Meet Carbo Culture, the company hacking the carbon cycle
At NASA’s Ames Research Center in 2013, Pia Henrietta Moon and Christopher Carstens met as part of Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program. The Finnish-American duo bonded over a strong, shared conviction that fighting climate change requires solutions that work at scale.
Enter Carbo Culture.
The company, which Henrietta and Chris founded a few years after meeting in Silicon Valley, is commercializing the extensive removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They are doing so by creating and selling a material called biocarbon — more on that below — plus selling carbon removal credits. Their north star mission is to remove 1 billion (Gt) tons of CO2 by 2030.
An ambitious goal, yes, but if anyone can do it, it’s this team.
At Cherry, we, too, agree that overcoming one of our generation’s most urgent problems requires scalable solutions. Carbo Culture has the tech, the team, the experts, the clients, the products, the revenue streams, the momentum, and the demand from the market to achieve their goals and have global impact. We’re honored to join them on their mission to change the world following today’s $6.2 million seed round announcement.
Hacking the carbon cycle
Over the past few years, policymakers and startups have made important strides in carbon offsetting, assessments, and bringing overall greater attention to climate change. We hope to see even more developments and synergies here in the future.
But fighting climate change also requires more than this. It requires reducing and removing carbon (shorthand for greenhouse gases like CO2) from the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that we may need to remove up to 1000 Gt of CO2 by 2050 — in thirty years — to halt even more detrimental effects of climate change.
Carbo Culture has created one of the most effective negative emissions technologies (NETs), which are projects that store or capture carbon. Through a unique, patented take on pyrolysis — which is the thermal decomposition of biomass, such as dead trees or other woody waste, in the absence of oxygen — Carbo Culture instantaneously converts CO2 into a functional material called biocarbon.
Biocarbon has two key benefits. The first is that CO2 maintains a stable form that remains out of the atmosphere for up to at least 1,000 years. That’s right. A millennium. One ton of Carbo Culture’s biocarbon stores up to three times the amount of CO2.
The second benefit is its functionality. When buried in the ground, for example, biocarbon becomes a soil enhancer. It can increase soil biodiversity, improve water quality — and quantity — for plant/crop utilization by increasing soil retention of nutrients and agrochemicals, and can produce oil and gas by-products that can be used as fuel and other renewable resources.
Up to 90% of the CO2 stored in trees or other biomass is released back into the atmosphere when the tree or biomass dies. It is exactly this CO2 that Carbo Culture’s biocarbon captures and keeps out of the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years.
Carbo Culture’s biocarbon not only has the power to remove carbon from the atmosphere and help mitigate climate change, but also help adapt to climate change by upcycling carbon into biocarbon.
Ripe for seed
Henrietta and I first met a few years back at Slush. Since then, it’s been fantastic to see Carbo Culture grow into what it is today and embark on this next bigger and bolder chapter. Henrietta and Chris complement each other in a superb way and it’s a true honor to work alongside such a brilliant team. They both live and breathe Carbo Culture’s impactful mission and the results are speaking for themselves.
At Cherry, we’re obsessed with backing bold founders who bring new ways to solve global problems through technology. And here, with Henrietta and Chris, we have a founding team that is using a resourceful and highly technological and inventive approach to fighting climate change at scale. Their approach is more ambitious, elegant, and sustainable than any other company in this field I’ve come across. As an aside, working with founders like Henrietta and Chris and backing companies like Carbo Culture is why I love my job so much!
Carbo Culture also marks Cherry’s steps further into impacttech, but it is not our first time. My partner Christian Meermann explains, “We made a similar bet on an impactful mission in 2017 when we first invested in Infarm. Since then, it’s been so exciting to see how the company has set out to improve — and is improving — how the world consumes food and foster change in a sustainable and inventive fashion. We saw many parallels with Carbo Culture and can’t wait to see what Henrietta and Chris accomplish in carbon removal and reduction.”
Until this point, Carbo Culture has been focused on product-market fit and finessing its technology and infrastructure. Now, it’s ready to scale, build more facilities, and educate the market about the benefits of biocarbon. The company’s demo facility is located in California and new funding will go-towards developing more facilities, such as here in Europe, and fuel further development in engineering, research and product development, and growing its remote team across Northern Europe and the US. (They’re hiring!)
You can read more about their news in TechCrunch and, of course, visit Carbo Culture’s website and social channels for more great content around their product, team, and mission.
