carbon-removal
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Will Kain Is Teaching Carbon Capture to Make Water
After Wall Street, biofuels and desalination, the Avnos founder arrived at a stubborn climate problem with an unorthodox demand: carbon removal should give something back.
Isometric Wants Every Carbon Credit to Show Its Work
Carbon markets have spent years asking buyers to trust a tonne they cannot see. Isometric’s answer is part science lab, part software company and part public ledger - with the awkward incentive conflicts designed out.
Rob Hranac Is Taking the Long Way Down to Scale Climate Tech
After years spent making roads legible, GPS precise and soil measurable, Rob Hranac has arrived at Loam Bio with a practical brief: turn microscopic fungi into something farmers can trust at field scale.
Cory Sanderson Is Trying to Make Carbon Removal Boring Enough to Scale
After years inside industrial gas systems, the Sustaera co-founder rebuilt direct air capture around a stubborn idea: climate hardware wins when the complicated parts disappear.
Grant Canary Is Building the Supply Chain a Burned Forest Needs
The former insect farmer behind DroneSeed learned that reforestation is not a planting problem alone. His next act joins native seed, nurseries, carbon finance and buried fire-killed wood into one long view of recovery.
The Dirt Is Cheap. Proving It Is Not: Yard Stick's Bet on Better Soil Carbon Data
Soil can store carbon, but the proof has been slow, costly and easy to distrust. Yard Stick is building the measurement layer that tells carbon-project developers and food companies whether the dirt is actually doing what the spreadsheet promised.
Sustaera Scrapped Years of Work to Build a Cheaper Carbon-Capture Machine
Direct air capture has a brutal math problem: too much machinery chasing too little CO2. The North Carolina startup’s answer was to kill its first product, shrink the team and redesign the machine around electricity, ceramics and a cost target the market might actually buy.
Mast Reforestation Learned Planting Trees Wasn’t the Hard Part - Financing the Forest Was
Mast began with a fleet of seed-firing drones. Then it discovered the expensive truth: after a megafire, the real bottlenecks are native seed, nursery space, dead wood and patient capital - so it bought the supply chain and buried the business model underground.
280 Earth
280 Earth is a climate-tech company that removes carbon dioxide permanently from the ambient air using a modular Direct Air Capture (DAC) system spun out of Alphabet's X, The Moonshot Factory. Its continuous-flow process uses a proprietary sorbent, off-the-shelf industrial equipment and low-grade waste heat or clean electricity to pull CO2 - and fresh water - out of the atmosphere at low energy cost. Its first plant in The Dalles, Oregon began operating in May 2024 and is designed to scale from hundreds to more than 20,000 tons of CO2 removed per year. The company's name references 280 parts per million, the pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 concentration it aims to help restore.
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.
AirMyne
AirMyne is a Berkeley, California climate-tech company building liquid-based direct air capture (DAC) systems that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at industrial scale. Founded in 2022 by chemical-industry veterans Sudip Mukhopadhyay and Mark Cyffka, the company designs a low-temperature, energy-flexible capture process - regenerating its solvent at roughly 100-130 C so it can run on waste heat, geothermal energy, or electricity rather than the high-temperature furnaces most DAC rivals require. Backed by Y Combinator and, more recently, a strategic investment from Japanese energy giant ENEOS, AirMyne is moving from kilogram-per-day prototypes toward a commercial pilot and demonstration plant.
Calcarea
Calcarea is a Caltech- and USC-born climate-tech company decarbonizing the shipping industry with onboard reactors that capture CO2 from ship exhaust and convert it into stable ocean bicarbonate. By speeding up the natural reaction between seawater and limestone - a process that normally takes over 10,000 years - down to about a minute, Calcarea aims to permanently and safely store roughly half of a cargo ship's emissions as slightly saltier seawater, at costs competitive with today's best carbon capture options.
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.
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.
Jess Adkins
Jess Adkins is a Caltech chemical oceanographer turned founder-CEO of Calcarea, a climate-tech startup that bolts a limestone-and-seawater reactor onto cargo ships to scrub up to half their CO2 and lock it away as ocean bicarbonate. After two decades studying how the deep ocean naturally buffers carbon, he spun his lab science out of the garage during COVID to attack shipping's gigatonne-a-year emissions problem at a fraction of the cost of atmospheric capture.
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.
