They dug carbon out of the ground for a century. This company gets paid to put it back.
THE SUBJECT: A charcoal-black company logo against strata of stone. Look closely and the layers are the whole pitch - carbon, pressed down, staying put. Carba means to keep it there for a thousand years. Longer than most countries have existed.
Here is a fact about a tree that most business plans ignore: a tree is a machine that pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, for free, using sunlight, and then locks it into wood. This is, if you think about it, exactly the thing that dozens of well-funded startups are now trying to do with giant fans and industrial chemistry. The tree already did it. The problem is that when the tree dies, it rots or burns, and all that captured carbon goes right back into the sky. So the atmosphere gets a refund.
Carba, a company based just outside Minneapolis, has looked at this arrangement and decided the interesting part is not the capture - nature handles that - but the staying put. Its whole business is stopping the refund. You take low-value waste biomass (dead trees, yard clippings, the biogenic stuff nobody wants), you char it in a reactor into a stable, coal-like material called biochar, and then you bury it somewhere with no oxygen so the microbes that would eat it simply can't. Char plus no oxygen equals carbon that sits still. A registry called Isometric has certified that it sits still for more than 1,000 years.
The founders call this "reverse coal mining," which is a good line because it is literally true. Humanity spent about two centuries digging fossilized carbon out of the ground and setting it on fire. Carba proposes to run the tape backwards - carbon in, ground down, sealed up - and to get paid for each ton it re-buries. The buyers are companies with net-zero commitments and, increasingly, hyperscale data-center operators who need very durable carbon removal and are willing to sign multi-year contracts to get it.
The most Carba detail of all is where they bury it: the landfill you already drive past. There is existing infrastructure, permits, and a steady stream of waste biomass showing up daily. And the biochar, it turns out, behaves like an activated-carbon filter on the way down - potentially adsorbing PFAS, mercury, lead, and assorted landfill nasties. One product; two problems solved. That is the kind of quiet double-duty that tends to survive contact with a spreadsheet.
Locally sourced waste biomass - dead trees, yard waste, biogenic scraps - is gathered near existing landfill infrastructure. The material already captured the carbon; Carba just intercepts it before it rots.
Carba's patent-pending autothermal pyrolysis reactor converts the biomass into high-carbon biochar. "Autothermal" means it runs on the energy of its own process - no external power source required.
A patent-pending anoxic burial method seals the biochar in oxygen-starved conditions inside a landfill, where microbes can't degrade it. Certified permanence: 1,000+ years.
Registry-certified (Isometric) carbon dioxide removal credits with 1,000+ year durability. Corporate buyers with net-zero targets purchase them - most notably Microsoft, on a five-year, 44,000-tonne agreement.
A proprietary, modular pyrolysis reactor designed to be dropped in beside existing waste infrastructure. Energy-efficient by design, it's the piece that makes the decentralized model economically plausible.
High-durability biocarbon sold as a fossil-input substitute - for tires and rubber, metals and steel, asphalt and concrete (bitumen replacement), and as filtration media.
Deployed as alternate daily cover, the biochar can adsorb pollutants - PFAS, mercury, lead, PCBs, dioxins, furans - while it stores carbon. The removal and the cleanup happen in the same batch.
Carbon-removal approaches compete on durability and cost. Biochar's pitch is that photosynthesis already paid for the expensive part - pulling CO2 from the air - so the work that remains is cheap and permanent. Illustrative durability comparison below (approximate, for orientation):
Approximate, illustrative only. Durability figures reflect general category characteristics, not certified per-project values.
PhD in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley; summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota. Previously founded and sold Activated Research Company to Japan's Shimadzu. Inventor of Carba's pyrolysis and storage technology. Winner of the 2023 MN Cup Grand Prize.
MacArthur "Genius" Fellow (Class of 2020) and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. Twenty-plus years in biomass conversion research; a serial founder of five startups.
First employee and Chief Strategy Officer at Impossible Foods. Chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota; MBA and MS in Environment & Resources from Stanford.
Leads R&D, engineering, and operations. Former CTO at Protolabs and PaR Systems; PhD in Engineering from Cornell; holds 18 U.S. patents across automotive, aerospace, and medical devices.
Jones and Dauenhauer first met as student researchers at the University of Minnesota in 2005. The company is, in a sense, the twentieth year of a conversation that started in a lab.
| Round / Source | Amount | Date | Backers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed / Investment Round | $6.0M | Dec 2025 | Rusheen Capital, CanopyGen, Groove, Demos Fund, Collaborative Fund, Incite, Grid Catalyst |
| Project Financing & PRIs | $2.5M | 2025 | MN Climate Innovation Finance Authority, JLL Foundation, Venn Foundation |
| DOE Grant (Carbon Negative Shot) | $7.0M | 2024 | U.S. Department of Energy |
Total equity/PRI funding ≈ $6.09M per public records. Grant funding is non-dilutive.
Our decentralized model - using existing landfill infrastructure and locally sourced waste biomass - can scale rapidly and cost-effectively.
The team has built a credible, scalable business model to monetize biomass waste to clean landfills for future generations.
Their rigor in measurement, permanence, and cost-efficiency turns an environmental liability into long term value.
Closed a $6M investment round led by Rusheen Capital Management and CanopyGen.
Brought its first-of-its-kind biocarbon technology online at the Burnsville, Minnesota facility.
Announced a five-year agreement to deliver 44,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits to Microsoft.
Secured $2.5M in project financing and program-related investments from Minnesota-based funders.
Selected for a $7M U.S. Department of Energy grant under the Carbon Negative Shot Pilot.
Interviews & demos: Search "Carba carbon removal" or "Andrew Jones Carba" on YouTube for founder talks and reactor walk-throughs. Carba has not published a single official channel URL we could verify, so we're pointing you to the source rather than guessing a link.
Carba is a Minneapolis-area climate-tech company that turns low-value waste biomass - dead trees, yard waste, and other biogenic scraps - into a stable, charcoal-like material called biocarbon (biochar). Using a patent-pending autothermal pyrolysis reactor and an anoxic (oxygen-starved) burial method, Carba locks carbon away for a certified 1,000+ years, most notably inside existing landfills where the material can also filter pollutants. The company sells the resulting permanent carbon-removal credits - including a five-year, 44,000-tonne deal with Microsoft - and aims to remove a billion tons of CO2 by 2035.
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