From left: Amogy co-founders Hyunho Kim, Seonghoon Woo, Jongwon Choi, Young Suk Jo

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The big green John Deere that energy startup Amogy has parked outside its Brooklyn Navy Yard headquarters might be the only farm tractor in the five boroughs. It’s certainty the only one running on ammonia.

“It cost us about $150,000,” says Amogy Chief Executive Seonghoon Woo, one of the company’s four co-founders. “And then we had to take the most expensive thing—the engine components out of it!”

To demonstrate its new technology, Amogy replaced the tractor’s diesel engine with its own reactor, which “cracks” liquid ammonia into its two components: nitrogen and hydrogen. A standard hydrogen fuel cell converts the latter into electricity.

Ammonia is a promising clean-energy option for companies under pressure from government regulations to reduce carbon emissions. It costs twice as much as diesel and takes up three times the space to store the same amount of energy; but thanks to Amogy’s new cracking technology, it’s now cheaper and more energy-dense than other carbon-free alternatives such as batteries and pure hydrogen.

Founded in 2020, Amogy employs 80 people—mainly electrical and chemical engineers—who are on a furious quest to create small, efficient reactors to power heavy-duty transport vehicles including mining trucks and container ships.

“In 30, 40 years, in industries like shipping, ammonia is going to be the main fuel,” Woo says.

ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded international oil and gas company, employed 63,000 workers as of December and reported revenues of $285.6 billion last year. While exploring for oil and natural gas on six continents, it researches and develops alternative-energy sources such as renewable diesel and hydrogen fuel.

Woo met his three co-founders at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they were getting their doctorates. He later landed a job at IBM in Westchester County, while the others found jobs in their homeland, South Korea. During the Covid-19 pandemic they got to chatting over Zoom about starting a company. Each proposed a different venture. The ammonia-cracking technology pushed by Young Suk Jo, now the company’s chief technology officer, seemed the most promising.

They had no startup experience, but Woo volunteered to find investors.

“I didn’t even know what a VC did at the time,” he says.

He sent out more than 300 email queries. The unproven idea from an unknown team generated little interest. But one venture-capital firm in London, AP Ventures, had been looking for what Amogy was offering.

“When we originally met, there were just four founders employed with their original jobs,” says Michelle Robson, APV senior investment manager. “But they obviously had developed some really compelling [intellectual property] that they were looking to license. They had a very, very ambitious strategy, commercial road map and technology road map. And they’re inspiring individuals.”

The Amogy team replaced a tractor engine with one using its ammonia cracking technology as a proof of concept in June. 

When APV and Amogy closed on a $3 million seed round in March 2021, the other three founders quit their jobs and moved to New York. They set to work on their first prototype: a 4-foot, ammonia-powered drone.

The first flight attempt that summer, at Coney Island, was a flop.

“It never got off the ground,” Woo says. Given the company’s limited funding, it was a nerve-wracking situation.

“If we didn’t make it happen by, like, August or September,” Woo says, “this company could have died.”

A successful flight two weeks later, however, demonstrated that the ammonia-powered drone could fly without refueling for three times as long as a battery-powered model. Investors became interested, and Amogy in November closed on a $20 million Series A round led by APV and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund.

The funding was enough to expand the team from six to several dozen and scale up the technology, leading to a successful tractor demonstration in June at a corn farm upstate.

That helped seal the deal on a $46 million bridge round, which Woo says will fund the development of an ammonia-powered 18-wheeler in the fall, followed by a ship.

The company already has bought a 60-foot-long, 70-year-old cargo ship. It is docked in Kingston, N.Y., ready to make history.

It could be difficult for Amogy to land its first customer, Woo said, because replacing the engines on, say, a fleet of cargo ships is no small matter.

“If you think about the potential consumers of this technology, they are operating really large, ridiculously expensive assets,” Woo says. “Essentially, they have to be committed to this technology that no one has ever tried before.”

But Robson says there are compelling reasons for someone to step up and be a guinea pig: “The first mover has the advantage. If you’re willing to go first, you can have this novel technology shaped in a way that’s beneficial to you.”

How Amogy stacks up to industry giant ExxonMobil

Anne Kadet is the creator of Café Anne, a weekly newsletter with a New York City focus. She previously was the city business and trends columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Have a story idea or a startup you would like to see featured in a future column? Write to [email protected] .

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