KU Leuven venture SkyLign wins award worth up to €1 million

Last week, SkyLign, a promising venture currently incubating at KU Leuven, won the Capnamic Deep Tech Award at Stage Two, a pan-European competition for start-ups and ventures emerging from leading universities. The award gives the team the opportunity to secure an investment of up to €1 million, subject to a positive due diligence review.
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Skylign wins Capnamic Deep Tech Award

SkyLign is a brand-new venture from the Sels Group at KU Leuven and builds on technology developed and scaled up at the university's Biocon facility. Its ambition is to enable the production of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) from plant-based residues, which could play an important role in decarbonising the aviation industry.

Addressing barriers to sustainable aviation fuels

Producing sustainable aviation fuels at scale remains challenging. SkyLign's innovative technology, which has already been validated at pilot scale, addresses three important barriers:

  • Feedstock availability: SkyLign’s biorefining process is feedstock flexible and can use different streams of plant residues from all over the world.
  • Production and infrastructure costs: the technology leverages existing refinery infrastructure, significantly reducing the overall cost of production.
  • Fuel blending limitations: Skylign’s technology efficiently produces cyclic hydrocarbons that are essential for aviation fuel performance and can help overcome current blending limitations.

From Moonshot Flanders to take-off

The technology behind SkyLign is closely connected to Moonshot Flanders. SkyLign builds on biorefining technology developed and scaled up at KU Leuven’s Biocon facility. This pilot facility, designed to scale up the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass into bio-based aromatics, was developed within the Moonshot Flanders Later Stafe Innovation project PILLAR.
 
Today, SkyLign is exploring the potential of this biorefining technology for sustainable aviation fuels. Its progress illustrates how technologies supported through Moonshot Flanders can move from research and pilot-scale validation towards new industrial applications and commercial opportunities.

 

Discover the PILLAR project

 

About SkyLign

SkyLign is a Belgian-based technology licensing company in formation, currently spinning out from KU Leuven, working to speed up the production of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). Aviation is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, and SAF is the most practical way to cut its emissions today. However, a structural mismatch between supply and demand in SAF is arising due to accelerating commitments by both corporates and governments. SkyLign helps to close that gap. We don’t build and run plants ourselves. We license proven SAF process technology to producers and back it with engineering and technical support, so new capacity can come online faster and with less risk.