Turnover Labs, an early-stage, NYC-based start-up that aims to decarbonize the chemical manufacturing industry and change the way the world produces petrochemicals, announced that it has closed a $1.4 million pre-seed funding round. Pace Ventures and GC Ventures are co-leads, along with Sandy Spring Climate Partners and several leading VC firms.
Turnover Labs utilizes proprietary technology pioneered and developed at Columbia University to convert dirty carbon dioxide produced in chemical manufacturing and released into the atmosphere into valuable chemical building blocks. Launched in 2022, Turnover’s innovative electrolysis technology will allow chemical companies to produce their products without relying on petroleum feedstocks.
Research has shown that chemical manufacturing accounts for more than 2 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year. And a majority of these emissions have no current technical solutions for reduction, avoidance, or capture.
Turnover will use the funding to expand its engineering team, grow business development efforts, and accelerate R&D to transition its technology from the lab to a sub-scale prototype. And these critical growth steps will lead to building a real-world prototype that could recycle thousands of tons of carbon dioxide annually.
KEY QUOTES:
“Using Turnover’s technology, chemical manufacturers will be able to synthesize the most basic chemical building blocks out of the CO2 being emitted by their own facilities. Our design emphasizes durability and process compatibility with existing infrastructure, and we’re building our systems to be highly resilient, inexpensive, and able to scale into many different processes.”
“Instead of building a new process to be compatible with our conversion system, we’re building a system that can easily fit into the operations of virtually any chemical manufacturing plant. Our hope is that our approach will help speed the transition to a petroleum-free future because we can make use of chemical manufacturing assets that are already in place and operating. These assets still have years of life left before they’re replaced with more efficient alternatives, so we’re excited to offer chemical producers a way to reduce emissions and costs today.”
-Founder and CEO Marissa Beatty, Ph.D.
