Heirloom Raises $53 Million in Series A for Its Cost-Effective Carbon Capture Tech

Carbon capture firm Heirloom has raised $53 million in a Series A funding round to continue its efforts to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Marking one of the largest private financings in direct air capture, Heirloom says its new funding will go toward financing the first low-cost and scalable direct air capture process. Heirloom says it has the lowest peer-reviewed cost of any direct air capture process in the world.

Decreasing costs of carbon capture

“The costs of Direct Air Capture have to come way down to make a meaningful impact on climate change,” Shashank Samala, Co-founder and CEO at Heirloom, said in a statement.

“Utilizing low cost, earth-abundant minerals as a sponge for CO2 is key to making the economics work. In the 10 months since we launched, we’ve made a breakthrough in the rate we take up CO2 from the atmosphere, giving us a clear path to ultra-low cost, highly scalable carbon removal, and achieving our mission to help reverse climate change,” Samala said.

The funding includes investments from leading climate funds and entrepreneurs, including Breyer Capital, Grantham Environmental Trust, Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Carbon Removal Partners, and Seven Seven Six. Heirloom has also received grant funding from the ARPA-e and the National Science Foundation.

The company’s aim is to remove one billion tons of CO2 from the environment by 2035.

“Carbon removal is essential to hit our climate goals,” said Jonathan Goldberg, founder and CEO of Carbon Direct.

Climate targets

Data from the IPCC point to carbon capture as one of the most critical tools in fighting climate change and keeping global temperatures from rising more than 1.5℃.

“To limit the planet’s warming to 1.5°C, we need to combine significant carbon reductions with carbon removal from the atmosphere. Our catalytic investments in durable direct air capture technologies like Heirloom aim to drive mainstream adoption by bringing down the green premium through large-scale deployment,” says Mark Kroese, General Manager, Sustainability Solutions at Microsoft.

A new report from the U.K.-based Energy Transitions Commission, says renewable energy alone is not enough to curb climate change, and more attention to carbon offsets management is necessary to meet Paris Agreement targets.

Earlier this week, U.N. Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said that an urgent shift away from fossil fuels, especially coal, in Asia-Pacific countries is essential to meeting those climate targets.

“Moving away from coal and fossil fuels in a region that accounts for 75 percent of global coal-fired generation capacity will not be easy,” she said. “But it is essential for our common future, and it is financially and technologically possible.”

Lead photo courtesy Redd on Unsplash