Limestone has been pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for millions of years. Shashank Samala just figured out how to make it do the job in days instead.
Walk into Heirloom's facility in Tracy, California and you'll find stacks of trays filled with white powder - calcium hydroxide, the mineral better known as slaked lime - quietly absorbing CO2 from the ambient air. It's unglamorous, and that's the point. Unglamorous scales.
Samala grew up in Southeast India watching cyclones and floods reshape his hometown. Climate change wasn't an abstraction - it was the neighbor's flooded house, the failed harvest, the recurring disaster. He made his way to Cornell University, then to New York City, then to the startup world. But the image of those vulnerable communities never left him.
The detour through tech wasn't wasted. At Square, he noticed something that would shape the next decade of his career: hardware iterations took months, software iterations took hours. He co-founded Tempo Automation in 2013 to close that gap - a software-driven electronics factory in San Francisco that helped engineers build circuit boards for satellites, surgical robots, reusable rockets, and eventually NASA's Mars rover. Tempo raised over $100M in venture capital.
In 2020, mid-pandemic, with Tempo running and the world halted, Samala made the pivot. He joined Carbon180 as Entrepreneur in Residence - a deliberate year of learning before committing to an approach. He called it "learning before doing," and considered it one of the most valuable periods of his professional life. When he finally committed, he chose calcium hydroxide mineralization: a geologically proven, low-cost, highly scalable process that industrial chemistry made accessible at room temperature.
In November 2023, Heirloom opened America's first commercial direct air capture facility. The team had gone from capturing CO2 in petri dishes to removing 1,000 metric tons per year - a factor of one million - in just over two years. Now two more facilities are under construction in Louisiana, with combined capacity of nearly 320,000 tons annually.
The company originally started under the name EquiOps - short for "equal opportunities," a nod to Samala's belief that climate solutions must create fair economic outcomes. An investor told him the name had bad branding. After roughly 100 brainstormed alternatives, they landed on Heirloom. It fits: what they're removing from the air is something borrowed from a better past, returned to future generations.