Sustaera Scrapped Years of Work to Build a Cheaper Carbon-Capture Machine

The least glamorous fact in climate technology may be the most important: carbon dioxide is hard to catch because the atmosphere barely contains any. At roughly four hundred parts per million, a tonne of CO2 is hiding in something like 3,000 tonnes of air. A direct-air-capture company must move that air, persuade the carbon to stick, make it let go again, compress it and send it somewhere permanent. Every fan, valve, heater and pressure drop arrives with an invoice.

Sustaera, a small company in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, has spent its life staring at that invoice. Its current machine uses a solid sorbent spread across a ceramic monolith - think of a highly engineered honeycomb - to catch CO2. Electricity heats the structured material directly so the captured gas can be released. The design is modular, meant to be manufactured through existing supply chains, shipped to project developers and repeated rather than reinvented for every site.

That neat explanation conceals the messy part. In 2024, Sustaera decided the first-generation product it had developed over several years was not good enough for the market. The company pivoted to a nano-structured sorbent, laid off valued contributors when financing could not support the full team and began again. For hard-tech founders, this is the part worth studying. The breakthrough was not a triumphant demo. It was an admission.

01 / The machineA ceramic lung with an electric pulse

Sustaera’s system belongs to the solid-sorbent branch of direct air capture. Fans expose the structured contactor to ambient air. CO2 binds to the capture material. Rather than piping steam through a separate regeneration system, the design integrates resistive heating into the same structured assembly. Heat changes the chemical equilibrium, the CO2 comes off in a concentrated stream, and the sorbent cools for another pass.

The appeal is subtraction. Steam requires boilers, piping, heat exchangers and water management. Direct electric heating promises fewer pieces of equipment and less thermal waste. Sustaera says its third-generation system can deliver equipment cost three to five times lower per tonne of capacity than the best quoted alternatives, an estimate it says was assessed by a third party. That is a forecast, not field history. A sorbent that shines in a lab must still tolerate dust, humidity, cold starts, hot afternoons and thousands upon thousands of cycles.

02 / The resetWhat failed first was the product-market equation

Sustaera did not begin with a blank sheet in 2021. It spun out of Susteon, an R&D incubator started by Shantanu Agarwal and Raghubir Gupta. The pair evaluated roughly 35 to 40 climate technologies across carbon capture, conversion and hydrogen. More than half failed. Work with Columbia University on dual-functional materials - compounds intended to capture CO2 and convert it in place - produced intriguing chemistry but unattractive economics. The team narrowed its attention to direct air capture and designed backward from a viable cost.

Patient climate capital followed. Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Grantham Trust’s Neglected Climate Opportunities led a $10 million Series A in December 2021. Stripe selected Sustaera for an early removal purchase. Shopify signed a multi-year agreement. The company won a $1 million XPRIZE milestone award in 2022. These were meaningful votes of confidence, but none changed the basic engineering burden.

Leadership changed along with the machine. Agarwal was the founding chief executive; gas-processing veteran Mary Haas took the role in 2022; Ben Gardner was identified as CEO when the Deep Sky agreement was announced in 2024; and the current team page names Sanderson co-founder and CEO, with Gardner advising on projects. For a company this small, those handoffs are not corporate trivia. Each phase asks for a different kind of operator: research selection, fundraising, project development, then product discipline. The public team today is lean - a materials scientist and fabrication manager sit beside commercial and technical advisers - and its culture reads more like a compact industrial workshop than a software startup with a climate tab.

“In 2024, we realized the first-generation product we had spent years developing was not good enough to meet the market requirements.”Cory Sanderson, co-founder and CEO

The market requirements were harsher than capture alone: competitive capital cost, manageable energy use, stable performance and equipment a developer could finance. Sustaera’s response was a “complete redesign,” in Sanderson’s telling, toward its current nano-structured generation. It also moved into lab space at First Flight Venture Center and built a fast-cycling sorption array. The rig uses air with commercially relevant CO2 and oxygen levels, mimics heating and cooling rates, and averages about 30 cycles a day. It is a machine built to make failure arrive early.

03 / The businessSell the shovel, not the carbon mine

Sustaera’s present business model is equipment sales. The company does not plan to own and operate capture plants. It wants project developers to buy its modular systems, arrange clean power, connect storage and operate the facility. That keeps Sustaera from carrying every project on its own balance sheet and lets specialist developers handle permitting, geology and carbon-credit sales.

The likely customers are therefore not households with guilty air travel. They are carbon-removal developers such as Deep Sky, companies assembling storage hubs, owners of suitable clean-energy sites and corporate buyers funding durable removal through intermediaries. Sustaera has named commercial relationships with Deep Sky and Return Carbon and described a $59 million near-term pipeline. It has targeted first equipment revenue in the second quarter of 2027. Both figures depend on financing and successful validation.

An equipment sale does not make the captured tonne disappear on its own. The developer still needs a buyer willing to sign a long contract, a clean-power agreement, permits, compressors, transport, an injection well and a measurement system credible enough to certify storage. Public support matters too: early Sustaera research received federal and North Carolina backing, while corporate prepurchases helped create a customer before the commodity existed at scale. The business is therefore B2B, but the full customer is better pictured as a temporary coalition of developer, utility, storage operator, registry, government and corporate purchaser. Remove one member and the spreadsheet can stop behaving.

Its 2024 memorandum with Deep Sky offered a plausible bridge from laboratory to market: explore a Sustaera unit at a future Canadian facility sized for roughly 1,000 to 5,000 tonnes a year and share evaluation data. More recent company material points to a validation unit in the fourth quarter of 2026. Deep Sky is useful because it is technology-agnostic and already thinks like an integrator; it can compare machines while supplying the project wrapper around them.

04 / The copyable bitBuild a test that is rude to your favorite idea

The transferable lesson is not “pivot faster,” which is startup wallpaper. It is to translate a market price into engineering constraints before affection forms around a design. If the buyer needs a certain cost per tonne, the founder can work backward into allowable equipment cost, energy use, sorbent replacement, uptime and financing. Then the test program should recreate the cycle that attacks those assumptions.

05 / The catchThe design only works inside a larger system

Direct air capture is not a permission slip to keep emitting. It is a tool for balancing residual emissions and eventually removing historical carbon. Even a good contactor becomes bad climate policy if powered by carbon-heavy electricity. And capture is only the first half: concentrated CO2 needs transport, verified storage and long-term monitoring. Cheap hardware without cheap clean power or accessible geology is simply stranded equipment.

Competition is crowded: Climeworks, Heirloom, Carbon Engineering, CarbonCapture, Mission Zero, Avnos and dozens more are pursuing different combinations of liquids, solids, minerals, membranes, heat and electrochemistry. Sustaera’s wager is that integration and manufacturability beat sheer novelty. Its industrial team talks about ceramic substrates, supply chains and project interfaces because gigaton ambitions eventually become procurement problems.

The next honest milestone is not one to two gigatonnes a year, Sanderson’s long-run vision. It is a validation unit that runs, cycles and produces data a developer trusts. Sustaera has already shown the useful courage to reject one machine. Now it must prove the replacement deserves to survive.