Impact Bioenergy receives $3.6M funding round

Impact Bioenergy, a Seattle-based renewable energy company, has announced it has completed a Series A funding round in the amount of $3.6 million.

Itochu Corp., one of Japan’s leading general trading companies, is an anchor investor in the round, and several of Impact Bioenergy’s seed investors also are participating. Impact Bioenergy builds and deploys community-scale anaerobic digestion (AD) systems that convert food waste into renewable natural gas (RNG), diverting food waste from landfills for productive reuse while also reducing carbon emissions to reverse climate change.

“Forty percent of all the food produced in and imported into this country is never eaten,” Impact Bioenergy CEO Jan Allen says. “Food waste is being trucked, burned and buried at great expense and accounts for nearly 10 percent of our carbon emissions. Converting food waste to energy not only reduces transportation costs and fuel consumption, but also generates electricity, heat and carbon offsets. Rarely does a technology come along that has so much positive impact with zero waste.”

Impact Bioenergy, which was founded in 2013 by Allen, operates more than a dozen digesters across the country.

The funding will enable Impact Bioenergy to upscale manufacturing and expand its offering to meet the strong demand the company is seeing in the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. More states also are legislating and incentivizing the diversion of food waste from landfills.

“We are all looking for actions we can take to have a positive impact on the climate right now,” Impact Bioenergy President Tim Tiscornia says. “Our products do just that. We are already working with several college and corporate campuses. We are fielding calls every week from restaurant chains, grocery stores and others who want to make a meaningful impact on the environment by turning their organic waste into renewable natural gas and drive toward carbon neutrality.”

Although AD has been used to convert organics to energy for several decades, projects historically have been large-scale. Impact Bioenergy’s proprietary technology reduces the physical footprint and costs for AD and is wholly odor-free, enabling community-level installations. Impact Bioenergy has patented a modular and containerized system to create a product specifically scaled for local use.