Twenty years. No shortcuts.

It started with a project for a German development agency in Ethiopia. After the war, the country was suffering massive blackouts, and the brief was to turn local waste streams and bamboo into power for rural communities. Julien challenged German engineering to deliver real impact for rural electrification. The idea was laughed at.

Almost twenty years ago, fitting a highly complex thermochemical reactor inside a shipping container was close to unimaginable. And the chemistry was against it: high-temperature gasification turns ash into clinker, and in those days clinker made reactors collapse almost immediately.

The container and the clinker: both were impossible then. Both are exactly what Jenja solves today.

Julien came to the project from Swiss Alternative Investment AG, where he worked in project development, after earlier experience with a large private equity firm in New York City. He brought an investor's discipline to an engineering problem. In 2008 he drove the project's first raise and managed its government funding.

He brought together 16 universities and research labs and 15 companies, among them the German Aerospace Center (DLR), RWTH Aachen, the Technical University of Munich and TU Dresden. That consortium became the foundation of HolzStrom, a joint research network in the technology region around Aachen, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics under its ZIM programme. Its goal: a small, decentralised gasification system for waste and wood. One of the partners back then was Hochschule Zittau/Görlitz. It is still with us today.

Michael Hofmeister found gasification the hands-on way. He was working on a farm with a wood gasifier that never really worked, so he started taking it apart and making it better. That led him to a young Munich gasification company backed by leading venture investors.

By 2008 he was one of its lead engineers, building highly complex heat-pipe reformers and fluidised-bed gasifiers for biomass to hydrogen. The company built prototype after prototype and burned through a lot of capital very quickly.

In 2013 Julien was asked to bring the German government into a funding round alongside the company's existing investors. The process ended in a management buyout of its US business, including the patent portfolio, followed by a full restructuring. Michael and Julien partnered with Dr. Arnim Rosenbach, the Munich-based lawyer who had advised on the transaction from day one, to bring the technology to market.

In 2015 the founders dropped fluidised-bed gasification completely. It was too expensive, too hard to operate, too prone to failure, and it depended on high-quality fuel that most projects simply did not have.

Few teams have built fluidised beds, run them, and then walked away for good reasons. That decision shaped everything that followed.

1. from 2015

   Generation 1 · Wood-pellet gasifier

   The founders' first gasifier on the market, running on wood pellets. It was built many times worldwide and won large government-backed contracts for renewable heat and power. Its limit was the fuel: only high-quality wood pellets would do. A stepping stone, not the destination.

2. from 2019

   Generation 2 · X-5

   In 2018 the founders went into separate orbits for a while: Julien built EX Venture, a US-based venture firm, and Michael founded MFC in Germany, with EX Venture staying invested. The idea for a new reactor was born: small, but able to run on many fuels. MFC built the first prototype in 2019, co-funded through licence payments from EX Venture and Zero-X in the United States, and tested it in Indonesia, Japan, India and Germany. Zero-X ran two successful community funding rounds on Wefunder to co-finance government grants.

3. Generation 3 · Jenja

   The work led to the Jenja oxygen-steam system. The German Biomass Research Centre (DBFZ) and Hochschule Zittau/Görlitz recommended MFC for the COMETHA project in Paris, and extensive testing of the multi-fuel oxygen-steam system followed in the Zittau laboratory. Then came the surprise: a reactor originally designed for Tata Power to turn straw into power could handle very diverse waste streams, even at small scale. It was not designed as a waste machine. It turned out to be one.

Verkoso, approved with Hochschule Zittau/Görlitz and Fraunhofer IKTS, combines Jenja with fuel cell technology. Syngas goes directly into the fuel cell, so the system uses the full gas spectrum instead of extracting only the hydrogen. The first tests ran under a ZIM-funded feasibility study, and the full project is due to run in 2027.

In parallel, commercialisation of the Jenja core reactor began with our development partner in Spain, Equation Labs, which is building a complete, integrated system around the gasifier: drying upstream; the LONOX boiler, catalytic tar reforming and tar reduction downstream; the control systems; and our research into biochar.

Jenja is no longer just a reactor. It is a plant in a box.

Automation has been part of the story since 2018, when the team ran a global marketing collaboration with Schneider Electric on Industry 4.0 automation. Today the company is AI-first, close to the level of a software company.

Every unit in testing streams its data back to us, and we use it to optimise for 24/7 remote operation. On top of classic automation, we are developing AI that makes the machines easier to run: it turns complex machine data into clear, actionable commands, predicts maintenance before anything fails, and handles what rule-based automation cannot.

We like to tell this one against ourselves. Almost twenty years ago we started with a budget of €500,000 and a plan to build the system in 6 to 12 months. It turned into almost twenty years of development. That is not a joke at our expense. It is our moat.

Multi-fuel conversion means feeding a reactor waste streams that change all the time, while delivering a stable, high-quality gas on the other side. That is why so many companies enter gasification, discover after five years how hard it is, and drop out. This team stayed, through every setback, and CNN has featured the journey twice. We have never asked anyone to take our word for it: universities and research institutes around the world validate our results, so our technical data is always checked outside our own walls.