Forge Industries Raises $3.85 Million to Turn Waste Into Coal-Replacing Fuel

Forge Industries has raised $3.85 million co-led by Next Phase Capital and 8090 Industries to fund its first US biofuel facility, planned outside Las Vegas later this year, as the climate-tech company scales technology that converts hard-to-recycle waste into industrial fuel. The Nashville-announced round follows Forge's progression from producing 100 to 200 kilogram batches at founding in 2022 to completing industrial-scale pilots exceeding 100 tons by 2025. The funding is also backed by minority investors and a sponsorship from the Nevada Governor's Office of Economic Development.

 

Turning Trash Into a Coal Substitute

 

Forge's core technology addresses two problems simultaneously: waste that resists conventional recycling, particularly certain plastics, and industrial demand for lower-emission fuel. The company converts that hard-to-recycle waste into a high-performance industrial fuel designed to directly replace coal in heavy industries including cement, steel, lime and power generation.

The critical feature is that the fuel is engineered to work in existing equipment, meaning factories do not need to retrofit or replace their current machinery to burn it in place of coal. That compatibility matters commercially because it removes the largest barrier facing many alternative fuels: the capital cost and operational disruption of overhauling industrial equipment. A drop-in fuel substitute lowers the adoption barrier considerably compared with technologies that require heavy industry to rebuild around new machinery, which is what makes the pitch to cement, steel and lime producers, all notoriously difficult to decarbonise, potentially viable at scale.

 

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The Scale-Up From Batches to Tons

 

The company's technical progression underpins the case that this is ready for commercial deployment rather than early-stage science. Forge began by producing small industrial fuel batches of 100 to 200 kilograms and, through what the company describes as dozens of rounds of testing and validation, advanced to industrial-scale pilots exceeding 100 tons by 2025. That roughly thousand-fold increase in single-batch scale is the kind of progression investors typically look for before committing capital to a first commercial facility, since it demonstrates the process holds up outside a controlled small-scale environment.

The planned Las Vegas-area facility represents the next step in that trajectory, moving from pilot-scale validation to an operating production site. Whether the technology maintains its performance and cost economics at full commercial scale, rather than just pilot scale, is the test that facility is designed to pass.

 

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Why the Waste Angle Matters Alongside the Fuel Angle

 

Founder and chief executive Chelsea Boyle has said her interest in the problem traces to time spent in Senegal observing the environmental impact of waste firsthand, an experience that later shaped Forge's mission to build what the company calls a circular fuel economy. That framing positions the business at the intersection of two distinct pressures facing industry: rising costs and regulation around landfill diversion for hard-to-recycle materials, and growing demand from heavy industry to cut emissions without abandoning existing infrastructure.

Next Phase Capital, the growth investment firm founded by former BrightStar Care chief executive Shelly Sun Berkowitz, co-led the round and takes a board observer role in the company, giving it an ongoing advisory presence as Forge scales. Berkowitz described Boyle as tackling one of the era's most challenging environmental and industrial problems, framing the investment as consistent with Next Phase Capital's focus on backing founders building transformational businesses in sectors that matter. Whether Forge's first US facility successfully converts its pilot-scale validation into reliable commercial production, and whether industrial buyers adopt the fuel at the volumes needed to displace meaningful quantities of coal, will determine whether this funding marks the start of a scalable circular fuel network or remains a single proof-of-concept site.