Terradot

Who they are now

A startup that spreads rocks for a living

Somewhere in the Brazilian tropics, a spreader truck the size of a small house is laying down a fine grey dust across a field of crops. The dust is crushed basalt. The field belongs to a farmer who mostly cares that his soil gets healthier. The dust belongs, in a sense, to Google and Microsoft, who have agreed to pay for the carbon dioxide it will quietly pull out of the sky over the next decade. The orchestrator of this slightly absurd, entirely serious arrangement is Terradot.

Terradot calls itself "The Earth Regeneration Company," which is the kind of phrase that usually means very little. In this case it means something specific and measurable: take a reaction that nature runs over thousands of years, and run it in a few. The company has raised $58.2 million, signed contracts to remove nearly 300,000 tonnes of CO2, and spread roughly 50,000 tonnes of rock across about 2,000 hectares of farmland. For a four-year-old company built around grinding stone, that is a lot of momentum.

"Nature already removes carbon by dissolving rock. Terradot's only real innovation is impatience."

The problem they saw

Carbon removal had a measurement problem

Here is the inconvenient truth about removing carbon from the air: the easy part is the chemistry, and the hard part is proving it happened. The world does not lack ideas for pulling down CO2. It lacks credible, durable, countable ones. A forest can burn. Soil carbon can wash away. A carbon credit is only as good as the science behind it, and a great deal of the science has been, to put it gently, optimistic.

Enhanced Rock Weathering - ERW, for those who enjoy acronyms - sits in a rare sweet spot. When silicate rock like basalt dissolves in rainwater, it reacts with CO2 and locks it into stable bicarbonate that drains toward the ocean and stays put for tens of thousands of years. It is permanent in a way trees are not. It happens on land farmers already use. And it improves the soil while it works. The catch: weathering naturally takes geological time, and measuring exactly how much carbon a given field has captured is genuinely difficult.

"Anyone can spread rock on a field. The trick is proving to a skeptical buyer how much carbon it actually buried."The Terradot wager, in one sentence

The founders' bet

Three people, one soil lab, thirty years of dirt

Terradot was born in 2022 inside Stanford's Soil and Environmental Biogeochemistry Lab. The founding trio is an unusually balanced one. Scott Fendorf is a Stanford Earth System Sciences professor with more than three decades studying what actually happens to elements in soil - the kind of person who can tell you why a field in Brazil behaves differently than a field in Iowa. Sasankh Munukutla brought machine learning and climate research. And James Kanoff, the CEO, had already co-founded The Farmlink Project, a venture that rescues surplus farm produce, giving him a head start on the unglamorous logistics of working with real farmers.

Their bet was that ERW's bottleneck was not the rock - it was the receipts. So Terradot built itself around measurement first: calibrated biogeochemical models, field sampling, and ground-truth data designed to say, with defensible numbers, how much CO2 a site removed. The slogan the team likes is that they are "proving the science today" so they can deploy at scale tomorrow. It is a less exciting pitch than "we will save the planet," and a far more bankable one.

"A professor with thirty years in the dirt, an AI researcher, and a guy who moves food for a living. Carbon removal could do worse."On the Terradot founding team

$58.2M

Total funding

~300k

Tonnes contracted

~50k

Tonnes rock spread

10 Gt

Annual goal by 2050

The product

Rock in, receipts out

Strip away the mission statements and Terradot does three things. First, it deploys: sourcing and crushing silicate rock and spreading it across partner farmland in the tropics, where warm, wet conditions make weathering run fastest. Second, it measures: using calibrated models and field data to quantify how much CO2 each site has durably removed - the part most competitors wave their hands at. Third, it sells: turning each verified tonne into a high-permanence carbon credit bought by corporations under multi-year offtake contracts.

The elegance is that nobody loses. The farmer gets a soil amendment that raises fertility and pH, often for free. The atmosphere gets a little lighter. The buyer gets a credit that will still be valid in ten thousand years, which is more than can be said for most things sold in 2026. Terradot, naturally, gets paid per tonne. It is the rare climate model where the incentives of the planet and the spreadsheet actually point the same way.

"The farmer gets richer soil. The atmosphere gets less carbon. Terradot gets a check. Three things rarely agree this completely."

The proof

The buyers are the kind that read the fine print

It is one thing to claim your carbon removal works. It is another to convince Microsoft's procurement team. Terradot's customer list reads like a who's-who of buyers famous for technical scrutiny: Google signed an agreement for roughly 200,000 tonnes, its first direct investment in an ERW company. Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund both invested and bought a 12,000-tonne package explicitly structured to fund open scientific monitoring - a buyer paying not just for carbon, but for the proof itself. Frontier, the advance market commitment backed by Stripe and others, is in too.

The chart below tells the story numbers tell best: this is a company whose contracted ambition dwarfs what it has physically deployed so far, which is exactly what an early-stage scaling bet looks like.

The mission

Ten gigatons, said with a straight face

Terradot's stated ambition is to remove 10 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050. To put that in perspective, that is a meaningful fraction of what climate scientists say the world will need to pull from the air, on top of cutting emissions. It is a comically large number for a company that currently spreads rock on a few thousand hectares. Terradot seems entirely aware of this, which is why it spends so much energy on measurement rather than marketing. You cannot scale to a gigaton on credibility you do not have.

The February 2026 acquisition of Eion fits the same logic. Eion brought a U.S. footprint and an olivine-based approach to complement Terradot's Brazilian basalt. Its CEO put the rationale bluntly: Eion was simply too small to handle the contracts that large buyers and sovereign wealth funds now want. Consolidation, in other words, has arrived in carbon removal. Terradot intends to be the one doing the consolidating.

Five things that make Terradot, Terradot

Its core technology copies a process the planet has run for billions of years - it just hits fast-forward.
The same crushed basalt that captures CO2 doubles as a slow-release mineral supplement for farm soil.
It began inside a Stanford lab run by a professor with three decades of soil research behind him.
CEO James Kanoff previously co-founded The Farmlink Project, which rescues surplus farm produce.
Microsoft's deal pays Terradot partly to publish the science - a buyer funding its own skepticism.

Why it matters tomorrow

Back to the field

Return to that spreader truck in Brazil. From a distance it looks like ordinary agriculture - a machine dusting a field, a farmer checking his crop. Nothing about the scene announces that it is also a climate intervention, a financial instrument, and a science experiment all at once. That ordinariness is the point. The most scalable carbon removal will not look like a gleaming factory sucking air; it will look like farming, because there are already billions of hectares of it.

Whether Terradot hits 10 gigatons is, frankly, unknowable today. What is clear is that it has chosen the harder, more honest version of the problem - proving the carbon is really gone before selling the claim that it is. In a market that has burned buyers before, that may turn out to be the most valuable rock it spreads. The grey dust settles into the soil, the rain comes, the chemistry begins, and somewhere a spreadsheet quietly records another tonne the sky will not get back.

Terradot

A startup that spreads rocks for a living

Carbon removal had a measurement problem

Three people, one soil lab, thirty years of dirt

From lab bench to landmark deals

Spun out of Stanford

$4.2M seed

$54M Series A & public launch

Microsoft 12,000-tonne deal

Scaling in Brazil at COP30

Acquires Eion

Rock in, receipts out

The buyers are the kind that read the fine print

Terradot, by the tonne

Ten gigatons, said with a straight face

Five things that make Terradot, Terradot

Back to the field

Terradot, in their own words and others'