The funding will expand Atmen’s platform, helping industrial producers certify product origins and ensure supply chain integrity.

Munich, Germany – May 03, 2025 - Atmen (atmen.co), the company automating sustainability certification for industry, today announced a €5M seed funding round, led by Project A. Existing investors Revent and Vireo Ventures also participated, alongside notable angel investors including former TÜV SUD CEO Axel Stepken, Former CEO and serial Board member in tech environments including ThyssenKrupp, Martina Merz, and serial founder Christian Vollmann, an early investor in Trivago and SumUp. This brings Atmen’s total funding to €6.3M.

In an era of fierce global competition, European industrial companies face a dual challenge: creating a market advantage through sustainability leadership while ensuring global competitiveness.

The critical need for Atmen's solution becomes clear when examining Europe's fertiliser supply chain. Ammonia, an essential component for food security across the continent, is a prime example. While the EU imported approximately 25% of its fertilisers from Russia in 2024, valued at over €2.2 billion, the transition to low-carbon ammonia faces a fundamental verification challenge. Since a molecule of ammonia looks identical regardless of production method, this transition requires robust certification systems that can process over 70,000 data points annually to verify product origins and environmental credentials. This is precisely where Atmen comes in.

While traditional approaches rely on periodic sampling and yearly estimates, Atmen’s platform ingests granular, real-time operational data directly from industrial processes. This integration into industrial workflows streamlines compliance for energy-intensive products like hydrogen and renewable fuels, enabling companies to prove product composition and material origins with unprecedented certainty. By digitising certification processes, Atmen enhances traceability while reducing complexity, a crucial advantage for European industry navigating the energy transition.

Industry expertise drives practical solutions

Atmen was founded in January 2023 by Flore de Durfort, Quentin Cangelosi, and Erika Degoute, who met working at the renowned energy company E.ON. They identified a critical problem: despite its growing importance for market access, product certification still relied on outdated, manual processes - error-prone paperwork and scattered spreadsheets that couldn't handle today's complex supply chains and data requirements.

The team combines energy market expertise with robust technical capabilities. Atmen’s flagship product, 'Automate,' is already in use across industrial sites in 9 countries and working with five leading certification bodies, including TÜV NORD.

Building European competitiveness in a changing world

As Europe navigates complex trade tensions with the US, energy dependency on Russia, and manufacturing competition from China, traditional certification methods are failing due to their paper-based, labour-intensive processes. Cross-border transactions now require detailed certification of product origins and sustainability credentials, overwhelming systems designed for simpler supply networks. Atmen connects everyone involved, from producers and traders to auditors and certification labels, in a single system. This replaces scattered spreadsheets and siloed audits with continuous data monitoring and tracking tools that validate each product’s specifications and origins. Atmen’s approach also aligns with the EU Clean Industrial Deal, which outlines concrete actions to turn decarbonisation into a driver of growth for European industries.

With this €5 million funding, Atmen plans to expand beyond hydrogen, renewable and low-carbon fuels to certify a wider range of energy-intensive goods, including steel, chemicals, and fertilisers - sectors where proving product characteristics is essential for market access and decarbonisation. The team will also strengthen connections with regulators and certification schemes while launching tools that help companies track environmental impact and meet evolving regulations, which are increasing scrutiny on product sustainability claims.

Strengthening industry through transparency

As supply chains face growing pressure from geopolitical shifts and energy transitions, reliable product certification becomes essential for European businesses. Atmen's platform builds trust in product claims by raising the standard from periodic sampling to comprehensive data analysis - all while simplifying the process for manufacturers.

The platform helps companies navigate certification requirements, optimising their supply chains for both compliance and commercial goals. Atmen achieves this through advanced modelling tools that clarify decision-making and provide supply chain visibility.

Atmen is already working with industry leaders, including Lhyfe, Schneider Electric, and Energy & Regulation Partners. The team, currently at 11 employees, will expand to support the company's ambitious growth trajectory.

"European industries need reliable ways to verify products across borders and supply chains," says Flore de Durfort, CEO and co-founder of Atmen. "We're simplifying and scaling product certification, turning a traditional bottleneck into a competitive advantage. Our platform acts as a data infrastructure layer on top of industrial supply chains, processing complete operational datasets while reducing complexity. With Europe’s limited access to fossil fuels, the transition to renewable energy requires stronger systems to verify clean energy products - that’s precisely what we’re building.”

"In a world where industrial competitiveness depends on traceable, low-carbon supply chains, Atmen is building the digital backbone that turns complex production inputs into compliant, market- and export-ready products," says Mila Cramer, Principal at Project A. 

