carbon-credits
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Jean Pierre Azanedo and the second life of things
After building a waste-management business in Peru, Jean Pierre Azanedo began asking what could be saved before the trucks arrived. At Zero Waste Co., that question now connects food rescue, livestock feed and carbon finance.
The Carbon Machine That Changed Its Address
A tax credit sent Noya’s carbon capture machines away from cooling towers and toward storage wells. The pivot made industrial sense; the company still wound down in 2025.
The Carbon Market Needed More Than a Buy Button
Patch made carbon credits easy to buy. Then it discovered that buying was the easy part: the real work was proving what a company had paid for, when it would arrive, and whether it would hold up to scrutiny.
The 30-Centimeter Pipe That Made Rice Visible
Mitti Labs did not invent a better way to irrigate rice. It built the field operation, measurement system and market that could make an old idea travel across thousands of tiny farms.
Terraformation Is Trying to Turn Forest Restoration Into an Investable Machine
The former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong found that planting trees was the easy part. Terraformation now packages seeds, software, training and patient capital into a bid to make native forests financeable - without flattening them into plantations.
He Built the Zillow for Land - Then Wood Mackenzie Bought the Whole Map
LandGate turned 200-plus public datasets into a value score for nearly every acre in America. Ten years later, the company that data centers and grid developers lean on to pick sites got bought by Wood Mackenzie.
Number 8 Bio
Number 8 Bio is a Sydney-based agtech and climate startup building BetterFeed, a low-cost feed additive and slow-release rumen bolus that cuts enteric methane from cattle and sheep by up to 90% in trials while recapturing wasted feed energy to lift animal productivity. After pivoting from yeast biomanufacturing to synthetic-chemistry small molecules, the company targets grass-fed grazing systems - about 95% of Australia's livestock - and has raised roughly A$18 million to move toward commercial release.
Revalue
Revalue (Revalue Nature) is a London-based climate-tech company that develops high-integrity, nature-based carbon credits and builds the analytics platform behind them. Combining forest science, AI, remote sensing (satellite, drone and LiDAR), dynamic baselines and biodiversity monitoring, it partners with on-the-ground project operators and capital providers to design credits that avoid, remove and durably store CO2. Founded in 2022 and led by CEO Stuart Rowland, the company raised a $10M Series A in 2023 co-led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund and SJF Ventures.
Qnergy
Qnergy is an Ogden, Utah cleantech manufacturer that builds Free Piston Stirling Engine generators to mitigate methane emissions at the source. Its PowerGen systems turn waste methane and other gaseous fuels into reliable, grid-quality remote power - and can destroy methane while doing it - serving oil and gas operators, landfills, livestock farms, and other off-grid sites worldwide. Led by cleantech veteran Ory Zik, the company has deployed thousands of units, abated millions of tonnes of CO2e, and is expanding into landfill gas abatement and voluntary carbon markets.
Loam Bio
Loam Bio is an Australian agricultural biotechnology company using naturally occurring microbial fungi to help crops store more stable, long-lasting carbon in soil. Founded in 2019 by a group of farmers and climate scientists, it coats seeds with its CarbonBuilder inoculum so plants pull atmospheric CO2 into recalcitrant, mineral-bound soil carbon, and pairs the biology with its SecondCrop program that helps growers measure, verify and sell soil carbon credits. Backed by more than US$119M from investors including Lowercarbon Capital, Wollemi Capital and Marc Benioff's Time Ventures, Loam is scaling from its Orange, NSW base into the United States.
Solena
Solena is an agricultural biotechnology company that reads the microbiome of farm soil the way a doctor reads a blood panel. Farmers mail in a soil sample; Solena sequences the DNA of the microbes living in it, scores the soil's biological health with its MISS index, and its Prometheus platform turns that data into AI-driven prescriptions for what to apply, when, and how much. The goal is fewer synthetic inputs, healthier soil, better yields, and eligibility for carbon and regenerative-agriculture incentives.
Carba
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.
Renoster
Renoster is an Austin-based climate technology company that brought scientific rigor and radical transparency to the carbon markets. It began as an independent ratings agency - using LiDAR, satellite imagery, and AI to publicly review more than 200 nature-based carbon projects and over 500 million credits through its Mercury platform. Convinced that most existing credits fell short, the company pivoted from grading the market to fixing it, launching Apollo, an improved forest management program that helps small landowners in Maine store more carbon and generate high-integrity forest carbon credits.
