UniSieve AG has closed a $9 million Series A round, bringing the Zurich-based membrane developer's total raised capital to $25 million as it pushes its gas separation technology from pilot validation into pre-commercial production.

Orano Venture Fund, managed by Supernova Invest, led the round. Amadeus APEX Technology Fund, Founderful, Zürcher Kantonalbank and Guenot Holding all participated, alongside new and returning investors. That investor mix matters for practitioners: Orano's involvement gives UniSieve a line into large-scale industrial infrastructure and corporate expertise as it builds out manufacturing.

What does the technology actually replace?

UniSieve's core product is a hybrid membrane that embeds advanced porous materials — metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and zeolites — to achieve molecular-level gas separation without the thermal or cryogenic processes that currently dominate industrial gas processing. In practice, that means replacing energy-intensive thermal distillation columns with heat-free membrane units.

The company has already moved its manufacturing from pilot-scale validation to repeatable, pre-commercial production of deployable separation hardware. That's the distinction worth tracking: this is built, repeatable manufacturing capacity, not a lab demonstration — but paying-customer deployment at scale is still the next milestone, not the current one.

Which material streams are in play?

The Series A proceeds target two field-validated verticals:

• Olefin separation in heavy industrial chemical processing — recovering olefins, a core petrochemical building block, without the distillation energy bill.
• Point-source carbon capture at industrial emission sites, where membrane units could capture CO2 at the stack instead of downstream of it.

CEO Samuel Hess framed the value proposition in direct terms: "UniSieve's high-precision membranes make it possible to replace energy-intensive thermal technology with compact and simple solutions. This enables clients to recover more of their products and control emissions while spending less. The fresh capital will allow us to focus on execution."

For operators, the pitch is straightforward economics: heat-free separation cuts the operational energy footprint of gas processing, and higher-precision membranes recover more product per tonne of feed. Both levers hit the cost line, not just the emissions report.

Where the money goes

The capital has three stated allocations:

• Scaling manufacturing of the membrane separation hardware beyond pre-commercial volumes.
• Funding field trials with paying customers across chemical production facilities, gas suppliers and heavy emission sources.
• Deepening the strategic relationship with Orano's industrial network as deployment widens.

The emphasis on field trials with paying customers — chemical producers, gas suppliers, heavy emitters — signals where the commercial risk now sits. The membranes work at the molecular level; the question is repeatable performance across varied industrial feed streams, at customer sites, under contract.

Why this matters for carbon capture economics

Point-source capture remains one of the more capital-hungry segments of the circularity value chain, largely because conventional capture methods lean on energy-intensive separation steps that erode the business case. Membrane-based approaches that eliminate heat from the separation step would change that arithmetic — fewer inputs per tonne of CO2 captured, smaller unit footprint, modular deployment.

UniSieve is betting that olefin recovery and point-source capture share enough process DNA that success in one accelerates the other. The Series A capital is sized to test that thesis in the field.

What happens next

Watch for the first results from the funded field trials with paying customers at chemical production and heavy emission facilities. Those trials — not further fundraising — will determine whether UniSieve's $25 million in cumulative backing converts into commercial membrane capacity operating at industrial scale.