Thaioil backs Viridi’s £2.2m CO2 surfactant scale-up

By Olivia Hart

Thaioil’s corporate venture arm, TOP Ventures, joined a £2.2 million ($3 million) funding round for British carbon-to-chemicals startup Viridi, which uses captured carbon dioxide to make palm-free surfactants for home and personal care.

TOP Ventures participated as a strategic investor. Odyssey Ventures led the round, Alphatron Impact Ventures co-invested, and existing angel investors made follow-on commitments. The announcement did not disclose TOP Ventures’ own check, so the £2.2 million ($3 million) figure represents the full financing round, not Thaioil’s individual investment. Viridi will use the money for three stated priorities:

• Accelerate the scale-up of its carbon-to-chemicals technology.
• Strengthen its team.
• Support commercial expansion into Asia and the United States.

Dr Daniel Stewart, CEO of Viridi, said: “Having a strategic partner like TOP Ventures look closely at our technology, see its value and choose to back it at this stage is strong validation of what we've built. We'll be working closely with them to deliver our technology to market, starting in Asia.

“With Odyssey Ventures supporting our growth in the US, we now have partners who can help us take CO2-based surfactants to the world.”

Vivat Wongnirund, Vice President-New S-Curve Business Development of Thaioil, added: “We have followed Viridi’s development since 2024 and have been impressed by its progress, particularly in CO2-based surfactants.

“The technology has been tested in real manufacturing environments and shows strong potential for integration into existing industrial operations.”

Viridi describes its method as a platform rather than a single-product formula. The company says it can apply the technology across multiple classes of chemicals using existing manufacturing infrastructure. Surfactants, described as key ingredients across home and personal care, are the first major application. Potential later uses include other areas of chemical manufacturing and, ultimately, removing fossil feedstocks from the supply chain entirely.

The financing follows several commercial milestones. Viridi launched Vireya, its first CO2-based anionic surfactant, in 2025. Earlier this year, the company announced an agreement with Zschimmer & Schwarz to accelerate the scale-up and market adoption of Viridi’s sustainable-surfactant technology. Viridi most recently won the Renewable Material of the Year 2026 Innovation Award at the Renewable Materials Conference in Germany.

What does this change for personal care?

Immediately, the investment gives Viridi more resources to move from announced technology to scaled manufacturing, beginning with Asia, while Odyssey Ventures’ US backing creates a second route to commercialization. For home and personal care formulators, the relevant development is potential additional supply of palm-free, CO2-based surfactant chemistry that can integrate with existing industrial operations, if the scale-up proceeds as planned.

However, this remains an investment and technology-development announcement, not a clinical study. The announcement identifies no finished skin-care product, ingredient concentration, comparator formulation, participant cohort, clinical endpoint, adverse-event data or independent dermatologic evaluation of Vireya. It also provides no production volume, cost comparison, carbon-accounting methodology or benchmark against conventional surfactants. Neither the CEO’s description of “strong validation” nor the investor’s account of manufacturing potential establishes clinical efficacy, skin tolerability, allergenicity or superiority over palm-derived and other fossil-feedstock alternatives.

For dermatology readers, the practical answer is therefore narrower: no change to product recommendations follows now. What changes is Viridi’s capacity and geographic reach. The next test is whether the company can convert Asia-first market entry, US expansion and use of existing infrastructure into repeatable commercial output. Until then, the defensible conclusion is a funded scale-up, not a proven dermatologic benefit.