Lithos, a Seattle startup making use of carbon seize expertise in an agricultural setting, introduced Thursday that it raised a $6.29 million seed funding spherical.
Lithos offers a everlasting carbon elimination technique by spreading the mud of crushed basalt rock on croplands. When the rain falls, the basalt reacts with the water and carbon dioxide within the air, turning it into dissolved bicarbonate. The “enhanced rock weathering” course of additionally releases vitamins to the soil, benefiting crop manufacturing.
The startup makes use of software program to custom-deploy the basalt rock primarily based on variables comparable to soil chemistry and crop diet. The software program additionally measures carbon elimination quantity.
Lithos sells carbon elimination credit to companies and offers a share of the gross sales with the farmers the place the product was utilized.
Carbon elimination is seen by most as a mandatory resolution for preventing local weather change. The present market worth for carbon credit is $1 billion, based on McKinsey analysis, and it’s anticipated to extend to at the least $30 billion by the tip of this decade.
Lithos launched in March and is reside throughout greater than 1,000 acres. It’s the largest provider of credit to Frontier, a $1 billion advance market dedication led by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey.
Lithos co-founder and CEO Mary Yap beforehand labored with two San Francisco startups that have been acquired — together with social funds firm Tilt, acquired by Airbnb — and holds a bachelor’s diploma in earth and planetary sciences and geology from Yale. Yap’s household are generational farmers in Taiwan.
“We don’t simply seize carbon,” Yap stated in a press release. “Lithos’ method is instantly precious to farmers, growing crop yields and changing the costly established order – agricultural lime – with basalt mud, derived from rock that’s protected from heavy metals.”
Co-founder Dr. Noah Planavsky is an affiliate professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Yale and co-founder Dr. Chris Reinhard is an affiliate professor of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. The professors co-invented expertise utilized by Lithos, together with an method for precising verifying the quantity of carbon elimination in soil.
The seed spherical funding was led by Union Sq. Ventures and Greylock Companions with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, local weather funds Carbon Removing Companions and the Carbon Drawdown Initiative, in addition to agriculture funds Fall Line Capital and Cavallo Ventures.
Lithos represents the primary local weather funding for Greylock Companions and Bain Capital Ventures.