Direct Air Capture Startup Heirloom Raises $53M In Series A Funding
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Heirloom Carbon Technologies, a direct air capture (DAC) company, has just announced that it has successfully raised $53 million in equity financing. Notable investors participated in the round: Carbon Direct Capital Management, Ahren Innovation Capital, Carbon Removal Partners (CRP), and Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), with the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund as an additional participant, and a list of other VCs.
The co-founder, Shashank Samala, explained in a CleanTechnica interview in December of last year some of the background of the company.
Carbon removal technologies have become more talked about lately. The IPCC has made it clear that we must collectively and permanently remove tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air to maintain a sustainable standard of living on Earth — in addition to carbon avoidance and reduction efforts. This has encouraged individuals and corporations to buy carbon removal credits and invest in carbon removal technologies. The supply of carbon removals has to scale to several gigatons per year — many orders of magnitude from what is available today.
Heirloom is a California-based startup that intends to remove one billion tons (i.e. 1 gigaton) of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2035. Unlike other carbon removal methods, Heirloom does not rely on solvents to separate the carbon dioxide from the air, instead, they decided to utilize limestone for their removal processes.
“The costs of Direct Air Capture have to come way down to make a meaningful impact on climate change,” said Shashank Samala, Co-founder and CEO at Heirloom. “Utilizing low cost, earth abundant minerals as a sponge for CO2 is key to making the economics work. In the 10 months since we launched, we’ve made a breakthrough in the rate we take up CO2 from the atmosphere, giving us a clear path to ultra-low cost, highly scalable carbon removal, and achieving our mission to help reverse climate change.”
The company has already managed to attract some notable customers, such as Stripe and Shopify. This particular financing marks one of the largest private fundings in the direct air capture industry to date, and was apparently led by the clean technology fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The funds raised will finance additional research, development, and the deployment of Heirloom’s technology.
This funding round shows how carbon removal technology is gaining momentum. In other carbon removal news, there is the recent funding news for carbon removal platform Carbonfuture and new customer acquisitions by carbon removal company Climeworks .
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