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Alt Carbon Secured $12 Million To Increase Carbon Removal
Alt Carbon has recently secured $12 million to scale carbon removal in India. The company has an interesting and inspiring story. According to the startup funding news, this firm has evolved from a failing family tea plantation to an innovative climate firm that has raised $12 million in a seed round to scale its carbon dioxide removal efforts in the South Asian nation.
Summary:
1. Alt Carbon, a startup that has evolved from a failing family tea plantation to an innovative climate company, has secured $12 million in a seed round to scale its carbon dioxide removal efforts in India.
2. The startup plans to expand its work by conducting additional soil sample analysis and establishing remote sensing data collection.
3. The company, which has labs in Darjeeling and Bengaluru, employs 8 to 10 PhDs and has 25 staff.
The climate tech startup has growing stone weathering agricultural areas to store carbon for thousands of years, and received funding from Lachy Groom, co-founder of Physical Intelligence, a robotics AI company.
According to the latest startup news, the quest for redemption begins in May 2020, with a bittersweet homecoming. Shrey and Sparsh Agarwal drove 16 hours from Kolkata, eastern India, to Darjeeling, a city recognized for tea harvesting in the Himalayan foothills, preparing to say goodbye to their family’s tea plantation, Salem Hill, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. Instead, that visit laid the foundations for Alt Carbon, which launched in late 2023.
Initially, they considered carbon markets to rejuvenate their family business and help other tea farms make more revenue. However, throughout their study, they found improved rock weathering as a method that might shift Darjeeling’s heritage from a risk of climate change impact to a frontier of climate action.
“Within carbon markets, we concluded that a lot of the projects in India, which are more avoidance-based, are of very low quality, and they produce junk credits,” Sparsh said during a private conversation on this startup funding news.
What is Alt Carbon?
Alt Carbon initiated a pilot program last year on about 500 acres of land surrounding the Agarwals’ family tea estate, they later expanded to include rice and bamboo farms in North Bengal. The firm plans to expand to 500,000 hectares of land.
On this latest startup news, Sparsh told the company wants to eliminate 5 million tons of carbon from the area by 2030, Sparsh told media agencies.
Alt Carbon leverages increased rock weathering with waste lava rock dust from mines and quarries through the volcanic igneous province of Rajmahal Traps in eastern India. Rock dust, a byproduct of the building industry, is put on farm fields, where it reacts naturally to eliminate carbon dioxide and give micronutrients to the soil, improving fertility and health, and crop yields. Rainwater carrying carbon dioxide reacts with lava dust to generate stable bicarbonate ions. These are kept in the soil and eventually migrate down rivers into the ocean, where they settle as calcium carbonate, storing carbon for nearly 10,000 years.
Based on this startup funding news, the firm has labs in Darjeeling and Bengaluru, and employs 8 to 10 PhDs, with a staff of 25 people. It intends to scale these facilities and expand its work by conducting additional soil sample analysis and even establishing a hardware studio on the ground for better and more premium data collection via remote sensing. The business also intends to deploy sensors on the ground to collect more information at a cheaper and faster rate. All of this will come from the seed round led by Groom.
Similarly, 360 One Asset, the real estate management part of wealth manager 360 ONE WAM, just launched INR 500 crore funds to promote early-stage entrepreneurs, marking a major entrance into India’s growing startup scene.