Terraton
Terraton is a San Francisco climate-tech company that turns agricultural waste into biochar - a stable, carbon-rich material that locks away CO2 for centuries. It packages financing, hardware, and software into a 'biochar business in a box' so agribusinesses in emerging markets can launch carbon-removal facilities, while corporate buyers get verified, high-durability carbon credits delivered at scale. Backed by an $11.5M seed round co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Gigascale Capital, Terraton already runs facilities in Ghana and Kenya.
Zero Waste Co.
Zero Waste Co. is a climate-tech and circular-economy company that turns agro-industrial byproducts and food waste into high-value resources - chiefly livestock feed - through technology-driven, tailor-made processes. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Miami with operations across Latin America, it pairs its EcoHub processing facilities with a Carbon Solutions arm that measures, monetizes, and manages verified carbon credits, letting food and beverage producers turn waste liabilities into profit and measurable emissions reductions.
Jean Pierre Azañedo
Jean Pierre Azañedo is the CEO and co-founder of Zero Waste Co. (ZWC) and CoreZero, a Miami-based climate-tech venture that turns food waste and other discarded material into tradable carbon credits. A second-time founder from Peru, he previously built Kanay into that country's leading waste-management company before it was acquired by France's Séché Group. In 2023 CoreZero serialized the world's first carbon credits generated from food-waste diversion, working with the Mexican food-banking network. Azañedo's thesis is simple and stubborn: waste has boundless value, and nobody makes something just to throw it away.
Kevin Gibbs
Kevin Gibbs is co-founder and CEO of Terraton, a San Francisco climate-tech startup building a 'business-in-a-box' franchise model for biochar carbon removal. Before climate, he built two pieces of internet plumbing most people use without knowing his name: Google Suggest (search autocomplete) and Google App Engine. He went on to co-found Quip with Bret Taylor, sold it to Salesforce in 2016 for roughly $750M, and ran it to north of $100M ARR. Terraton raised an $11.5M seed in August 2025 led by Lowercarbon and Gigascale.
Applied Carbon
Applied Carbon (formerly Climate Robotics) builds tractor-pulled machines that turn crop residue into biochar in a single pass across the field. The Houston-based startup converts post-harvest plant waste into a stable form of carbon that improves soil health and locks CO2 underground for centuries, selling carbon removal credits to buyers including Microsoft.
Terranova
Terranova is a Berkeley-born climate-tech and robotics startup building car-sized autonomous robots that inject a wood-waste slurry deep underground to lift flood-prone land out of harm's way - no seawalls, no surface disruption. A single 'mothership' coordinating three injection rovers can raise about one acre by one foot per day, while the buried biomass becomes a durable carbon sink that can be sold as carbon credits. Founded by UC Berkeley mechanical engineer Laurence Allen to save his hometown of San Rafael, California, the company raised a $7M seed round in November 2025 and plans its first San Rafael pilots in 2026.
Saif Bhatti
Saif Bhatti is the founder and CEO of Renoster, an Austin-based carbon credit ratings agency that uses remote sensing and open science to grade nature-based carbon projects on whether they actually remove carbon. He started the company in 2019 as anti-poaching technology - a device that listens for gunshots on the African savanna to protect rhinos - and pivoted it into one of the sharpest, most independent watchdogs in the voluntary carbon market. A Northwestern-trained industrial engineer and philosopher turned data scientist, he has helped review hundreds of millions of credits and published deep-transparency reports that have rattled some of the world's largest carbon projects.
Earthshot Labs
Earthshot Labs is a public-benefit climate-tech company building the technology and financing rails for nature-based carbon projects at planetary scale. Its LandOS platform guides land stewards step-by-step through carbon project development, while its Biome mobile app uses computer vision and AR to collect field measurements. Backed by a community of 700+ data scientists, Earthshot has helped develop dozens of reforestation, conservation, agroforestry, and improved-forest-management projects worldwide and channeled tens of millions of dollars into ecosystem restoration.
NCX
NCX (Natural Capital Exchange) is a U.S.-based data-driven marketplace that pays forest landowners of all sizes for the natural capital their land provides - starting with forest carbon. Born out of the forestry analytics company SilviaTerra, NCX uses satellites, cloud computing, and machine learning to measure every acre of America's forests, then connects landowners who defer timber harvests with corporations seeking high-quality carbon credits. The company has enrolled thousands of landowners across dozens of states and raised $74.4M to expand natural capital markets.
