Charm Industrial – a company that is removing carbon from the atmosphere via bio-oil sequestration and decarbonizing steel with steam-reformed bio-oil – announced recently that it has raised $100 million in Series B funding led by General Catalyst. And additional investors include Lowercarbon, Exor Ventures, Kinnevik, Thrive Capital, and Elad Gil.
The funding round comes on the heels of Charm Industrial’s 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 funding round, Charm plans to expand engineering and bio-oil R&D efforts, scale operations with tens of thousands of pyrolyzers, and improve transportation capacity.
In connection with the funding round, General Catalyst’s CEO and Managing Director Hemant Taneja will join Charm’s board along with Ryan Panchadsaram (former Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States and also authored of Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now with John Doerr).
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
“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 breach the 1.5°C warming threshold by 2027. 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.”
— Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Charm Industrial
