Cambridge start-up Neela Biotech has raised £2.1 million to develop an AI-guided process that turns food, farm and forestry waste into sustainable aviation fuel feedstock. The funding is intended to support a pilot-scale trial at a biogas plant over the next two years, putting existing infrastructure at the centre of its plan to scale.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Neela’s process uses controlled microbes to turn waste into fatty acids, a precursor for HEFA-based sustainable aviation fuel. The company says it can integrate the process with existing biogas plants, rather than build new facilities, and that its approach is designed to use less energy than conventional thermochemical methods.
The pre-seed round was led by Elbow Beach, with participation from Ascension, Cambridge Enterprise, Ventures Together and angel investors. Circular reports that Neela’s CEO, Deepanshu Singh, described the process as using advances in AI-driven synthetic biology.
Why it matters
Aviation needs alternatives to fossil jet fuel, but turning a promising process into fuel at a commercially useful price is the hard part. Neela’s proposal links two potentially useful ingredients: waste-derived feedstock and biogas plants already operating across Europe. If the process works at scale, that could avoid some of the cost and construction involved in building new facilities.
For now, the next milestone is a pilot, not commercial fuel production. Neela says its approach has a path to cost parity with fossil jet fuel at scale; that is the company’s ambition, not a demonstrated outcome.
Our read
This is a tangible AI-and-biotechnology development with a clear next test: can the process move from funding announcement to a successful pilot using real waste streams and existing plant? The infrastructure-first approach is intriguing. The fuel still has to come out of the pipe, of course, and at a price airlines can live with.
What to watch
- Whether Neela starts its planned pilot at a biogas plant within the next two years.
- How much fuel feedstock the process produces, and from which waste streams.
- Whether pilot results support the company’s claims about energy use and future costs.
Discussion spark: Should sustainable aviation fuel investment prioritise processes that can use existing plants, or back entirely new infrastructure built for scale?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (12 October 2026, 08:44 UTC)
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