Remora
Remora is a Detroit-area climate-tech company that bolts carbon capture onto the things already burning fuel - semi-trucks and freight locomotives - instead of building giant plants to pull CO2 back out of the sky. Its zero-backpressure device threads exhaust through proprietary adsorbents, captures up to 90% of the CO2, reduces soot and NOx to Tier 4 levels, then liquefies the gas to be sold into a supply-constrained industrial CO2 market. Operators share the revenue, so cutting emissions becomes a line item that pays rather than one that costs.
Terradot
Terradot is a San Francisco and Stanford-born climate company turning Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) - one of nature's slowest permanent carbon-removal processes - into a measurable, global-scale climate solution. By spreading finely crushed basalt across tropical farmland, Terradot accelerates the natural reaction in which silicate rock binds atmospheric CO2 and locks it away for thousands of years, while improving soil health for farmers. The company pairs field deployment with rigorous biogeochemical measurement, and has signed landmark carbon-removal agreements with Google, Microsoft and Frontier totaling nearly 300,000 tonnes of CO2.
Kurt Tsuo
Kurt Tsuo is the Chief Business Officer of Varaha, a Gurugram-based carbon removal company building high-integrity credits with smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa. A Harvard-trained economist who spent seven years in agriculture before it was a climate headline, he has built business lines at the Gates Foundation, Farmer's Business Network, ProducePay, and Breakthrough Energy, and co-founded the carbon storage startup Graphyte. His through-line is unglamorous and stubborn: make the economics of fixing carbon work for the people who actually grow food.
Max Nova
Max Nova is the co-founder of NCX (Natural Capital Exchange), a San Francisco climate-tech company that counts every tree in America with satellites and machine learning, then pays forest owners to keep them standing. A Louisville-born, Yale-trained computer scientist who once planned to be a radiologist, he started the company as SilviaTerra in 2010 with forester Zack Parisa, built the first high-resolution forest inventory of the entire United States with Microsoft, and turned that data into a marketplace for carbon, wildlife habitat, and fire risk. NCX has raised about $74 million, including a $50M Series B backed by Salesforce's Marc Benioff.
Varaha
Varaha is an India-based climate-tech company that builds high-integrity carbon removal projects in the Global South. Working with roughly 170,000 smallholder farmers across about 1.7 million acres, it generates verified carbon credits through four pathways - regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, biochar, and enhanced rock weathering - and quantifies the results with a measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) platform powered by remote sensing, machine learning and field science. Its credits are bought by buyers like Google, Microsoft, Lufthansa and Swiss Re.
Vaulted Deep
Vaulted Deep is a Houston-based climate tech company that turns sludgy organic waste - biosolids, manure, food and agricultural waste, paper sludge - into permanent carbon removal by injecting it thousands of feet underground using patented slurry sequestration technology. Spun out of injection-well specialist Advantek in 2023, the company offers durable, low-cost, gigaton-scalable carbon dioxide removal while diverting hard-to-handle waste from landfills, oceans and fields. Its credits have been bought by Microsoft, Frontier Climate and others, and it won $8M in the Musk-backed XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition.
Heirloom Carbon
Heirloom Carbon Technologies is a San Francisco-based direct air capture company that uses limestone's natural CO2-absorbing properties to pull carbon dioxide permanently out of the atmosphere. Their process accelerates a geological phenomenon that normally takes thousands of years into a 3-day cycle: calcium oxide powder absorbs CO2 from ambient air, becomes limestone, gets heated in a renewable-energy-powered electric kiln to release the captured CO2, and repeats. The captured CO2 is then stored permanently underground or embedded in concrete. Founded in 2020, Heirloom opened America's first commercial DAC facility in Tracy, California in November 2023 and has raised over $354 million to expand capacity toward their goal of removing 1 billion tons of CO2 by 2035.
Gonzalo Fuenzalida-Meriz
Gonzalo Fuenzalida-Meriz is a Chilean-born entrepreneur and CEO & Co-Founder of Andes, a California-based climate tech company that deploys beneficial soil microbes via seed coatings to permanently lock atmospheric CO2 into soil minerals. A former investment banker turned biotech founder, he led development of the world's first Microbial Carbon Mineralization (MCM) Methodology — validated under ISO 14064 — and has raised $41M+ to scale a platform that simultaneously improves farm yields and generates durable carbon credits.