Capture6
Capture6 is a climate-tech company that turns the salty waste brine left over from desalination and water treatment into two things the world needs: fresh water and permanently removed atmospheric CO2. Its integrated platform converts brine into a CO2-absorbing solvent in a single step, eliminating costly brine disposal while producing freshwater, green chemicals, and durable carbon removal. Founded in 2021 and based in the San Francisco Bay Area with operations in New Zealand, the public benefit corporation works with water utilities, industry, and governments across California, Western Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.
Andrew Jones
Andrew Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Carba, a Minneapolis-based carbon-removal startup that turns waste biomass into a durable, charcoal-like biocarbon and buries it to lock away CO2 for more than 1,000 years. A chemical engineer with a PhD from UC Berkeley, Jones invented Carba's patented low-energy pyrolysis and storage process and describes the work as 'reversing the coal mining process.' He previously founded and exited Activated Research Company, and has steered Carba from a 2021 lab idea to a working molten-salt reactor at a Burnsville landfill, a multi-year carbon-credit deal with Microsoft, and a goal of removing a gigaton of CO2 a year.
Sudip Mukhopadhyay
Sudip Mukhopadhyay is the CEO and co-founder of AirMyne, a Berkeley-based climate-tech company building liquid-solvent Direct Air Capture (DAC) machines that pull carbon dioxide straight out of the sky. A chemist and engineer with more than two decades in industrial R&D, he co-invented the low-global-warming car refrigerant 1234yf during a 16-year run at Honeywell, where he rose from engineer to corporate fellow and director of innovation. He launched AirMyne in 2022 with co-founder Mark Cyffka through Y Combinator, raising $6.9M in seed funding and a strategic investment from Japanese energy giant ENEOS, with the bet that cheap low-temperature heat (including geothermal) can make carbon removal affordable at industrial scale.
Barclay Rogers
Barclay Rogers is the co-founder and CEO of Graphyte, a carbon removal company that turns waste biomass into dense, dehydrated carbon blocks and buries them to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere for over a thousand years. A former environmental lawyer and mechanical engineer turned multi-time agtech and climate founder, he built Graphyte's 'Carbon Casting' process to deliver durable carbon removal at under $100 a ton, an order of magnitude cheaper than direct air capture. The company is backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and runs its first commercial plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Rogers also teaches a climate change solutions course as an adjunct professor of law at Tulane University.
Mote
Mote is a Los Angeles-based climate-tech company that turns woody waste biomass into clean biohydrogen while permanently sequestering the carbon. Using a biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) process spun out of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Mote pairs energy production with carbon removal: each utility-scale plant is designed to produce roughly 60 tons of carbon-negative hydrogen per day while removing on the order of 450,000 tons of CO2 a year. The company is developing its first commercial facility near Bakersfield in California's Kern County and a second project in Northern California with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.
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.
James Kanoff
James Kanoff is the co-founder and CEO of Terradot, a climate company using enhanced rock weathering to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by spreading crushed silicate rock across farmland. He launched Terradot in 2024 with $58.2M in funding, including a $54M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and backing from Google, Microsoft, John Doerr and Sheryl Sandberg, and has already signed some of the largest carbon-removal deals in the field's history. Before Terradot, while a Stanford undergraduate sent home during the COVID-19 pandemic, he co-founded The Farmlink Project, a nonprofit that has rescued well over 130 million pounds of surplus food for communities facing hunger.
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.
Joshuah Stolaroff
Joshuah Stolaroff is the co-founder and CEO of Mote, a Los Angeles clean energy company turning woody waste into renewable hydrogen while permanently burying the carbon. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer who built one of the first working prototypes for pulling CO2 straight out of the air, he spent eleven years running the carbon capture program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before co-authoring 'Getting to Neutral,' the report that launched the Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage (BiCRS) approach now at the heart of Mote. His aim is blunt: reduce and remove a billion tons of carbon by 2035.
Julia Reichelstein
Julia Reichelstein is the co-founder and CEO of Vaulted Deep, a Houston-based carbon removal company that pumps carbon-rich organic waste up to 5,000 feet underground for permanent storage. A Stanford economist who built a fintech firm in Kenya and invested in climate tech at Piva Capital, she partnered with deep-well injection expert Omar Abou-Sayed to spin Vaulted out of Advantek Waste Management in 2023. The company won the $8M XPRIZE Carbon Removal in 2024 and has signed offtake deals with Microsoft, Google, and Frontier Climate.
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.
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.