ReGen Ventures is thrilled to have led Lavoit’s €1.2m pre-seed round alongside Starship Ventures, Project Europe and Wave Ventures.
Lavoit is engineering intelligence to unlock the universe’s most abundant molecule: hydrogen.
The world is now awash in cheap energy as renewable electrons continue to plummet in cost (see Terraform Industries post):
In this new paradigm, the value capture opportunity has largely shifted from those who generate electrons to those who can absorb, move and transform them.
Hydrogen is a tricky molecule, but it is also indispensable. It is the key input to an extraordinary number of chemical processes. While the end-state energy carriers may be methane, methanol or ammonia, hydrogen itself is the essential building block that industry cannot live without.
To date green hydrogen has struggled with cost, function and scalability. Most companies trying to tackle the problem have almost exclusively focused on hardware: a new catalyst, membrane, or stack design focused on modularity. The challenge with solely focusing on this is that electricity is ~75% the cost of hydrogen and therefore purely hardware approaches have produced incremental gains.
The bottleneck is not the molecule itself, but the lack of focus on the operating cost and taking a full-stack, systems level approach.
This is where Lavoit comes in.
Hydrogen has historically been framed as a hardware problem. Traditional hydrogen companies have focused on squeezing out incremental efficiency gains at the stack level.
Lavoit takes a different approach: starting with the whole system. Its platform integrates how hydrogen production interacts with intermittent power, market conditions and environmental factors. By ingesting streams of sensory data, the system dynamically optimises with the single goal of reducing the cost of delivered hydrogen.
Lavoit is an example of an AI-native company solving a physical world problem. Artificial intelligence enables hydrogen production systems to sense, adapt, and optimise in real time, capabilities beyond human operators or static designs.
The company is building a continuous learning system that can scale hydrogen production intelligently.
The founder of Lavoit is Nils Samrud. Nils has been obsessed with hydrogen since he was 12, building his first electrolyser in his grandparents’ chicken coop. By 16 he was constructing hardware prototypes, by 17 he had convinced universities to give him lab space, and along the way he wrote a 200-page manifesto on hydrogen systems.
Nils has built a team that sits at the intersection of bits and atoms. A team fluent in machine learning and industrial hardware, with one goal: make hydrogen cheaper, smarter and easier to deploy.
Lavoit team at their first on-site deployment.
We think the team’s world-class fluency in AI, electrolysis and energy systems provides Lavoit with an unfair advantage to solve what priors have struggled to unlock with green hydrogen.
At ReGen, we obsess about finding opportunities that emerge between fields. The convergence of ideas. Lavoit is a prime example of this, a team that is natively building at the convergence of artificial intelligence and the physical world.
Whilst hydrogen may be in a “hype winter” and looks non-obvious to some, the market is gigantic (>$500bn and growing), the underlying demand is non-optional and input costs are dropping. AI is the inflection point that makes green hydrogen scalable to model, actuate and orchestrate in the physical world.
We believe Lavoit and Nils, whose ambition is constrained only by physics, can become the lowest-cost producer of the most important industrial molecule on Earth.
We’re proud to support this alien team, they are moving fast and deploying their intelligence layer across systems in Europe and beyond. Lets go.
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