He pulled nitrogen straight from the sky and turned almond shells into fertilizer. Now, $95 million later, his company is proving that the most important chemical process in human history doesn't have to run on fossil fuels.
Before Nitricity had investors, a headquarters, or a groundbreaking ceremony, it had a lemon tree. Somewhere in a Stanford backyard, Nicolas Pinkowski and his co-founders rigged up a solar-powered system to test whether they could feed a citrus plant with nitrogen pulled from the air. The tree didn't care about their PhD credentials. But it grew. That was the proof they needed.
Nitrogen fertilizer is the foundation of modern agriculture. The Haber-Bosch process - invented in 1909, still running today - synthesizes nitrogen from natural gas and air at enormous scale, feeding roughly half the world's population. It also accounts for about 1% of global CO2 emissions and consumes nearly 2% of the world's energy supply. It is, by almost any measure, the most consequential industrial process ever developed. And Pinkowski decided, as a PhD student in energy systems at Stanford, that it was time to build a better version.
His path to that lemon tree ran through Colorado, not Silicon Valley. At the University of Colorado Boulder, he led a senior design team that built a CubeSat deployer prototype for NASA's Orion spacecraft program in partnership with Lockheed Martin Space Systems - and won first place at the ME Senior Design Expo. From orbital hardware to soil chemistry: the connecting thread is systems optimization. How do you make a complex process work under tight constraints? Pinkowski just keeps changing the domain.
After a master's degree at Stanford and then a PhD in Energy Systems - funded through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship - he and co-founders Dr. Joshua McEnaney and Dr. Jay Schwalbe officially launched Nitricity in 2018. The premise was radical in its simplicity: use renewable electricity to pull nitrogen directly from air, combine it with agricultural waste, and produce organic fertilizer locally - no natural gas, no fossil fuel feedstocks, no long-haul supply chains.
"There's a big focus on decarbonizing the grid and that's great, but we have to start focusing on bigger industries and chemical industries - specifically fertilizer itself."- Nicolas Pinkowski, CEO, Nitricity
"If you could decarbonize fertilizer production, it would lead to the decarbonization of many other chemicals and their production processes."- Nicolas Pinkowski, CEO, Nitricity
Nitricity's proprietary GD-17 system produces carbon-free ammonia through a novel metal-cycling process. Feed it air, water, and renewable electricity - it outputs reactive nitrogen. No fossil fuels. No methane reforming.
Their flagship product combines GD-17-produced nitrogen with recycled almond shells - California's most abundant agricultural byproduct. The result is a liquid organic nitrogen fertilizer that's OMRI-certified, CDFA-approved, and compatible with standard irrigation systems.
Third-party field trials across California show up to 30% yield increases compared to conventional fertilizers. Ash Tea delivers 92% lower lifecycle emissions. Farmers apply less, spend comparably, and get more - the agronomic case writes itself.
The competitive validation came fast. In 2020, Nitricity won Stanford's BASES 100K Challenge - the school's top entrepreneurship competition - in its first-ever virtual edition during the COVID-19 pandemic. The MIT Clean Energy Prize and the Stanford TomKat Grant followed. By 2021, Pinkowski appeared on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list for creating a startup that could "facilitate decarbonization of the chemical industry." He was still finishing his PhD.
Chipotle Mexican Grill noticed. In 2023, the chain's Cultivate Next venture fund made an initial investment in Nitricity - putting a major food brand directly behind the company's mission to clean up American agriculture's nitrogen supply chain. That kind of early commercial validator matters: farmers don't buy stories, they buy results, and Chipotle was willing to put capital behind the field trial data.
By 2025, the results were undeniable. In March, Nitricity secured $10 million in first-of-a-kind (FOAK) project funding from Elemental Impact and Trellis Climate to develop a commercial-scale facility in Delhi, California - in Merced County, at the heart of the Central Valley. Six months later, on September 10, Nitricity announced its $50 million Series B, co-led by World Fund (Europe's leading climate venture fund) and Khosla Ventures. Additional investors included Chipotle's Cultivate Next fund, King Philanthropies, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Energy Impact Partners, Fine Structure Ventures, and Change Forces.
Two days after the funding announcement, on September 12, 2025, Pinkowski and his team broke ground on the Delhi facility. The kicker: the plant's entire production capacity was already sold out through 2028. The $150 million-plus in binding offtake agreements were signed before the foundation was poured. That's not demand - that's a backlog.
Pinkowski's stated next move is global. Nitricity has begun pilot and field trials in Europe, which has an even larger organic fertilizer market than the United States. The company is hiring its first European team members and exploring local agricultural waste feedstocks - wood waste, olive oil production byproducts - to power region-specific fertilizer production. The architecture is the same; only the shells change.
World Fund, Europe's top climate VC, and Khosla Ventures jointly led the $50M round - a rare transatlantic co-lead signaling confidence in both the technology and the global market opportunity.
Chipotle's Cultivate Next fund invested in 2023 and participated in the Series B. A major restaurant chain with a stake in sustainable farming gives Nitricity a commercial anchor few climate startups can claim.
The first-of-a-kind Delhi plant represents a 100-fold increase in Nitricity's production scale. It will create 20+ jobs in Merced County and begin operating in 2026 - with output already committed through 2028.
California produces millions of pounds of almond shells annually. They're typically burned or landfilled. Nitricity turns them into a registered organic amendment - completing a local waste-to-resource loop inside California's Central Valley.
There's a big focus on decarbonizing the grid and that's great, but we have to start focusing on bigger industries and chemical industries - specifically fertilizer itself.
If you could decarbonize fertilizer production, it would lead to the decarbonization of many other chemicals and their production processes.
There's so many new technologies out there, the fertilizer landscape and marketplace is immensely complex and we can't wait to decarbonize it, we need to start now.
Consensus in Conversation - February 15, 2024 - Nicolas Pinkowski discusses Nitricity's origin story, the science of air-based nitrogen, and what a decarbonized food system looks like