From Lab Bench to Climate Innovation: Ayah’s Origin Story

Ayah didn’t start in climate. She started in medical laboratory science — analysing bacteria, running diagnostics, tracking disease. What shifted everything was a realisation that most of what she was analysing was downstream of a bigger problem.

“In the medical and lab technologies, we are analyzing the disease and bacteria. But the root cause is linked to climate factors — air quality, environment. When I realised this, I didn’t want to analyze anymore. I wanted to be more impactful.”

The routine nature of diagnostic work, she says, wasn’t enough. She wanted to be at the source, not the symptom. So she did something that takes most people years to decide: within a single year, she completed a climate and sustainability fellowship in Egypt, built the foundational science knowledge she needed, and pivoted her entire career. What followed was AuraCap — built from scratch, self-funded at the start, and designed specifically for the climate challenges of the MENA region.

The medical science background turned out to be an asset, not a liability. Working in a lab, Ayah had already been measuring air quality at the parts-per-million level, observing how bacteria both produce and absorb CO2, and thinking about the relationship between environmental conditions and biological outcomes. The science translated. The jargon was different. The problems were the same.

What Is AuraCap — and Why Does the MENA Region Need It?

AuraCap is a low-cost, portable carbon capture device that pulls CO2 from point-source emissions or directly from the air — and converts it into valuable products, including green hydrogen. It operates on renewable energy, uses a closed-loop system with zero water consumption, and is designed to be affordable and deployable in environments that can’t access the large-scale industrial carbon capture equipment dominant in European and North American markets.

That last point is the founding logic of the company.

The MENA region faces a specific combination of climate stressors — extreme heat, deteriorating air quality, water scarcity, and economic pressure — that neither European carbon capture technology nor the traditional fossil fuel economy adequately addresses. The big players in carbon capture are building for large-scale industrial clients. Their equipment is expensive, technically complex, and designed for environments with established green infrastructure. For SMEs in Jordan, for communities in regions already feeling the acute health effects of poor air quality, that technology is simply inaccessible.

“Here in the MENA region, we don’t have any innovation or technologies focused on reducing emissions. In Europe and globally, they focus on carbon emissions. If we want to scale and open new markets, we need standards appropriate for the EU — and technology built here, for here.”

AuraCap’s answer is to capture CO2 and convert it — not store it underground, which requires expensive geological surveys and GIS partnerships, and generates no economic return. Instead, the captured carbon becomes usable: converted to green hydrogen for fuel cells or electricity generation, to green ammonia for agricultural industries, or exported to countries building hydrogen infrastructure. The economic visibility of the output is what makes the model scalable in a region where pure environmental impact alone is not sufficient to drive adoption.

Green Hydrogen in the MENA: Opportunity, Infrastructure Gap, and What’s Changing

Hydrogen runs through this episode like a current. Ayah has built AuraCap around it, and both hosts are clearly excited — Andres returns to hydrogen from his deep dive in Episode 11 — because the MENA region, despite its infrastructure challenges, has genuine structural advantages for hydrogen: abundant renewable energy in the form of solar and wind, existing industrial demand, and growing policy interest.

The core bottleneck is the electrolyser — the device that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. Current commercial electrolysers are energy-intensive, water-intensive, and expensive. This is the exact innovation gap AuraCap is working inside: a zero-water-consuming, renewable-energy-powered approach to CO2 conversion that sidesteps the electrolyser’s worst inefficiencies.

There are already use cases emerging in the region. Ayah describes an electrochemical factory in Jordan that has replaced around 70% of its electricity dependence with green hydrogen — a proof point that the infrastructure, while nascent, is not hypothetical.

The captured green hydrogen from AuraCap can flow in multiple directions: converted to green ammonia for agricultural use, run through fuel cells to generate electricity, or stored and exported to countries actively building hydrogen economies. As Andres notes, California is currently the only place in the world with anything resembling functional hydrogen fuelling infrastructure for vehicles — but that gap is precisely the opportunity. MENA countries that build hydrogen supply infrastructure now will be positioned to serve a fast-growing global market.

Building in the Gaps: Funding, Team, and the Realities of Deep Tech in Jordan

Ayah is candid about what it actually costs to build a deep tech climate startup in a region with almost no dedicated funding infrastructure.

She started with her own savings. No grant, no investor, no accelerator. She built the prototype from chemical equations pulled from her lab background, then worked with a technical partner to develop an MVP — actual hardware, not a pitch deck — before approaching any external funders. Her advice to other founders is direct: prove your concept in the physical world first.

