The Airmo team
“Oil and gas energy, [the] dirty bad guys, are not always happy when their leakages are found,” Daria Stepanova tells Pathfounders. “What we want to do is build a service that is so attractive in terms of savings, of costs and risk management, that even they would change their perspective on the impact on the climate.”
Wasteful industry operations in the oil and gas sector accounted for nearly 80 million metric tons of methane leaking in 2023, and while overall emissions are a result of both natural sources and human activities, the latter makes up about 60% according to NASA.
Methane leaks also present a significant financial challenge for energy companies, costing the industry approximately $100bn every year, including $30bn in direct revenue lost. So there is not only a climate change benefit in detecting greenhouse gases, there is also a direct monetary gain.
The gas is more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, making leak detection a major priority for climate regulators.
Stepanova is a rocket scientist and serial entrepreneur that founded the space-tech startup Airmo in 2022 with the aim of bringing transparency to climate monitoring and cutting methane emissions by deploying a series of small satellites that can detect and measure greenhouse gases in real time.
The team has built a new sensor that can detect greenhouse gas emissions using satellites and the company has just raised €5m in seed funding to launch its first satellite mission in 2027.
The round was led by Ananda Impact Ventures alongside high-profile VCs including Unconventional Ventures, kopa ventures, Pi Labs and Antler. The funds raised add to a €5.2m pre-seed round in 2023, which included a €3.7m contract with the European Space Agency.
The goal is to have a 12-satellite constellation operational by 2030. Stepanova told Pathfounders that the company estimates it will be able to measure approximately 14 million tonnes of methane per year at a facility level and be able to detect where it’s coming from.
What makes this meaningful beyond the numbers, Stepanova explains, is that the gap between what operators report and what satellites actually detect is enormous.
“Measurement-based accounting is the foundation for any credible mitigation — you can’t fix what you can’t see,” she says. “Airmo’s role is to make the invisible visible, at the precision regulators and operators need to act.”
Methane is the second-largest contributor to global warming, but the International Energy Agency estimates about 75% of methane leaks could be fixed with existing technology.
Measurement-based accounting is the foundation for any credible mitigation — you can’t fix what you can’t see. Airmo’s role is to make the invisible visible
Airmo plans on deploying a constellation of small, cheaper satellites, with the aim of delivering near real-time continuous global observation.
The startup is currently pre-booking capacity on the satellite to monitor different spots and the plan is to then deploy a network of sensors to deliver a daily visit rate for any point on the globe.
“We as humankind feel the consequences of climate change,” Stepanova says. “I think the first step is to actually understand better what’s going on and how we are impacting the planet.”
Methane monitoring and mitigation can be extremely cost-effective and much easier to implement than some of the more convoluted carbon monitoring and removal systems.
“Most of the time these are leakages and pipelines that can be plugged or open valves that can be easily closed,” she adds. “So all of that is really easy to mitigate in comparison to building crazy expensive carbon capture setups.”
Methane monitoring from space is a rapidly growing field. Last summer, a Jeff Bezos-backed satellite, MethaneSAT, lost contact with Earth and is now presumed lost, but there are other startups still going successfully such as GHGSat, a Canadian company that has raised CAD$173m in debt and equity, Planet Labs and Carbon Mapper.
According to Airmo, the technology is twice as accurate as existing systems, combining a shortwave infrared (SWIR) imager with micro-LIDAR, and can spot a methane leak the size of a car from 500km in space.
The technology is currently being used in commercial operations on drones and planes for monitoring missions in Europe, Central Asia and MENA. Large energy companies including Uniper, Total and ESCE use the technology for energy infrastructure monitoring.
“Methane leakage reduction is the most effective way to decarbonise the energy industry today,” Alina Bassi, Principal at Ananda Impact Ventures, said in a statement. “Airmo’s ability to quantify greenhouse gas emissions from space with such high precision is a game-changer, finally solving a significant transparency problem for the energy sector.”
In addition to the satellite launch, the funding will also be put towards international expansion, with plans to establish a local presence in MENA.
“While there’s a lot of attention [paid] to the Moon, Mars, who has the biggest rockets, there could be more attention on our planet,” Stepanova says. “It’s very important to build systems that help us understand our planet and help us preserve our planet.”
Company info:
The team includes: Dr. Christoph Grobbel (advisor), a serial entrepreneur and board director, formerly of South Pole and Terra Impact Ventures; Dr. Errico Armandillo (CSO), former European Space Agency (ESA) Head of Optoelectronics and LIDAR expert with 28 years of experience and David Vilaseca (CTO) with 15 years of experience in space optical instruments and technical team scaling.
Based in Munich, Berlin and Luxembourg