A New Zealand startup is pumping water into rock and waiting for the rock to hand back hydrogen. The company is Kura Dynamics, founded in Christchurch in January 2026 by Dr Chris Oze and Peter Joynt.
How it works
Most green hydrogen is made by splitting water with a lot of electricity. Kura goes underground instead. It sets up the right conditions so water reacts with iron-rich (ultramafic) rock. The rock takes the oxygen and the hydrogen is released. The plan is to build the control system that makes that reaction happen on purpose and recovers the gas.
Why it matters
Electricity is 60 to 80% of the cost of making hydrogen by electrolysis. Green hydrogen currently costs more than NZ$12 a kilogram, and heavy industry generally needs it at around NZ$4 to NZ$5. If you can cut out most of the power bill, that gap starts to look closable.
In the lab, the company says up to 0.6 kg of hydrogen can come out of a cubic metre of ultramafic rock under the right conditions.
The raise
Kura raised NZ$4.65M in a pre-seed round co-led by GD1 and Motion Capital, with Outset Ventures, K1W1 and NZGCP also in.
My read
This is the cleverest angle on hydrogen I’ve seen in a while. Instead of fighting the electricity cost, it tries to sidestep it. But these are still lab numbers. Now it has to work in the ground, at scale, where rock is a lot less tidy than a lab sample.