ENTRADE Group acquires Agnion Energy Inc.

International investors transfer their shares to North Rhine Westphalian generator of electricity from wood

The ENTRADE Group is buying all the shares in Agnion Energy Inc. from their existing owners. These are three international venture capital companies and the largest US corporation in the waste management field, which are withdrawing from their investment after the initial phase in which the technology company was founded and built up. After restructuring operations have been completed Agnion Energy Inc will be integrated into Entrade Energiesysteme AG.

In May 2013 ENTRADE reached an agreement to acquire the shares held by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Wellington Partners, Munich Venture Partners and Waste Management, which had previously together invested €35 million in the start-up company. It was also agreed that the purchase price would remain confidential.

Agnion is a leading supplier in the field of generating electricity and heating from solid biomass. The company has its head office in Pfaffenhofen, Bavaria, with a branch in Bolzano. The core technology involved was devised 10 years ago at the Technical University of Munich, and then developed for the market as the 'Heatpipe Reformer' (HPR) by Agnion together with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jürgen Karl, Professor of Energy Process Engineering at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and his team. The product enjoys all-round protection from more than 30 patents.

Technology transfer and synergies in wood gasification

Explaining the benefits provided by the process Julien Uhlig, CEO of ENTRADE Energiesysteme AG, states: "For the first time the technology developed by Agnion enables biomethane to be generated from solid biomass and then to be fed into the natural gas grid," adding: "We expect it to offer us technology transfer and synergies with our own production engineering for the decentral generation of electricity and heating on the basis of biomass, selected raw materials and waste."

Currently the company has concrete plans for more than 20 locations in Germany and Italy.

For more information please see www.entrade.de.

ENTRADE invests worldwide in sustainable energy companies with extraordinary growth potential. With prices for food and electricity rising all over the world, using our limited resources more efficiently is a major factor of the solutions we fund. Working close with German Government Agencies, ENTRADE has been awarded three federal grants for R&D projects as well as three state grants in order to install a number of pilot plants in the field of solid biomass usage.

ENTRADE Energiesysteme AG
Hendrik van Ritter, CSO
Hubertusstr. 6
D-53949 Dahlem-Schmidtheim
Tel.: +49 (0) 2447-218 100-0
Fax: +49 (0) 2447-218-100-9
E-mail: info@entrade.de

This release was published on openPR.