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About Atmen

Atmen (atmen.co) is a regulatory technology company providing the data infrastructure that powers trusted certification of industrial products. Atmen focuses on automating certification and enabling large-scale, verifiable supply chain transparency across energy-intensive industries. Founded in January 2023 by energy and regulation experts Flore de Durfort, Quentin Cangelosi, and Erika Degoute, Atmen has raised €6.3M to date to build technology that certifies industrial goods, starting with clean fuels. Headquartered in Munich, the company's platform is deployed across industrial sites in 9 countries, automating certification workflows and enabling verifiable proof of product attributes throughout the supply chain.

About Project A

Project A (project-a.com) is one of the leading early-stage tech investors in Europe with offices in Berlin and London. In addition to $1bn assets under management, Project A commands the largest VC platform team in Europe: 100 functional experts exclusively support the portfolio companies in key areas of growth such as software engineering, business intelligence, data engineering, recruiting, sales and marketing. The venture capital firm was founded in 2012 and has backed more than 120 startups. The portfolio includes companies such as Trade Republic, Black Semiconductor, Quantum Systems and sennder.

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When global emissions are on the table, international cooperation is often demanded, but rarely achieved.

However, what the International Maritime Organization (IMO) achieved in April 2025 can truly be described as “a groundbreaking commitment”, as Flore de Durfort, Co-Founder and CEO of Atmen, calls the IMO’s decision.

“It’s not every day that over 150 countries come together and agree to binding decarbonization targets for an entire sector.”  

The decision is particularly crucial as international shipping accounts for approximately 2-3% of global CO₂ emissions, a figure comparable to the annual emissions of major industrialized countries.

The IMO’s new net-zero framework introduces a twofold strategy. First: a global fuel standard that will force ships to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity (GFI) of their fuel year by year. Second: a carbon pricing mechanism that penalizes non-compliant vessels up to $480 per ton of CO₂. While rewarding low-emission ships with surplus units, they can trade or use them to offset emissions elsewhere in their fleet.

With implementation starting in 2027 and enforcement starting in 2028, the pressure is on. Shipowners, operators, and fuel producers must act now to prepare vessels, supply chains, and reporting systems for compliance.

Certification needed from Well-to-Wake

To a large extent, the green fuels market has been held back by uncertainty. Buyers couldn’t commit, offtake stayed weak, and project financing stalled. A framework like the IMO’s changes the dynamics.

This agreement creates a compelling business case for green fuels. Shipping companies will need to align their businesses with the new rules and face strategic decisions on fuel types.

The framework not only includes emissions from ‘pump-to-engine’, but also considers the entire fuel lifecycle, from ‘well-to-wake’. That means upstream emissions from feedstock extraction, refining, and transportation now count toward a vessel’s compliance status.

This will require full upstream-to-ship emissions tracking and certification. A tough challenge, as fuel supply chains involve a wide range of feedstocks, often sourced from distant geographies with many different regulations. It is therefore almost impossible to build a unified and evidence-based data layer that covers the full supply chain, or, as Flore de Durfort says, “The new IMO rules create the need to finally connect the dots”.

Atmen and Swiss Climate join forces to connect the dots

That’s exactly what Atmen and Swiss Climate are now working to deliver.

Swiss Climate is a recognized leader in emissions reporting and verification for ships and fleets through its digital emission reporting platform MRV Cockpit, covering the downstream segment of the value chain. Atmen’s Automate platform specializes in upstream compliance modeling and fuel certification.

In light of the need for a solution that captures the sustainability of the entire value chain, from natural resources all the way to the vessel’s tank, Swiss Climate and Atmen join forces to build the first infrastructure layer that integrates upstream and downstream data for green fuels. For Atmen and Swiss Climate, this is a perfect one-plus-one-equals-three scenario. 

“Together, we can go faster, cover more ground, and offer the market something no one else can: true end-to-end infrastructure for Green Fuel compliance”, says Flore de Durfort. With full-chain accountability, the shipping sector is becoming a global test case for how carbon pricing and digital infrastructure can drive a real decarbonization shift.  

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“FuelEu, EU-ETS regulations and now the new IMO decarbonization targets create a complex regulatory environment that all market participants from fuel producers to bunker traders and ship owners, managers and charterers have to navigate which only fully digitalized solutions can accomplish: “This is what Atmen and Swiss Climate provide”, says Philipp Ahrenkiel, Founder and Co-CEO of Swiss Climate.

Jan Herberg, Partner of Swiss Climate adds: “Facing the future challenges for the maritime industry and the practical implications of GHG emission regulations, we see the alliance between Atmen and Swiss Climate as the ideal basis for developing new, future-prove digital solutions that will enable the industry to cope with the emission management efficiently. We are really looking forward to a fruitful cooperation and are more than happy to support the market on its way through the green transition.”

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