Biochar developer raises $1.5 mln as carbon removal funding stays thin
Small-ticket factory-based carbon removal deals keep coming while total sector investment sits well below its 2022 peak.
A factory-based biochar developer has raised $1.5 mln to scale production, Carbon Pulse reported on 2026-05-28, in a story covering a data centre developer unveiling an integrated biochar platform aimed at hyperscaler and institutional carbon dioxide removal buyers.3 The raise is small by sector standards. It is also the kind of deal now setting the pace for engineered removal capacity.
Investment in carbon dioxide removal peaked at around $1.5bn in 2022 before falling to $856m in 2023, according to a 2024 University of Oxford-led report cited in Energy Voice coverage dated 2026-06-11.4 Removal accounts for just 1.1% of overall climate-tech start-up investment, even as estimates put the world's need at between 7 and 9 billion tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050 to keep Paris goals within reach.4 A $1.5 mln round does not close that gap.
Buyer-side pledges have grown. Frontier Climate, the purchasing group backed by Stripe, Google and Shopify, announced on 2026-06-17 that Anthropic had joined and that the group would invest $915 mln in leading carbon removal companies, per Utility Dive reporting dated 2026-06-23.7 That is a commitment to buy, not capital for early-stage developers. The two are not interchangeable.
Technology routes are multiplying regardless. The Economist, in a piece dated 2026-05-19, described electrochemical and chemical approaches to extracting carbon dioxide from a continuous flow of seawater, with some developers eyeing a synergy with desalination plants.1 Those processes carry the same energy burden that weighs on direct air capture. Stockholm Exergi, which supplies electricity and heating to most of Stockholm, plans to capture 800,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from biomass-fired boilers, per the same Economist piece.1
The UK is testing how far the larger projects can get. Airhive and Mission Zero Technologies formed a joint venture with Progressive Energy to build and operate what the partners call Europe's biggest direct air capture project, with Energy Voice reporting on 2026-06-11 that the venture aims to capture 60,000 tonnes of CO2 annually two years after start-up.5,4 Deployment globally remains tiny: around 20 DAC plants capturing roughly 10,000 tonnes of CO2 per year in total.4 A single planned UK plant would target six times the entire existing fleet's annual capture.
Policy support for carbon pricing keeps tightening around the edges. The EU has set out pricing frameworks for its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, applying a carbon price to imports of cement, steel, aluminium, electricity and hydrogen, according to edie reporting dated 2026-04-07.6 That nudges industrial emitters toward abatement and, indirectly, toward removal markets. It does not fund a biochar plant.
Carbon Pulse reported on 2026-05-26 that a Belgian firm raised €17.5 mln to scale plasma-based CO2 utilisation technology.2 That is more than ten times the biochar round, and utilisation rather than storage. Investors are still paying up for technologies with an industrial revenue line attached.
The question hanging over small developers is whether purchase commitments convert into bankable offtake. A $915 mln buyers' pledge and a $1.5 mln equity round can coexist for years without the second growing into the first. The next tranche of Frontier-linked deals — and whether factory-based biochar appears in them at anything above pilot scale — is the concrete thing to watch.7