Skytree – a direct air capture company providing DAC units for the indoors farming industry, announced a milestone that will help it realize its carbon removal potential. The company closed successfully a $6 million seed round led by Horticoop, a cooperative fund investing in businesses that contribute to the horticultural industry, and Yield Lab Europe, an international Agtech impact VC fund.
The company also announced it appoints Mark Henderson as a global Chief Commercial Officer and President of North America. Skytree’s mission is to capture 10 million metric tons of CO2 through customer applications by 2030. Apart from helping its clients offset their emissions, the company has committed to achieving carbon neutrality through its own decentralized technology. The funding will enable it to move towards its goal and increase the adoption rates of the DAC technology.
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Skytree’s decentralized direct air capture (DDAC) technology allows clients to capture CO2 onsite, directly from the air outside. It filters the CO2 using a patented process and stores it in pressurized buffer tanks where clients can access it and have full control over it. The technology is used by businesses in regular need of concentrated CO2.
This modular DAC technology is also used by a range of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) businesses like greenhouses and vertical farms. Those indoor farms use concentrated CO2 to boost crop production. The circular supply of CO2 is said to enable the facilities to boost crop yields by up to 20-30% compared to traditional farming methods.
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According to Skytree, this onsite CO2 generation direct air capture technology future-proofs CEA businesses, alleviating procurement and transport challenges, and delivering clean and affordable CO2. The technology could also save emissions from natural gas utilization as some greenhouses feed their crops with concentrated CO2 derived from burning natural gas.
“We are the first climate tech company supporting food security through deployment of DAC technology, enabling businesses to transition away from fossil fuel-based CO2 supply… Not only can we provide a cleaner source of CO2 for greenhouses that use it for their farms, but our onsite solutions also enable increased productivity in farms that currently cannot access or don’t use CO2,” said Rob van Straten, CEO of Skytree.
