CO₂ removal, built for 24/7 operation - a chemical plant that eats the sky.
THE WORK. An engineer leans into the machinery - hard hat, safety glasses, a braid, and a lot of steel. Carbon removal, up close, looks less like a moonshot and more like a Tuesday shift at a plant. Which is exactly the point.
There is a genre of climate startup that sells you a miracle. AirMyne, a roughly 18-person outfit in Berkeley, California, is selling you a chemical plant. That is a compliment, and it is more or less the whole strategy.
The problem AirMyne is chewing on is one everybody in the field agrees on and almost nobody has solved cheaply: how do you pull carbon dioxide out of ambient air - where it sits at a stubborn 0.04% concentration - and do it at a price and a scale that matters? Direct air capture, or DAC, is not physically hard. You can build a machine that grabs CO₂ today. The hard part is that grabbing it, and then persuading the CO₂ to let go again so you can bury or reuse it, tends to eat a punishing amount of energy. And energy is money. So the DAC business is, underneath the green branding, a very old-fashioned unit-economics problem.
AirMyne's answer is to attack the energy line item directly. Its co-founders, Sudip Mukhopadhyay and Mark Cyffka, are not climate-conference lifers - they are chemical-industry veterans who between them spent something like four decades at Honeywell and BASF inventing and scaling the kind of molecules that quietly end up in your car's air conditioner and your phone's chips. They looked at DAC and, reasonably, decided to treat it the way a chemicals company treats any process: optimize the whole system, use cheap and benign inputs, and design for the tenth plant, not the demo.
Here is the part that amuses the engineers. Most DAC systems capture CO₂ onto a solid or into a liquid, and then have to heat that material up a lot to release the gas so the capture medium can be reused. “A lot” often means furnace-grade temperatures, which usually means burning something or drawing enormous amounts of electricity. AirMyne's liquid solvent instead regenerates at roughly 100 to 130°C - the temperature of a hot cup of coffee's angry cousin, not a blast furnace.
That single design choice unlocks a menu of cheap heat sources: industrial waste steam a factory was going to vent anyway, geothermal heat coming up out of the ground, or ordinary electricity when that is cheapest. It is why AirMyne keeps ending up in conversations with geothermal developers - the heat is already there.
Modular collectors pull ambient air across a liquid solvent that grabs the CO₂.
The CO₂-rich liquid flows to a central column and is warmed to ~100-130°C to release the gas.
That low heat can come from waste steam, geothermal, or electricity - whichever is cheapest.
Pure CO₂ is piped to underground storage or to buyers making concrete, textiles, and fuels.
Approximate, for illustration. High-temperature calciner-based DAC typically requires far more heat than AirMyne's low-temperature approach.
Corporations and governments with net-zero targets can purchase durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) - carbon physically taken out of the air, not an accounting offset.
Captured CO₂ becomes raw material: partners like CarbonBuilt lock it into concrete and Rubi turns it into cellulose for textiles.
The same platform works at concentrated emission streams (roughly 1-10% CO₂), so it isn't limited to ambient air.
Energy developers can co-locate capture with geothermal heat for round-the-clock, low-cost operation.
The resumes are the strategy. If your edge is chemistry and manufacturing, you pick the market where chemistry and manufacturing win - and DAC, underneath the climate story, is exactly that.
Spent much of his career at Honeywell, where he co-invented a low-global-warming refrigerant now used in vehicles around the world. Now runs AirMyne's push toward commercial deployment and cost reduction.
Came up through BASF and large chemical-plant operations. Helped scale a subsidiary, Precision Microchemicals, that was acquired for about $90M, and co-invented chemicals used in EV and 5G power electronics.
AirMyne closed a $6.9M seed round in March 2024, with Y Combinator alongside Alumni Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, Impact Science Ventures, Another Brain, EMLES, Soma Capital, Wayfinder, and angel Justin Hamilton. Two years later came the more telling investor: ENEOS, the parent of Japan's largest energy company, took a strategic stake in March 2026.
That ENEOS deal is worth pausing on. When a giant fossil-energy incumbent invests in a DAC startup, it is buying two things a venture fund can't offer: a potential industrial customer and a supply chain. In carbon removal, who eventually buys your CO₂ - and who can build your hardware at volume - matters as much as the chemistry.
Company launches publicly out of Y Combinator.
Raises seed funding; details plans to pair DAC with geothermal and ship CO₂ to utilization partners.
Japan's largest energy firm backs AirMyne to co-develop liquid-solvent DAC for industrial scale.
Plans to break ground on a commercial pilot and demonstration plant with California Energy Commission support.
AirMyne is one entry in a crowded, well-funded race. The alternatives include solid-sorbent players like Climeworks and Heirloom Carbon, high-temperature approaches from Carbon Engineering and Global Thermostat, and newer liquid or hybrid entrants such as Noya, Sustaera, and Holocene. AirMyne's distinguishing bet is not a flashier machine - it is the claim that low-temperature, energy-flexible, benign-chemistry design is the cheapest road to real scale.
Whether that bet pays off is genuinely unsettled. The reported figures - a 100x energy reduction, kilogram-per-day capture - are milestones on the way to the tons-per-day and eventual megaton scales the climate math demands. The interesting thing about AirMyne is not that it has won. It is that it is playing the game like a manufacturer, and manufacturers are the ones who usually figure out how to make things cheap.
Interviews, coverage, and the primary sources. The webinar below is a good place to hear the founders explain the “industrial thinking meets DAC” approach in their own words.
AirMyne is a Berkeley, California climate-tech company building liquid-based direct air capture (DAC) systems that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at industrial scale. Founded in 2022 by chemical-industry veterans Sudip Mukhopadhyay and Mark Cyffka, the company designs a low-temperature, energy-flexible capture process - regenerating its solvent at roughly 100-130 C so it can run on waste heat, geothermal energy, or electricity rather than the high-temperature furnaces most DAC rivals require. Backed by Y Combinator and, more recently, a strategic investment from Japanese energy giant ENEOS, AirMyne is moving from kilogram-per-day prototypes toward a commercial pilot and demonstration plant.
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