NeoCarbon, a Berlin-based tech startup that retrofits industrial sites to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, announces 3.2M EUR in a Seed funding led by RAISE Seed For Good, a Seed and Pre-Seed fund operated by RAISE Ventures, dedicated to financing and supporting Europe’s future leaders in responsible tech with further investment from their initial backers PT1 – Proptech1 Ventures, Speedinvest, and Antler.
The funding round of the Direct Air Capture startup also included several new high-profile angel investors like Christian Vollmann and Matthias Gotta, complementing the private investors who joined the company’s Pre-Seed round in the summer of 2022.
NeoCarbon leverages underutilized waste streams from existing industrial infrastructure like waste heat from cooling towers, to capture carbon. This enables the company to drastically reduce the cost and time associated with capturing CO2 from ambient air, encouraging mass-market adoption.
Hundreds of thousands of industrial sites produce excess heat around Europe that they cannot utilize. By efficiently retrofitting their system at these sites, NeoCarbon removes the carbon dioxide from ambient air with much lower capital and operational costs.
Only twenty-seven Direct Air Capture plants are currently operating worldwide, capturing approximately 10,000 tons of CO2 per year combined, several orders of magnitudes off the lowest climate targets estimated by experts. Furthermore, cost per unit of CO2 removed is still up to 10 times higher than the economically viable price. By retrofitting existing infrastructure, NeoCarbon substantially reduces the up-front expense and time investment to build capture systems. This can rapidly improve the mass-market adoption of removing carbon dioxide directly from ambient air, and paves the way to several gigatons of CO2 being captured this way annually, a huge share of humanity’s long-term needs.
The new financing will accelerate the roll-out of NeoCarbon’s units to customer sites through the creation of an operations team and enable the finalization of the first full-scale capture unit using NeoCarbon’s proprietary reactor technology, which will considerably lower capture costs. Both achievements will lead the way for the company to enter in the era of industrial-scale capture, aiming to reach a significant share of the global Direct Air Capture installed capacity.
René Haas, NeoCarbon CEO, says: “Every year, the climate crisis is causing more tangible and costly damages. Thus, experts from leading climate research like the IPCC are now urging actions to scale carbon dioxide removal as fast as possible. NeoCarbon is a core actor of this impactful mission, and with our first unit being rolled out in the coming months to one of our partners’ industrial sites, we are starting to see the tangible impact of our company. We need to accelerate this rollout, and the Seed round will enable us to answer demand better and faster, to reach the climate potential of NeoCarbon.”
Sophia Martin, Co-head at RAISE Ventures says: “We were impressed by NeoCarbon’s ambitious and mission-obsessed founding team, their remarkable early execution skills and strong entrepreneurial mindset. DAC is, and will stay, a critical topic, as it is the only way to achieve carbon neutrality and provide a scalable approach to mitigate the effects of climate change. With a decentralized approach, Neocarbon is the first autonomous system that leverages existing infrastructures and captures CO2 scalably. This round aims at accelerating the product rollout with existing and new clients willing to implement their net-zero commitments and tackle a multi-gigatons per year climate impact opportunity.”
NeoCarbon was founded in January 2022 and has implemented a first fully autonomous demonstrator in Spring 2023, and is now finalizing rollouts of a second-generation system to a customer’s site by Q1 2024.
