How a superyacht dealer became a technology entrepreneur

Jamie Edmiston usually spends his time selling and chartering superyachts for the world’s mega rich. And he’s good at it, with the easy charm and confident manner of the sort of chap you’d happily hand a cheque for tens of millions of pounds.
On his to-do list this year is the sale of the world’s first hydrogen-powered yacht, a 118-metre beast being finished off right now in a Dutch yard and rumoured to cost £515 million. It is “without doubt the best yacht ever built”, Edmiston says.
So far this year, the eponymous business he leads has sold 28 superyachts, he adds, “with a cumulative value of over £1 billion. We have a strong leadership position in the space”.
Which makes it all the more odd that several times a year he makes the trip to Mercers Row, on an industrial estate on the northeast edge of Cambridge, where he parks up next to the Magnet Trade kitchen supply shop and opposite Partyman World of Play.
It’s also the home of a promising ‘cleantech’ company, previously known as Cambridge Nanosystems but now called Levidian, which can crack methane gas to create hydrogen and high-grade graphene, the one-atom-thick wonder material first isolated at Manchester University in 2004.
Edmiston, 49, bought the business in December 2020 at the height of the second Covid lockdown. But the deal didn’t come about because of an introduction from one of his wealthy contacts. It came about because his car broke down.
He recalls: “There was a guy who lives in the building I live in who said to me a couple of times, ‘Hey Jamie, would you come and meet my friend who makes graphene?’ I didn’t know what graphene was and I was super busy dealing with all the dramas of Covid. So I said, ‘Sure, we’ll do that sometime.’
“Then one day my car broke down and this particular guy helped me get it started and at the end of that he said, ‘Would you come and meet my friend who makes graphene?’ By this stage I felt a duty to do it.”
So off he went with a colleague to Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, where the scientist behind the technology, Krzysztof Koziol, was based. They flew by helicopter from the London heliport which Edmiston sponsors and only expected the meeting to last half an hour.
“My plan was to go, be polite, listen and come back home and forget about it,” says Edmiston. Koziol explained the technology. “Having planned to only spend 30 minutes there, we spent two hours. It was fascinating.”
They left the university wondering why the clever people at Ineos, the chemicals giant, or Goldman Sachs were not all over it, and did some background research on the flight back to London. “By the time we had got back we had made the decision to see if we could help the business and get involved.”
Edmiston is not an obvious cleantech investor, having previously only dabbled with luxury brands such as a furniture maker. “It was a bit of a hunch. Krzysztof explained that the challenge with graphene, this wonder material, is getting the consistency. What he had figured out was how to make super high-quality graphene in a consistent manner,” Edmiston explains.
That all sounded promising, but his ears had also pricked up when he heard that the hydrogen was being flared as a waste product, as planning for the hydrogen-powered superyacht had already begun. “Without doubt I was influenced partly by what I was doing with this hydrogen boat,” he says.
Cambridge Nanosystems (CNS), founded in 2012, had not been an overnight success. Its previous owners, the Malaysian group Felda Global Ventures, could see the potential and acquired a 70 per cent stake in 2013, but by 2019 it had written down the value of its investment and focused its efforts elsewhere.
“Krzysztof had ended up being a minority shareholder in a business that the other shareholders were not interested in,” says Edmiston.
“It was a big punt by us as there was not a lot of due diligence that we could do, other than with Krzysztof. But less than a month later, [at 9.30pm] on December 23, 2020, we bought what was CNS. I woke up on Christmas Eve owning a warehouse in Cambridge, with lots of great patents and technology and zero employees, which was a little bit daunting.”
He had invested £8 million and provided a further £2 million of working capital.
“What I understood about the technology and particularly about graphene was that it needed someone to run it like a commercial business,” says Edmiston, echoing a common assessment of Britain’s excellence in science but inexperience at commercialising that knowhow.
“I said we are not going to be a science project based in Cambridge. We are going to run it with rigorous attention to detail with everything that we do. We need to have a strong brand and we are going to get great people together. We rehired two of the former engineers in January 2021 and then we recruited an A-team, including John [Hartley, now chief executive] who joined in August.
“We rebranded as Levidian. Extraordinarily the business took off. We have taken an abandoned warehouse in Cambridge into a 104-person venture with shareholders such as Baker Hughes [the American energy technology group] and Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund.”
Baker Hughes invested in October 2022, staking £12 million in a deal valuing Levidian at £130 million. Mubadala followed, taking an undisclosed “strategic stake”, with Levidian’s valuation rising to £150 million.
Graphene has application in a wide range of products, including steel production, concrete and cables. It features in the road surface of stretches of the A1 near Alnwick, Northumberland, and in Head tennis rackets. Edmiston has his eye on batteries, where graphene could improve charging times and how long they last by about 30 per cent. “That could be a complete game-changer,” he says.
Hartley, who joined from Centrica, says the company should make revenues of more than £10 million this year and has a giant pipeline if trials deliver as expected. Its customers range from the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company — which operates the biggest gas processing facility in the UAE — to United Utilities and Worthy Farm, home to the Glastonbury festival.
He is targeting industries that find it hard to abate their carbon emissions. “If you look at greenhouse gas emissions, 64 per cent of them globally come from sectors like waste facilities, big aluminium, steel producers, rubber and glass producers, and that is where we are focused.”
Customers buy Levidian’s Loop system — previously known as the Reactor, but changed in another Edmiston rebrand — which arrives in a shipping container. It can take in methane from sources such as landfill, wastewater and farm sites, as well as from industrial supplies of methane.
“We can produce tens of tonnes of graphene from a small unit in one facility. We don’t have a problem with scaleability,” says Hartley, 41. “What we can’t do yet is grid-scale facilities. We are not targeting power stations, it is more industrial facilities.”
He is now busy raising further funding of around £75 million to help the company build manufacturing and operating facilities in the UK, the Middle East and the US, and conduct more research and development. “The market conditions [for cleantech fundraising] in the last 18 months have been difficult. There is a really high bar and it is a hard process. Investors are more risk averse than they were three years ago,” he says.
But he’s confident they will make it and isn’t looking for government support, as many other early stage cleantech and deeptech companies do. “The economics work already and that is why we are selling them at scale. What is helpful for us is if the rhetoric of the government is in support of net zero. The power of that internationally is enormous.”
Edmiston remains Levidian’s No 1 fan and hopes others will see the light. “I absolutely believe that Levidian as a company can play a really critical role both in the world of climate tech and the UK economy. At times it is frustrating that it has taken quite a lot of effort to get people to buy into it. Hopefully, the new government will drive these sort of things forward.”