The global maritime shipping industry is facing an unprecedented decarbonization challenge. Responsible for transporting approximately 90% of global trade, the merchant fleet also accounts for nearly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions—amounting to roughly one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. With the International Maritime Organization (IMO) tightening regulations to reach net-zero emissions by or around 2050, ship operators are scrambling for solutions that can be deployed rapidly without requiring the trillions of dollars needed to replace entire fleets.
Enter Newlight, a San Francisco Bay Area-based clean technology startup founded by Israeli Navy veterans. The company has developed an innovative, retrofittable hydrogen-injection system designed to significantly reduce fuel consumption and carbon emissions for existing cargo vessels. By injecting compressed hydrogen fuel into conventional diesel engines with millisecond precision, Newlight’s system optimizes combustion, allowing ships to burn less fossil fuel while maintaining performance.
Following a highly successful 8,500-nautical-mile commercial test voyage and the completion of a $9 million seed funding round, Newlight is preparing to scale its technology across the global shipping sector.
1. Main Facts: The Newlight Technology and Funding Breakthrough
At the core of Newlight’s commercial offering is a hardware-and-software retrofit system that introduces compressed hydrogen into the air intake of large marine diesel engines. Rather than replacing diesel entirely, the system acts as a high-tech efficiency booster.
Key Milestones and Financial Backing
Newlight recently closed a $9 million seed funding round to accelerate the commercialization and production of its hydrogen-injection technology. The investment round features a diverse coalition of maritime, governmental, and deep-tech backers:
- lomarlabs: The venture and innovation arm of Lomar Shipping, a prominent global ship owning and management group.
- BIRD Energy: A bilateral program operated by the Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, funded jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Israel Ministry of Energy.
- Undeterred Capital and CiRi Ventures: Deep-tech venture capital funds focusing on hard-to-abate industrial sectors.
- Fusion VC: An accelerator program dedicated to scaling Israeli startups in the United States.
Alongside the funding announcement, Newlight revealed that its system successfully completed its first long-range commercial test voyage. Installed on a 650-foot-long bulk carrier owned by Lomar Shipping, the system operated continuously during an 8,500-nautical-mile journey from Singapore to Ghana.
The real-world trial yielded remarkable efficiency gains, recording a 24% reduction in fuel consumption and a 28% reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Armed with these figures, Newlight has already secured commercial agreements to install its system on 12 vessels across multiple shipping companies, with broader fleet deployments slated for next year.
2. Chronology: From the Navy to the Open Ocean
The path to Newlight’s commercial breakthrough began in the demanding environment of marine engineering.
[Navy Service] ---> [Startup Founding] ---> [System R&D & Lab Tests] ---> [lomarlabs Partnership] ---> [Singapore-Ghana Voyage] ---> [$9M Seed Round]Military Roots and Early Development
Co-founders Evyatar Cohen and Haran Cohen Hillel spent years working closely with marine propulsion, electrical systems, and heavy machinery during their service in the Israeli Navy. This hands-on experience gave them a deep understanding of the operational constraints, maintenance cycles, and extreme conditions faced by maritime vessels.
Recognizing that the shipping industry could not afford to wait decades for alternative-fuel vessels (such as those powered entirely by green ammonia, methanol, or hydrogen fuel cells) to be built, the founders set out to design a solution that could be integrated directly into the tens of thousands of diesel-powered ships currently active on the oceans.
Engineering the Retrofit Concept
Between 2021 and 2023, the founders focused on designing a system that bypassed the traditional hurdles of maritime retrofits. Standard retrofits often require ships to enter a dry dock—a highly disruptive and expensive process that can cost operators tens of thousands of dollars per day in lost charter revenue.
Newlight engineered its hydrogen-injection hardware to be modular, allowing it to be installed while the ship remains in active service or during routine port calls. The team spent thousands of hours in the laboratory refining the software algorithms required to safely control hydrogen combustion inside massive, slow-speed marine engines.
The Landmark Commercial Trial
In early 2024, Newlight partnered with lomarlabs to transition their technology from the laboratory to the ocean. Technicians installed the system on a 650-foot Lomar Shipping bulk carrier in Singapore. Crucially, the installation was completed in under two weeks without taking the vessel out of service.
Over the course of the subsequent month-long, 8,500-nautical-mile voyage across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to Ghana, the system ran continuously under real-world maritime conditions, proving its durability against heavy seas, temperature fluctuations, and constant engine vibration.
3. Supporting Data: Technical Mechanics and Economic Viability
To understand how Newlight achieves a 24% reduction in fuel consumption, it is necessary to examine the physical chemistry of dual-fuel combustion and the real-time telemetry driving the system.
The Science of Hydrogen Co-Combustion
In a standard marine diesel engine, fuel is injected into the combustion chamber under high pressure, where it ignites. However, diesel combustion is relatively slow and often incomplete, leading to unburned hydrocarbons, soot, and carbon monoxide emissions.
[Air Intake + Precise Hydrogen Flow]
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[Cylinder Compression] ───> [Diesel Injection] ───> [Rapid, Complete Combustion] ───> [Reduced Diesel Needed]Hydrogen has a flame speed that is nearly ten times faster than that of diesel. When a small, highly controlled amount of hydrogen is introduced into the engine’s air intake, it acts as a combustion catalyst. When the diesel is injected and ignites, the hydrogen accelerates the flame front, causing the diesel fuel to burn much more rapidly and completely.
