Level Nine raises €4M Seed round to rebuild Europe’s chemical industry with AI-designed catalysts

Congratulations to our portfolio company Level Nine on the announcement of their €4M Seed round!

The round was led by our friends at Visionaries Tomorrow, with continued participation from us at Zero Carbon and joined by Rockstart, IBB Ventures and better ventures, bringing their total funding to date to €6.5M. This new capital will allow Level Nine to accelerate their catalyst discovery platform and bridge the gap between lab-scale innovation and industrial deployment.

Why we invested: The crisis in European Chemicals

Europe’s €1tn chemical industry is currently facing an existential crisis. For decades, the sector has relied on a deep dependence on volatile fossil feedstocks, and it now faces pressure from regulations and intense global competition.

While locally abundant bio-based feedstocks (like biomass and waste) offer an escape from fossil dependency, these alternatives have historically been too costly to scale. Level Nine solves this.

The Solution: A new class of catalyst called 'nanozymes'

We first met the Level Nine team in 2023 (our initial investment announcement) and were struck by their vision to overhaul the chemicals industry. Their unique expertise is in designing a new class of catalysts, called ‘nanozymes’, that combine the precision of enzyme catalysts with the robustness required for industrial chemistry

Level Nine is building an AI-driven catalyst discovery platform to produce key chemical building blocks from locally abundant bio-based feedstocks. By using machine learning and quantum chemistry to screen millions of molecular configurations, Level Nine can reduce discovery timelines from years to just months. Their catalysts enable the production of drop-in chemical intermediates from biomass that can finally compete with petrochemicals on both cost and performance.

The Polyurethane Beachhead: From Waste to High-Value Materials

Level Nine’s first commercial application is in the €100bn polyurethane market. Polyurethanes are everywhere—from the foam in your mattress and car seats to high-performance coatings and adhesives. Currently, these are almost entirely derived from crude oil. Level Nine’s nanozymes can dismantle lignin's tough structure under mild conditions to create bio-based precursors for polyurethanes that are:

• Cost-competitive with fossil-based alternatives.

• High-yield, effectively depolymerising lignin into usable chemical building blocks.

• Selective, targeting specific molecular structures to recover the highest value products.

Scaling to Gigaton Impact

While polyurethanes are the "beachhead," the ultimate goal is systemic change across the chemical industry. Petrochemical production is currently responsible for gigatons of emissions (read our blog post on decarbonising chemicals), including:

• 0.4 GtCO₂e/year from fugitive methane during fossil fuel extraction.

• 1.1 GtCO₂e/year from direct process emissions during chemical reactions.

• 1.8 GtCO₂e/year from the extreme high temperatures required for traditional catalysis.

Level Nine scales toward gigaton-scale reduction by replacing naphtha-based precursors. Because their catalysts work at mild temperatures and pressures, they eliminate the need for fossil-fueled heat, and because they use locally abundant biobased feedstocks, they bypass the carbon-intensive fossil supply chain.

Congratulations Level Nine!

We are proud to partner with you as you execute your next phase of scaling up.