“I did not just fill the idea. I filled the hardware, just to prove my concept. You should not focus only on innovation — you should have routine work, a payback for yourself, and focus part-time on your innovation to secure a grant later.”

She now runs a dual track: ESG reporting work generates income that funds AuraCap’s continued development. It’s not glamorous, but it’s real — and it keeps her from being entirely dependent on funding cycles that, in Jordan, are slow, bureaucratic, and heavily channelled through government partnerships with international institutions like the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Her team was assembled through LinkedIn, reaching out to PhD researchers in carbon capture globally, building a hybrid remote and on-site structure. In a region where carbon capture expertise is rare, she sourced knowledge internationally and built local execution capacity alongside it.

The ESG Landscape in MENA: New, Imperfect, and Genuinely Useful

ESG reporting is new to Jordan — formally adopted in 2024 and applied from 2025 — but Ayah sees it as more than a compliance exercise. For large industries operating between communities, the ESG framework requires emissions tracking across Scope 1, 2, and 3, measurement of noise and health impacts on neighbouring populations, occupational health standards, and social accountability. It is also, critically, a door to green finance.

Banks in Jordan are beginning to require ESG reports from companies seeking green financing. The GCF and EU grant programmes increasingly require environmental certification (ISO standards, green building certificates, energy audits) before funds are released. ESG isn’t just a reporting tool — it’s the entry credential to an entirely different tier of capital access.

“ESG reports are a door that opens to green finance, from the GCF and any finance institution. Investors should have to do these reports. It’s very useful for business budgeting too — because when your emissions increase, your energy costs increase. You lose.”

The broader MENA picture is uneven. Jordan is an adaptation country — it doesn’t have significant domestic fossil fuel production, runs heavily on renewable energy for electricity, and faces climate impacts primarily as a recipient rather than a generator of emissions. The Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE — are a different story entirely: high production, high emissions, high economic dependence on fossil fuels, and, in Dubai and Riyadh, nascent but real carbon market infrastructure beginning to take shape.

Air Quality, Public Awareness, and the Health Crisis Nobody Is Naming

One of the most striking threads in this conversation is Ayah’s description of air quality in Jordan — particularly in the current period, where regional conflict has compounded already deteriorating environmental conditions.

“In this period, air quality is very destroyed because we have a lot of bombing and attacks. Environmental factors will affect people’s health in the long term. We should have technologies now to reduce these emissions — not only for economic reasons, but for our health.”

The awareness gap is real. People know the air is bad. They know asthma rates are rising. But the connection between those experiences and the policy, technology, and investment decisions that could change them is not widely understood. As Ayah puts it: people feel the problem but don’t know what they can do about it. That resignation is one of the things AuraCap is trying to break — by making carbon capture affordable, local, and tangible enough to be deployed at the community and SME level, not just by industrial giants.

Key Takeaways

🌍 The MENA region needs climate tech built for MENA conditions — extreme heat, water scarcity, limited infrastructure, and economic constraints that European and North American solutions don’t address.

💡 AuraCap converts captured CO2 into green hydrogen and green ammonia — creating economic value from emissions rather than simply storing them underground, making the business case viable in markets where pure environmental ROI isn’t enough.

💧 Zero water consumption and renewable energy operation are the two design principles that make AuraCap deployable where conventional carbon capture is not.

📊 ESG reporting is new in Jordan but already opening real funding doors — companies with verified emissions reporting and environmental certifications gain access to GCF and EU green finance that is otherwise out of reach.

🏗️ Deep tech climate startups in emerging markets have to prove before they pitch — Ayah’s model of building hardware first, reporting income second, and seeking grants third is a practical blueprint for founders in under-resourced ecosystems.

🏛️ Government is the pivotal actor — in a region where public awareness is limited and private sector incentives are misaligned, policy change is the lever that can unlock everything else.

Final Thoughts

Ayah Younis is doing something genuinely rare: building frontier climate technology in a place that doesn’t yet have the infrastructure, the funding ecosystem, or the public awareness to make it easy. She’s not waiting for any of that to change before she starts. She bootstrapped the prototype. She built the team remotely. She funds her innovation through ESG reporting work because she understands that idealism without a payback model stalls. And she’s building specifically for the people and conditions of the region she comes from — not importing solutions designed for a different climate, a different economy, a different set of constraints.

Her shift from lab technologist to climate entrepreneur wasn’t about abandoning science. It was about pointing it upstream. If the bacteria she was analysing were downstream of poor air quality, and the poor air quality was downstream of emissions and climate breakdown, then the most impactful place to work wasn’t the lab — it was the source.

“I don’t want to be a routinely person. I want to be a special person that changes things worldwide.”

She’s on her way.