Inside Helios: Making iron without carbon, and without the premium

The world makes close to two billion tonnes of steel every year. That single material carries almost 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and yet we still make the iron inside it the same way we did in the 1800s. We burn coal, inject carbon into a blast furnace, strip the oxygen off the ore, and release CO2 into the air.

Two hundred years of progress, and the recipe is the same.

And like most breakthroughs, the people who found a possible answer did not start from inside a steel mill, instead, they began on a mission to the Moon.

Jonathan Geifman and his co-founders set out to make breathable oxygen on the lunar surface, where none exists. Oxygen is locked inside the Moon's rock, bound up in iron oxide. To release it, they needed a way to break that bond, to pull the oxygen off the iron. Carbon does this job on Earth, but given that the Moon has none, they went through the periodic table for another element that could take its place and landed on sodium. What they found was that sodium broke the bond at around 300°C, close to a kitchen-oven temperature, and left them holding pure oxygen.

That was the moment the story turned.

Separating oxygen from iron oxide is the same reaction as making iron run backwards. Strip the oxygen away for the astronauts, and what remains, on the Moon or on Earth, is the exact metal the world builds everything from. They had stumbled onto a way to make iron that used no carbon and ran at a fraction of a blast furnace's 1,400°C, emitting oxygen instead of CO2. A lunar oxygen experiment had become a potential new recipe for steel.

The question was whether the world wanted one.

Jonathan and his team looked at the industry he was suddenly holding a potential answer to, and what he saw was what he calls a ‘graveyard’.

Steel is one of the most price-sensitive commodity humans produce, and its past is full of cleaner, smarter processes that lost anyway, for the single reason that they cost more than the blast furnace. Everyone racing to decarbonise it kept reaching for the same broken lever: build the green version, then ask the market to pay a premium, or wait for regulation to force the switch. The pattern was too consistent to ignore, and it forced a hard conclusion.

If clean steel keeps losing on price, then price is the only place worth competing, as a cleaner furnace is worthless if no one can afford to run it. Simply put, the version of green steel that wins has to be the cheaper one.

While the chemistry is interesting, what makes this story worth telling is what Jonathan learned when he carried it back into one of the oldest and most unforgiving industries on Earth.

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The Interview: Inside Helios

Q: What was the moment that made this the right problem to solve?

For Jonathan, the problem stopped being theoretical the day he read the numbers off a factory floor.

"Not long after we completed the lab proof of concept five years ago, we toured a large steel mill in Europe. The young engineer who gave us the tour told us that their in-house construction company buys steel from India, because it is cheaper for them than the mill's own production cost. We also learned that the operation was not profitable, and that any move towards cleaner production would deepen the negative gross margin even further. It was mind blowing to grasp how dire the industry's situation is. Giving the industry a process that reduces both emissions and cost became our mission."

What Jonathan saw on that mill floor became the principle HELIOS is built on. Cut emissions and cost together, because the industry will only ever adopt a process that does both. That principle is also what drew us to the company, since cutting carbon and cost at the same time is exactly what we look for.

And while conviction is one thing, progress against it is another, and that is where the conversation turned next.

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Q: Helios is still pre-commercial. So where has it made its mark so far?

For a company still years from commercial production, Jonathan is precise about where that impact shows up today.

"Our technology is still in development and scaling up, so we have not yet made a physical impact on emissions at industrial scale. Where we have made an impact is on how the industry thinks. We push hard on the idea that a green premium will not decarbonise steel, and we can see that conversation shifting, whether by chance or thanks to the narrative we're pushing."

At this stage, that is the impact that matters. Reframing how an industry defines the problem is what clears the path for the technology that solves it. But changing minds is the visible bet. The riskier ones happen inside the company, long before the market ever sees them.

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‍Q: What is the biggest bet you have placed to get here?

"Taking risks is inherent in what we do. One early risk that paid off was the decision to build our own workshop capabilities, so we could design and build our own equipment. It was expensive at the start but it paid off quickly, because we could build new apparatus much faster and iterate on designs."

That decision did more than speed up the engineering, it put Jonathan and his team closer to the raw chemistry than most founders ever get, and working that close to the material is where they stumbled onto something everyone else had overlooked.

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‍Q: What surprised you most once you started working inside a centuries-old industry?

"There is a misconception that in the world of atoms, everything has already been explored, and no low-hanging fruit is left. We learned that this is not true. Even simple reactions, such as the one between sodium and iron oxide, had never been studied before. The industry had its biases, or simply no reason to look. In academia, no one studied it because no one had studied it before. Research almost always starts from existing references and existing knowledge. When there are no references and nothing to build on, no one takes the risk to research it."

That same appetite for the unexamined runs right through to how Jonathan sees the industry's future. He is willing to throw out its received wisdom, and he does it most sharply on the one question everyone else tiptoes around: money.

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‍Q: What are the broader ripple effects if your technology is widely adopted?

"You have to look at the history of the industry: which technologies made it big, which failed, which stagnated early. The lesson is the same every time. If we want to decarbonise steelmaking, our technology has to beat the unit economics of the blast furnace at its core, without relying on any premium or external incentive. That is the only version of this that scales. And if the chemistry beats the blast furnace on iron, the same reaction reaches copper, nickel, and the other metals the energy transition runs on."

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Why this matters

Ask most people why steel is still dirty and they will point to the technology. Jonathan points to the price.

It is the thread he kept pulling on all through our conversation. The cleaner process does not win, the cheaper one does, and for a century the two have never been the same steel. That is the deadlock every green furnace has broken itself against.

HELIOS is the bet that the two can finally be one and the same - lower heat, cheaper feedstock, electricity instead of coal, and a reagent used more than once, every choice aimed at the one number the industry has ever decided on.

Whether HELIOS clears that bar is still years from being settled, and Jonathan is the first to say so. What makes the company worth watching sits in his quietest answer, the one about the reaction nobody had thought to study.

The chemistry at the heart of this business went unexamined for two centuries, not because it was difficult, but because no one in steel had a reason to open the question, and no earlier work pointed the way.

The people who finally opened it were not looking at steel at all. Instead, they were on the Moon, trying to pull breathable oxygen out of lunar rock, when they realised the reaction that frees that oxygen is the same one that makes iron here on Earth. The answer to one of the oldest problems in heavy industry had been sitting in plain sight, waiting for someone with no reason to assume it was already solved.

Heavy industry has no shortage of hard science, but it has a shortage of people willing to reopen the questions everyone else filed as closed, the processes the world stopped testing generations ago. At KOMPAS we believe that the largest gains left in physical industries are often the simplest, hiding inside methods nobody thought to question, and they belong to whoever is stubborn enough to ask again.

Steel is the biggest of those questions, and the hardest to answer, which is why Jonathan started there and why we backed him. Get it right, and the interesting part is no longer the iron. It is how many other materials the world still makes the hard way, only because no one has thought to ask whether they should.

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About Helios

HELIOS produces iron from iron ore using sodium in place of carbon as the reducing agent. The process, which the company calls the ‘Helios Cycle®’, runs at around 300°C and emits oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. HELIOS recovers and reuses the sodium in a closed loop, and the method works with fine ores and mining waste, skipping the extra processing step that conventional production needs.

The company is scaling toward its first pilot plant and targets its first commercial units from 2029.

Continue reading more about Helios and visit their website at www.heliosmatters.com

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Written by Pauline Jimenez, Head of Marketing at KOMPAS VC