The Story of CleanJoule: The Company Building the Future of Sustainable Aviation

The Story of CleanJoule: The Company Building the Future of Sustainable Aviation

In 2009, a chemical engineer sat in his Houston office working for a major oil and gas company, questioning every choice that had led him there. He knew how to build molecules. He understood the petroleum industry intimately. And that knowledge was eating at him.

“I was always driven by sustainability and impact of human operations on sustainability,” Mukund Karanjikar, now CEO of CleanJoule, a sustainable aviation fuel producer that’s raised $55 million, explained in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. “If you go back, we decided to drill petroleum in 1859. Standard oil. The rest of it is history. And we designed a modern lifestyle around petroleum crude. This gunky, dark, nasty looking substance that we take out of the ground ten mile below sea level. And I don’t believe that’s how it should have happened ever.”

That crisis of conscience led to a question that would consume the next 15 years of his life: what can a chemical engineer do to turn the paradigm from fossil-based human life to sustainable, raw material based human life?

The Meeting That Changed Everything

The answer started with a chance encounter with a serial entrepreneur in his eighties from Salt Lake City, Utah. The entrepreneur asked Mukund a simple question: “How do you like working in oil and gas?”

Mukund’s response was honest. “I say it is pretty boring because working in a large oil and gas company is like working for the government in the sense of the bureaucracy of it.”

The entrepreneur’s counter-offer was equally simple: come to Salt Lake City and we’ll do something together. Something was never defined. There was no business plan, no deck, no roadmap. Just the opportunity to work with someone who had built deep tech companies ten times over.

So Mukund packed up his wife and dog, drove from Houston to Salt Lake City, and walked into a room with four walls and a roof. That was CleanJoule’s beginning.

Three Years in the Dark

What followed was what Mukund calls going down “many dark alleys, coming back, restarting.” From 2009 to 2012, the team worked to answer three questions: what could they meaningfully contribute based on their expertise, what was relevant, and what would be impactful?

“The most important piece of those three years, I remember, is we were learning every day there was something new every day,” Mukund recalls. “And that’s what kept us going.”

By training, Mukund knew molecular transformation. He could take feedstock and transform a into b, where b looked nothing like what a started with. He had always been driven by sustainability. The intersection led to a decision: focus on what’s hardest to decarbonize.

Long-haul transport became the target. Specifically, aviation.

“Energy dense hydrocarbon building for mature industries is the most impactful aspect of pursuing sustainability from the viewpoint of what is that we are going to disrupt,” Mukund explains. “And that would be building molecules in a new way from different and sustainable feedstock.”

The Pub Decision

Somewhere in Birmingham, UK, in a pub whose name has been lost to time, the CleanJoule team made a pivotal decision. They wouldn’t try to trade power through renewable energy assets. They would become something different: a company that builds sustainable aviation fuel using biomass feedstocks through molecular transformation.

By 2012, “we thought we hit gold in at least framing the problem.”

That year, they won their first government contract. It wasn’t large, but it was validation. “It was an instant gratification and instant ratification that other people, because, see, a lot of entrepreneurs do not understand that this is not helicopter money,” Mukund says. “When Department of Defense pays you to do something, they have their hand on your throat, which means you are supposed to deliver something.”

The Government Years

What followed was 14 years of development funded almost entirely by US government contracts. This wasn’t conventional venture-backed growth. It was something different: patient capital aligned with patient innovation.

The alignment made sense. The Department of Defense buys 4 billion gallons of aviation fuel every year across the world. Sustainable aviation fuel wasn’t just an environmental play. It was national security, supply chain resiliency, and the creation of new industries rolled into one.

“We happened to be lucky in that way,” Mukund admits. “The mousetrap we chose to work on happened to be so relevant for the us government that they literally almost undertook all our development from 2009 to 2023.”

The years taught patience. “You may have the next best idea after sliced bread, but it is still the next best idea,” Mukund says about the government contract process. “Government does not move at the same rate as a starry eyed entrepreneur wants to move.”

But that slowness served a purpose. It eliminated non-optimal solutions while making optimal solutions more robust, like polishing the world’s largest diamond.

The Strategic Raise

In 2023, CleanJoule raised their first venture round. The timing was deliberate, and the composition told a story.

Three airlines from three countries participated: Frontier in the US, Volaris in Mexico, and Wizz in Hungary. These weren’t passive checks. Each airline signed offtake agreements, committing to purchase large volumes at a future date while investing capital.

The round was led by Indigo Partners, helmed by aviation veteran Bill Franke, who Mukund describes as “an absolute visionary.” Gen Zero, the climate tech investment arm of Singapore’s Temasek, joined alongside Clean Hill Partners, a private equity firm focused on decarbonization.

“We were very selective in type of investors we choose because that money is for future performance. It’s not truly for past performance,” Mukund explains.

The Infrastructure Compatible Insight

One of CleanJoule’s most important strategic decisions was what not to change. Their sustainable aviation fuel is drop-in compatible, requiring zero modifications to aircraft, pipelines, or infrastructure.

“You’re already solving a very hard problem, which is can I make new type of hydrocarbons and compete with an extremely efficient industry called oil and gas,” Mukund says. “While we are at it, can I also sell it to an extremely conventional but highly efficient industry called aviation that hesitates to change anything. You go to them and you say, I do not want you to change anything. Just buy a different barrel of the fuel. It’s fully infrastructure compatible end to end.”

Today, you could take a special plane powered by 100% CleanJoule fuel and fly carbon neutral. The technology works. What remains is scaling it economically.

The Road to 2029

The timeline forward is deliberate. Up to 2022 was solving technological problems, what Mukund calls the rear view mirror period. 2023 to 2025 is engineering scale-up, with an operational plant that serves as a blueprint for commercial manufacturing. Work on full commercial scale begins in 2026.

“Come 2029, we will have a full scale manufacturing operation of manufacturing at what would be called a commercial scale,” Mukund projects. “Away we go from there on geographical expansion of the manufacturing operation in various parts of the world.”

The Promise of Real Zero

Mukund’s vision extends beyond CleanJoule’s commercial success. “We are after making aviation 100% sustainable,” he says. Airlines are fixated on net zero by 2050, but Mukund wants to go further to real zero, not net zero where credits offset emissions elsewhere.

“From my viewpoint as a SAF entrepreneur, I want to make sustainable aviation fuel affordable and available to everyone, everywhere on the planet,” he explains. “And while doing that, since we use biomass as the feedstock, we are looking at lifting millions and millions of people around the planet who are on the rural side of the world out of poverty forever.”

It’s a dual sustainability play: planetary and economic. By using feedstocks from rural areas, CleanJoule creates new industries that bridge what Mukund calls the industrial revolution with the agrarian economy of the past.

The end goal? “Let’s make aviation 100% independent of petroleum.”

It’s a 20-year story that started with a crisis of conscience in a Houston office, took a detour through a pub in Birmingham, spent a decade in government-funded labs, and now points toward a future where the gunky, dark substance we drill from ten miles below sea level becomes obsolete.

That’s not a quick win. But as Mukund says about deep tech founders, “even if you have to look back 20 years later and God forbids you do not succeed, you should derive the satisfaction out of, well, I tried and I was in it for the long haul and it just wasn’t my time.”

For CleanJoule, their time is 2029. And the promised land isn’t just commercial success. It’s changing civilization.