Last week, the carbon removal sector saw the launch of CTRL-S (Climate Tech Rescue, License, & Scale)—a new platform that will gather and store knowledge and breakthroughs from direct air capture (DAC) technology startups that never made it to market.
The platform was launched by Jason Hochman, co-founder and former executive director of the Direct Air Capture Coalition, alongside founding team members Silvan Aeschlimann and Nicole Williams.
Its creation was also shaped following expert insights from a consulting group that includes membersJack Andreasen Cavanaugh, Kelly Cummins, Grant Faber, Merritt Dailey, Phil De Luna, Thomas McDonald, James Mwangi, Erik Funkhouser, Jacques J. Tohme, and Charithea Charalambous.
The release of CTRL-S comes at a time when the DAC sector is decreasing in size.
Many DAC startups that have been developing technically working DAC solutions have been forced to shut down operations due to factors outside the company, such as the lack of capital needed for further advancement, even though the technology was progressing as planned and hitting key milestones.
In cases like these, once the startup halts operations, the hard-earned DAC knowledge and technology advancements typically get deleted or abandoned.
This causes valuable DAC intellectual property (IP), experimental data, and scientific and engineering insights to disappear, exactly at a time when the industry could leverage a more comprehensive knowledge base to unlock technological breakthroughs.
Founder and CEO Jason Hochman explains that CTRL-S aims to address exactly this problem, acting as an archive that collects gained knowledge on DAC innovations, preventing it from disappearing and helping it compound over time.
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CTRL-S acquires IP, data, and knowledge from DAC startups that are unable to commercialize it before it disappears. Every acquired asset is evaluated by a founding team with DAC and IP experience before it gets independently reviewed by the advisory group of DAC experts and published on the subscription-based platform.
This will allow vital DAC knowledge to be carried forward, making it available to different stakeholders, including energy companies, industrials, and businesses from adjacent sectors, that could scale it and bring it to market.
More details can be found here.
