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OUR BLOG
06 Jun 2023 | Peter Reinhardt
3 MINUTES READ
We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $100m in Series B funding! This comes on the heels of our market-leading delivery of over 6,200 tons of carbon removal, and record-breaking new deals with Frontier and JPMorgan Chase to permanently remove an additional 140,000 tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide via bio-oil sequestration. With this new funding in hand, we’re excited to dramatically expand our operations in the American heartland in the years ahead.
Our new funding was led by General Catalyst. The firm is deeply committed to investing in ‘responsible innovation’ companies that can deliver outsized financial and societal returns. General Catalyst’s CEO and Managing Director Hemant Taneja will join our board alongside Ryan Panchadsaram from John Doerr’s office (also, authors of Speed and Scale).
We’re proud that Lowercarbon, Exor Ventures, Kinnevik, Thrive Capital and Elad Gil also invested as part of the round.
Over the past three years, we’ve taken bio-oil sequestration from lightbulb moment, to first delivery, to—in Frontier’s words—leading the market, having delivered over 6,200 tons of permanent carbon removal to date. Figuring out how to smoothly get carbon underground has been anything but easy, with plenty of highs and failures too: corn cob chaos, solidified bio-oil, frozen water lines, auto-igniting biochar and many other adventures. Delivery isn’t easy, but for the climate, delivery is what matters, and we’re proud to share our deliveries publicly here.
We’ll be using the new funding to accelerate our carbon removal deliveries. After deploying increasingly advanced pilot processes in 2021 and 2022, we began ramping up in 2023. Our primary focus is expanding bio-oil production and transport capacity, and since the beginning of the year we’ve increased tons of carbon removal delivered per week 5x.
Continued acceleration requires ramping up our operations in Colorado and the broader corn belt, and expanding our lone pyrolyzer into a continent-wide fleet of tens of thousands of pyrolyzers. The future of carbon removal will be a massive investment in the heartland of America. Each Charm pyrolyzer will produce bio-oil for sequestration and improve the soil with biochar. By 2050, we need roughly 10 billion tons per year of carbon removal, which will require 70% year over year growth for the next 27 years (twice as fast as software).
Unfortunately scientists now expect the world will pass 1.5°C of warming in the next decade. We need massive emissions reductions through electrification, decarbonized grids, industrial process changes, ag practice changes, plugging methane leaks, and more. We also need to ramp up removals of historical carbon dioxide emissions.
If you are a corporate buyer seeking to clean up your footprint, email us sales@charmindustrial.com. And if you want to mobilize into the front lines of carbon removal, see our open roles.
Gigatons or bust!
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Peter Reinhardt
CEO
Subscribe to follow our journey to inject bio-oil into deep-geological formations, Charm permanently puts CO2 back underground.
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Earlier this year, in the bitter cold of Kansas winter, we began field testing our first scaled pyrolyzer, designed to process 10 tons of biomass per day. The pyrolyzer processed California wheat straw just fine. But now in Kansas, corn stover turned out to be a bit different. The bales not only had leaves and stalks, but also cobs and rocks.
Lauren Murray
Engineering Manager
Earlier this year, in the bitter cold of Kansas winter, we began field testing our first scaled pyrolyzer, designed to process 10 tons of biomass per day. The pyrolyzer processed California wheat straw just fine. But now in Kansas, corn stover turned out to be a bit different. The bales not only had leaves and stalks, but also cobs and rocks.
Humanity has emitted hundreds of gigatonnes of CO₂. Now you can put it back underground.