This startup is fuel-injecting hydrogen to make cargo ships more efficient

It’s one the most iconic scenes in the Fast & Furious film franchise: Paul Walker’s thumb comes off the steering wheel and smashes a small red button, pumping nitrous oxide into the engine of his Mitsubishi Eclipse and giving the car an explosive boost.

This is not exactly how the hydrogen-injection system developed by a startup called Newlight works on cargo ships. In fact, the company’s system uses compressed hydrogen fuel to boost efficiency — not to beat Vin Diesel. But it’s an analogy that’s proved to be useful for co-founder Evyatar Cohen.

“Instead of getting power, we actually say to the engine: ‘Hey, reduce the fuel [flow] to the engine, we don’t need as much because we have some nitrous. It’s [just] called hydrogen,’” he told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.

The small team based in the San Francisco Bay Area has developed this hydrogen injection system as a retrofit, which it claims can be installed in less than two weeks without needing a dry dock. It cuts fuel use and emissions by more than 20%, and can save some vessels as much as $500,000 in annual costs, according to the startup.

Newlight does this by constantly monitoring the diesel engine and finding optimal moments, down to the millisecond level, to inject the hydrogen fuel. That includes measuring exhaust temperature, combustion pressure, and air intake pressure, and increasing or decreasing the hydrogen flow every time a piston moves inside the engine’s cylinders.

The startup says this hybrid system has completed its first long-range commercial voyage: an 8,500-nautical mile trip from Singapore to Ghana. Newlight installed its tech on a 650-foot-long Lomar Shipping bulk carrier ship for the test. The startup said its system reduced fuel consumption by 24% and carbon dioxide emissions by 28%.

“It was amazing,” Haran Cohen Hillel, Cohen’s co-founder and the CEO of Newlight, said of the month-long voyage. “Being onboard and seeing the system operate in real conditions was a completely different experience from anything we had done in the lab.”

Turning the system on with his co-founder for the first time, he said, was an “emotional moment for both of us.”

“We spent a lot of time monitoring the system, the engine behavior, and the performance, and what impressed us most was how smoothly everything worked,” he told TechCrunch. “Seeing the system integrate with the vessel, operate reliably, and deliver the results we had been working toward was a huge milestone for us and for the entire Newlight team.”

The combination of those projections, the clever pitch, and the years Cohen and Hillel spent working in the Israeli Navy has helped the duo secure a $9 million seed round. The fundraise included investment from lomarlabs, the venture arm of Lomar Shipping, BIRD Energy, a joint venture between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Israel Ministry of Energy, deep tech funds Undeterred Capital and CiRi Ventures, and Fusion VC, an accelerator for Israeli startups in the U.S.

Newlight also says it’s attracting commercial interest. The company claims it has signed agreements to put the hydrogen injection system on 12 vessels across multiple companies with “broader fleet rollouts planned for next year.”

There are other companies working to use fuel injection methods to cut emissions and boost efficiency, including with ammonia or methanol. But Newlight argues its hydrogen setup is leaner and requires fewer changes to the diesel engines typically used on cargo ships.

The two co-founders also told TechCrunch they see opportunities beyond the marine industry, too — though they expect to stay focused on the sea for now.

“We’re an energy company, right? So we look at the whole energy situation that is happening around the world, with transportation, and data centers, and we have some investors that even have trains,” Hillel said. “But we’re gonna try to be focused on shipping right now, and to get on a scale there, and then we can probably expand.”