Because the combustion process is far more efficient, the engine extracts more energy from the same volume of diesel. Newlight’s software then instructs the engine’s electronic control unit (ECU) to reduce the flow of diesel fuel, maintaining the exact same power output while burning significantly less fuel.
Millisecond-Level Precision Telemetry
Hydrogen is highly volatile, meaning its introduction must be managed with extreme precision to prevent engine knocking or premature ignition. Newlight’s system utilizes a proprietary suite of sensors and actuators that monitor the engine’s vitals down to the millisecond level. The system continuously measures:
- Exhaust Gas Temperature (EGT): To ensure the engine does not overheat.
- Combustion Chamber Pressure: To prevent damaging pressure spikes.
- Air Intake Pressure and Volume: To calculate the optimal air-to-fuel ratio.
Based on this data, the system adjusts the flow of compressed hydrogen for every single stroke of the engine’s pistons, ensuring safe and optimized combustion under varying load conditions, such as maneuvering in ports or cruising in open waters.
| Parameter | Performance Metric |
|---|---|
| Installation Time | < 2 Weeks (No dry dock required) |
| Fuel Consumption Reduction | 24% (Demonstrated in commercial trials) |
| CO2 Emission Reduction | 28% (Demonstrated in commercial trials) |
| Estimated Annual Savings | Up to $500,000 per vessel |
| Target Vessels | Bulk carriers, container ships, tankers, and roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ro) vessels |
4. Official Responses: Perspectives from Founders and Backers
The successful voyage and subsequent funding round have generated substantial optimism among Newlight’s leadership and its investment partners.
Evyatar Cohen, co-founder of Newlight, uses a pop-culture analogy to explain the system’s operation to those outside the maritime industry:
"It’s one of the most iconic scenes in the Fast & Furious film franchise: Paul Walker’s thumb comes off the steering wheel and smashes a small red button, pumping nitrous oxide into the engine of his Mitsubishi Eclipse and giving the car an explosive boost.
Instead of getting power, we actually say to the engine: ‘Hey, reduce the fuel [flow] to the engine, we don’t need as much because we have some nitrous.’ It’s [just] called hydrogen."
Haran Cohen Hillel, co-founder and CEO of Newlight, reflected on the emotional and technical milestone of the Singapore-to-Ghana voyage:
"It was amazing. Being onboard and seeing the system operate in real conditions was a completely different experience from anything we had done in the lab. We spent a lot of time monitoring the system, the engine behavior, and the performance, and what impressed us most was how smoothly everything worked.
Seeing the system integrate with the vessel, operate reliably, and deliver the results we had been working toward was a huge milestone for us and for the entire Newlight team."
Representatives from lomarlabs expressed strong confidence in the partnership, noting that the ability to retrofit vessels without dry-docking is a game-changer for ship owners who are under intense regulatory pressure to lower their Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII) ratings. By demonstrating a 28% reduction in CO2 emissions on an active bulk carrier, Newlight has provided a commercially viable pathway to compliance that can be deployed immediately across global fleets.
5. Implications: Decarbonizing Global Shipping and Beyond
The successful deployment of Newlight’s technology has profound implications for both the maritime industry and the broader global transition to clean energy.
Solving the Vessel Lifespan Dilemma
The average lifespan of a commercial cargo vessel is between 25 and 30 years. Because of this long capital cycle, ships being built today will still be operating in 2050. The industry cannot achieve its net-zero goals solely by waiting for old ships to be scrapped and replaced with next-generation green vessels.
Retrofit technologies like Newlight’s bridge this gap. They allow shipowners to immediately reduce the carbon footprint of their existing fleets, buying crucial time for green hydrogen production and alternative-fuel supply chains to mature.
A Leaner Alternative to Methanol and Ammonia
While other companies are developing retrofits to run marine engines on ammonia or methanol, these solutions face significant headwinds:
- Ammonia is highly toxic to human health and marine life, requiring complex safety systems and specialized crew training.
- Methanol requires substantial cargo space for fuel storage because it has a lower energy density than diesel, and green methanol remains scarce and expensive.
- Infrastructure Costs: Both fuels require extensive modifications to the vessel’s fuel storage and delivery systems.
In contrast, Newlight’s system is far less invasive. It does not replace the primary fuel but optimizes it, requiring a much smaller physical footprint on the vessel and a fraction of the capital expenditure.
Horizontal Scaling into Other Hard-to-Abate Sectors
While Newlight remains intensely focused on the maritime shipping market in the near term, the underlying technology—using millisecond-precision hydrogen injection to optimize heavy-duty diesel combustion—is highly transferable.
┌───> Maritime Shipping (Current Focus)
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[Newlight Core Tech] ──┼───> Rail Transportation
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└───> Backup Power for Data CentersHeavy-haul rail transport, off-grid mining equipment, and diesel backup generators for data centers all rely on similar large-scale diesel engines. As industries face mounting pressure to decarbonize, Newlight’s dual-fuel injection technology could find a wide array of applications across the global industrial economy, establishing the startup as a major player in the transition to a low-carbon future.
