Lowercarbon Capital – a climate investment company founded in 2018 by entrepreneurs Chris and Crystal Sacca, announced Thursday, April 14th, it raised a $350 million fund specifically dedicated to investing in carbon removal startups with the potential to achieve truly significant levels of CO2 removal.
“There has never been a better time to start a carbon removal company,” said Sacca in a company announcement for the new fund.
According to the founders, the fund is looking to invest in startup entrepreneurs looking to scale up their carbon removal technology. It is open to any solutions from biological enhancements and manipulations to electrochemical solutions to burying carbon deep underground that hold massive potential.
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“We can, and will, zero out new emissions, even in industries like steel and fertilizer that are notoriously hard to decarbonize… Carbon is expensive, and removing it from energy, services, goods, and the like ultimately translates to profits. Businesses like profits. So, that’s all working. It’s just going to take time. Sadly, we spent most of the last 50 years running out the clock while gorging ourselves at an all-you-can-eat petrochemical buffet,” added Sacca.
In the announcement of the raised funds, Chris Sacca also shared that left to its own devices, Earth could take up to 100,000 years to cool back down to safe levels. That shows once again removing the already added emissions in the sky is essential for the world to curb climate change, therefore we need to suck CO2 out of the air and put it back in the ground where it was in the first place, in addition to dramatic emissions reductions.
“Removal means removal. It means mopping up the 170 years of extractive sludge milk we’ve already spilled,” expressed firmly Sacca.
Lowercarbon Capital raised a separate $800 million climate fund last summer, backing companies “buying us time to unf**ck the planet”, according to its statement. The fund counts on three main approaches to do that: adapting to the rising dangers, cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, or removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.
It has also invested earlier in renowned carbon removal startups like Heirloom – using minerals to capture carbon dioxide, Running Tide – planting seaweed that captures carbon, and Verdox – using an electric carbon removal approach.
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Lowercarbon Capital raising a $350 fund also follows another major milestone for the carbon removal space this week. Stripe announced on Tuesday it teams up with Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey to commit to purchasing $925 million worth of permanent carbon removal from companies developing this technology over the next nine years.
They jointly announced the creation of Frontier – an advance market commitment that aims to accelerate the development of carbon removal technologies by guaranteeing future demand for them.
Together the two initiatives provide a combined more than $1.2 billion of capital devoted to carbon removal startups, initiatives, and technologies with great potential to balance out carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
In addition to supporting climate change efforts, these commitments also confirm there is a huge demand for the space for carbon removal that barely existed a few years ago. Creating carbon removal capacity will be truly needed in the next few decades so the market is projected to expand exponentially from here. True decarbonization technologies are projected to make the cut and be offered the chance to develop their climate contributions.
