, and it produces aqueous ammonia that requires a separation step. The company makes the catalyst in house from metal powders and uses no platinum group metals or rare earths.
The founders and the raise
Facet was founded in 2024 at the University of Newcastle by mechanical engineers Richardson and James Bradley. It has since moved from the campus to its own industrial site nearby. The seed round, worth about US$2.1 million, followed a small pre-seed.
Main Sequence investment manager Emerald Scofield said the company “is tackling a problem that sits at the intersection of energy security and industrial resilience”, according to AgFunderNews.
The road to scale
The new funding pays for a first pilot producing 1kg of ammonia a day in early 2027. If that works, Facet plans a 100kg a day pilot about two years later and a 4 tonne a day pilot in the early 2030s. The commercial plants it is designing for would run at 500 to 3,000 tonnes a day.
Facet does not plan to own or operate plants. It intends to license its plant design and supply its catalyst to global fertiliser producers, and Richardson has described the goal as undercutting conventional ammonia on cost alone, without relying on carbon pricing or a green premium.
Jack’s take
The gap between a lab pilot and a 3,000 tonne a day plant is where most catalyst startups die. Licensing the design instead of building plants is the smart call, because it means Facet only needs one big producer to say yes. I would rather back that path than a startup trying to out build the incumbents.