A reactor the size of a shipping container. A teapot full of leftover almonds. A fertilizer industry that may finally have something to worry about.
In Delhi, California - a town better known for almond orchards than industrial intrigue - a steel-and-concrete skeleton is rising on a patch of farmland. Inside, when it powers up next year, air will become nitric acid, water will become coolant, and the shells of last year's almond harvest will be brewed into a dark liquid called Ash Tea. None of this is hypothetical. Every gallon the plant will produce through 2028 has already been spoken for, bought by the same growers whose orchards are dropping the shells.
That is the strange position Nitricity finds itself in: a manufacturer with no inventory and a waiting list. A climate-tech company whose product is, in the literal sense, agricultural waste. A startup whose investors include Khosla Ventures, World Fund and the venture arm of a burrito chain.
How did three Stanford PhDs, one backyard lemon tree and a hundred-year-old chemistry problem end up here?
Co-led by World Fund and Khosla Ventures.
Average reduction vs. conventional nitrogen fertilizer.
Delhi plant vs. Fremont pilot.
Reported in early field trials with growers.
Disclosed sales pipeline after Series B.
Conventional nitrogen fertilizer relies on natural gas, high pressures, and a 1909 process named after two German chemists. Nitricity uses the four things in this picture - and skips the fossil fuels entirely.
A rough sketch of the emissions math - same nitrogen delivered, very different footprint.
The founders - Nicolas Pinkowski, Joshua McEnaney and Jay Schwalbe - met as PhD students at Stanford. They were studying chemistry that, on paper, made nitrogen fixation look obsolete. The Haber-Bosch process, the chemistry that feeds roughly half the planet, also produces something like two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. There had to be another way.
So in 2018, they founded Nitricity and moved in together. The first prototype lived in a backyard. The first customer was a lemon tree. The first investor pitch involved that tree.
Seven years later, the lemon tree is, by all accounts, doing fine. The company is doing rather better.
Combustion physics at Stanford. NDSEG Fellow. Once interned at IBM on heat transfer. Now writes pitch decks instead of dissertations.
Electrochemistry. The reactor design lead. Spends an unusual amount of time thinking about plasma at low pressure.
Science strategy and applied chemistry. The translator between PhD theory and almond grower.
Founded by three Stanford PhDs. First reactor runs in a residential backyard.
New pilot system commissioned in Fremont, California.
Field trial of climate-smart nitrogen fertilizer on almond trees with Olam Food Ingredients in California's Central Valley.
$50M Series B closes. Groundbreaking on first-of-a-kind organic fertilizer facility in Delhi, California.
Delhi plant comes online - 100x the pilot's capacity, already sold out through 2028.
Ash Tea is what happens when you treat an almond shell like a feedstock instead of a nuisance. The shells - millions of tons of them a year, in California alone - are processed, combined with electrochemically produced nitrate, and turned into a liquid fertilizer compatible with the drip and micro-irrigation systems growers already use.
It is animal-free, which matters more than it sounds. The organic fertilizer market is full of products derived from feathers, fish and blood. Some growers won't touch them. Ash Tea sidesteps the whole category. It is also pathogen-free, OMRI listed and CDFA approved, which is the regulatory equivalent of three clean bills of health.
The only feedstocks. No natural gas. No imported ammonia.
Liquid Ash Tea, ready for the irrigation system you already have.
Cleared for organic use in California.
Made near the field that needs it. Trucks beat tankers.
The $50M Series B was co-led by World Fund and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Chipotle's Cultivate Next venture fund, Change Forces, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, EIP, and Fine Structure Ventures. Total disclosed funding sits at roughly $95M.
The Chipotle line is the one people remember. A burrito chain investing in a fertilizer company is, on its face, a strange sentence. It also makes complete sense: the fastest way to decarbonize a supply chain is to start with the inputs.
Roughly half the nitrogen atoms in your body passed through the Haber-Bosch process. That is not a metaphor. It is a measurable fact about modern food. The process was a marvel in 1909 and remains one. It is also one of the most carbon-intensive industrial reactions on the planet, and the supply chain that surrounds it - tankers, terminals, pipelines, ports - is brittle in ways that became obvious during the most recent global commodity shocks.
Regionalized, electrified nitrogen production answers both problems at once. You get a lower carbon footprint, and you get a fertilizer supply that does not depend on a ship arriving on time.
Nitricity is not the only company chasing this idea. Pivot Bio is working on microbial nitrogen. Talus Renewables is building green ammonia containers. Atmonia and Jupiter Ionics have their own electrochemistry. What is novel about Nitricity is the almond shell - the willingness to treat agricultural waste as the raw material rather than the problem.
Return, for a moment, to that patch of farmland in Delhi, California. A year from now, the shells from this season's almond harvest will be carried a few miles down the road and run through a reactor that did not exist before Nitricity built it. The liquid that comes out will go back to the orchards it came from. The carbon that would have been emitted by a natural-gas plant in the Gulf, by a tanker crossing the Pacific, by a truck moving urea up Interstate 5 - that carbon, mostly, does not enter the atmosphere.
The almond shell, once a disposal cost, becomes a line item on the same farmer's revenue. The lemon tree in the backyard back in 2018 keeps doing whatever lemon trees do. And the Haber-Bosch process, after 117 years of monopoly, gets its first serious competition for the molecule that feeds the planet.
Sold out through 2028 is a good problem to have. The interesting question is what 2029 looks like.