Venture Catalysts Leads USD 850K Seed Round in H2 Carbon Zero to Eliminate Diesel Generators
The funding round of Venture Catalysts, joined by Faad Networks, will accelerate Umagine Hydrogen’s plan to establish India’s first GigaWatt-scale hydrogen fuel-cell factory and replace diesel generators across telecom towers, data centres, micro-grids, and defence outposts.
October 07, 2025. By News Bureau
Commenting on the investment, Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Co-Founder and MD, Venture Catalysts, said, “Clean, dispatchable power is the last missing piece of India’s renewable-energy puzzle. H2 Carbon Zero’s 100 percent indigenous technology converts green hydrogen into electricity while emitting nothing but water, giving businesses the reliability of diesel without the carbon, the noise, or the particulate pollution. We are backing this team because they combine world-class electrochemistry with frugal Indian engineering, allowing us to address a USD $1.5 Billion domestic market and a USD 25 Billion global opportunity with price points that can compete head-to-head with fossil fuels. By catalysing their growth at the seed stage, we intend to anchor India’s leadership in the rapidly expanding green-hydrogen economy, which analysts project to scale thirty-fold this decade.”
The investment underscores Venture Catalysts’ conviction that climate-tech hardware backed by robust unit economics can deliver both outsized impact and attractive returns, even in a funding environment that has become more selective. By pairing capital with its 5,500-strong mentor network and global supply-chain partners, Venture Catalysts will guide Umagine Hydrogen through regulatory certifications, scale-up manufacturing and export market entry, positioning the startup as a key contributor to India’s ambition of becoming a net-zero economy by 2070.
Santosh Gurunath, Co-Founder and CEO, Umagine Hydrogen, said, “We are thrilled to embark on the next phase of our journey with the support of Venture Catalysts and Faad Networks. As societal and regulatory forces converge on the need for clean backup and off-grid power, we will double down on deploying hydrogen fuel cells across diverse applications with a singular goal: to make the diesel generator obsolete within a few years. The capital raised enables us to begin site work on our GigaWatt facility, expand our engineering and operations teams, and complete field trials with early anchor customers in telecom, construction and defence.”
H2 Carbon Zero designs and manufactures fuel cell systems ranging from sub-KiloWatt modules for defence equipment to multi-MegaWatt blocks for grid-scale, long-duration storage. The company’s proprietary system architecture allows customers to integrate hydrogen, battery and solar assets in plug-and-play fashion, slashing installation times and total cost of ownership. Each unit is built entirely in India, aligning with the government’s National Green Hydrogen Mission and its emphasis on local value creation.
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