To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, emissions must be reduced by nearly half by 2030 and reached net-zero by 2050. Consequently, several notable investments in the industry have been made this year in Europe including Kausal, Cloover, Revalue Nature, and Renewabl. Another one to get some funding before this year ends is NeoCarbon, which retrofits industrial sites to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Raises €3.2M funding
The Berlin-based Direct Air Capture startup has snapped a €3.2 million seed funding round led by RAISE Seed For Good, a Seed and Pre-Seed fund operated by RAISE Ventures. Further investment came from initial investors PT1 – Proptech1 Ventures, Speedinvest (recently backed Milano Vice and HomeCooks), and Antler (backed Quinky and Getplace.io). Further, the NeoCarbon seed round also saw participation from several new high-profile angel investors – Christian Vollmann and Matthias Gotta.
The fresh funds will accelerate the rollout of NeoCarbon’s units to customer sites through the creation of an operations team. It will enable the finalisation of the first full-scale capture unit using NeoCarbon’s proprietary reactor technology, which will considerably lower capture costs.
Removes CO2 from ambient air
NeoCarbon was founded in Berlin in 2021 by René Haas and Silvain Toromanoff, two engineers passionate about climate tech. The company leverages underutilised waste streams from existing industrial infrastructure such as waste heat from cooling towers to capture carbon.
This can accelerate the adoption of removing carbon dioxide directly from ambient air, and pave the way for several gigatons of CO2 to be captured per year. It dramatically reduces the cost and time associated with capturing CO2 from ambient air by up to 10x by retrofitting existing infrastructure.
René Haas, NeoCarbon CEO, said: “Every year, the climate crisis is causing more tangible and costly damages. Thus, experts from leading climate research like the IPCC are now urging actions to scale carbon dioxide removal as fast as possible. NeoCarbon is a core actor of this impactful mission, and with our first unit being rolled out in the coming months to one of our partners’ industrial sites, we are starting to see the tangible impact of our company. We need to accelerate this rollout, and the Seed round will enable us to answer demand better and faster, to reach the climate potential of NeoCarbon.”
Sophia Martin, Co-head at RAISE Ventures, said: “We were impressed by NeoCarbon’s ambitious and mission-obsessed founding team, their remarkable early execution skills and strong entrepreneurial mindset. DAC is, and will stay, a critical topic, as it is the only way to achieve carbon neutrality and provide a scalable approach to mitigate the effects of climate change. With a decentralised approach, Neocarbon is the first autonomous system that leverages existing infrastructures and captures CO2 scalably. This round aims at accelerating the product rollout with existing and new clients willing to implement their net-zero commitments and tackle a multi-gigatons per year climate impact opportunity.”
