Opening A New Chapter
When the Finnish Climate Minister Kai Mykkänen opened our R3 facility near Helsinki, Finland in August, the facility was brand new, a first of its kind in the world! It was an exciting day and I definitely got the bug for opening facilities then and there — the thrill of seeing something built! Our team then went through a few months of intense commissioning work, and now R3 is running and engineers can hand over to on site operators. To us, that’s success!
With our industry standard certified industrial pilot R3, we proved our ability to build industrial-grade carbon removal facilities, make geoscale-stable carbon removal, high grade energy and make a consistent biochar that’s over 90% carbon.
What’s next? More facilities.
While a thousand million tons is our northstar, we’re cracking on with the tens of thousands of tons next. We are excited to share that we are now able to start developing our first commercial-scale facility which will be built in 2025! Our C1 facility will enable us to remove 20kt of CO2 per year.
But here’s the news, the big announcement today is: we have succeeded in securing a US$18.3M Series A funding round led by top tier partners!
US$18M Series A co-led by GenZero and True Ventures
The Series A funding round is co-led by the Temasek-owned decarbonisation fund GenZero from Singapore and San Francisco-based venture capital firm True Ventures with participation from Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd) as well as notable climate tech investors and family offices.
We at Carbo Culture are very happy to welcome Genzero to join the journey of scaling up biochar carbon removal and climate solutions. Genzero is a partner who deeply understands the space and domain we operate in, and have an inherent mission to invest into nature-and tech based solutions. We see Genzero as catalytic capital in propelling us to take on this vast opportunity of climate change solutions.
Industrial-scale biochar carbon removal
Biochar technology is one of the few ways in the world today to remove carbon in an energy-generating manner. According to cdr.fyi, biochar credits make up > 87% of all delivered permanent carbon removal to date. Carbo Culture salutes all the headway made in farm-scale and in-field conversion technologies and is aiming to lead the industrial-scale segment of biochar.
“Henrietta and the Carbo Culture team have proven with their R3 reactor pilot that carbon can be removed from the atmosphere and locked into a stable form,” said Toni Schneider, partner at True Ventures. “It was an imaginative idea and now it’s real. This next step of building a commercial facility is going to be a notable milestone in decarbonisation efforts.”
Frederick Teo, CEO of GenZero, said, “Carbo Culture’s work leverages the power of both technology and nature to produce biochar with superior carbon sequestration capabilities. By undergoing Carbo Culture’s Carbolysis™️ process, a greater amount of carbon is locked in per unit of biochar and stored more durably than conventional production methods. This proprietary technology also avoids the production of bio-oil, resulting in higher yields of clean syngas from waste biomass, which in turn can be used to generate renewable electricity and heat. We look forward to supporting Carbo Culture in their next stage of growth and scaling its decarbonisation impact across more markets.”
The Series A funding will be used to develop the first commercial facility, new ip, and push the boundaries on what’s been done before in biochar carbon removal. The commercial facility itself will be financed via a separate financial closing (est. Q3 2024).
Both personally and professionally I could not be more fulfilled leading this company through the next leg of the journey and I’m grateful for the trust to do so. We are 100% aligned with nature and its truth, and I recently read that truth is love. Well, if you love science, want to work on climate, and have a lot to give — we’re hiring!
