CarbonZero.eco, a startup based in Silicon Valley, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to advance its biochar and restorative agriculture operations.
The seed funding includes investments from leading industry figures, the likes of managers and executives at Google, Meta, and Amazon, along with a cohort of CEOs of several late-stage startups.
With this financial boost, CarbonZero.eco will accelerate its CO2 removal efforts, producing biochar that will enable American farmers to access additional income streams while improving the quality of their soil and increasing the crop yields from their work.
Along with this announcement, CarbonZero.eco also shared the news of signing $7 million worth of deals with Californian almond farms that will provide the company with waste material like almond shells for the production of biochar.
This collaboration with almond farms in Colusa County and Yolo County is expected to result in the mitigation of up to 1.5 million tons of CO2 emissions that would otherwise be released in the atmosphere as the waste material decomposes.
Considering the location of its partnering farms, CarbonZero.eco has chosen Colusa County as the home to its first biochar production site, eliminating the need for transportation and complex logistics.
This planned biochar production plant, scheduled to launch towards the end of April 2025, has already been vetted by carbon crediting platform Puro.earth, registering CarbonZero.eco as a biochar carbon removal certificate supplier, slated to produce its first certificates in mid-2025.
Relevant: New Research: Beyond Sequestration, Biochar Enables Soil To Further Sorb Atmospheric CO2
Harper Moss, co-founder and CEO of CarbonZero.eco, was only 15 years old when she envisioned the climate-forward role of the company that she established together with co-founder and CTO Gregory Ray.
In a broader perspective, the co-founders aim to introduce biochar to approximately 525 million acres of US farmland, which would demand the production of over 2.6 billion tons of the regenerative product annually.
With this ambition in mind, the company currently has two main areas of focus: empowering farmers and addressing the significant biochar shortage in the US.
Read more: Google Makes Bold Investment In Biochar With New Varaha And Charm Partnerships
