Terradot, a San Francisco, CA-based climate company, raised $58.2m in funding.
The funding includes $4.2m in seed funding and a $54m Series A round, which recently closed.
Backers included Lead, John Doerr; Sheryl Sandberg & Tom Bernthal, George Roberts; Strategics, Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Google, Cisco; and Floodgate, Kleiner Perkins, Acre Venture Partners, Gigascale Capital, Valor Capital, Ponderosa Ventures and others.
Founded in 2022 at Stanford, Terradot aims to transform the natural process of rock weathering into a global carbon removal solution within the next decade. The company has assembled a team of scientists, engineers, and operators who are working to solve some of the most important problems in ERW: defining the exact parameters that maximize CO₂ uptake and creating the highest precision measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) tools. Terradot aims to build this research into a suite of tools and a digital platform that will enable ERW to integrate into existing agricultural and industrial systems worldwide – opening a key path to rapid scale within this decade.
The company is already running scaled pilot operations in Brazil – one of the world’s most optimal locations for ERW on account of its tropical soils, strength in agriculture, and 93 percent clean electricity matrix.
To advance this new model for scalable ERW, Terradot has established a collaboration with EMBRAPA, Brazil’s foremost agricultural research institution. Together, Terradot and EMBRAPA Cerrados are developing pilot projects building towards an ERW framework that can scale throughout the country, tapping into its vast agricultural strength and carbon removal potential.
In just over a year of operations in Brazil, the company has spread more than 48,000 tons of rock over 1,800 hectares of agricultural land. These trials have generated promising early results, showing that tropical temperature and humidity can improve weathering rates.
Founders include:
- James Kanoff, previously co-founder of The Farmlink Project, one of the fastest growing nonprofits working to address food insecurity;
- Sasankh Munukutla, who previously published AI for Climate research at Stanford; and
- Scott Fendorf, a world-renowned Earth System Sciences Professor at Stanford University with over 30 years of soil research experience.
They are joined by Julia Marisa Sekula, esteemed Brazilian climate author and ex-banker, and Connor Sendel, climate-tech operator and ex-BCG.
The founding science team also includes Peter Nico, Senior Scientist and Deputy Director, Energy Geosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; Uli Mayer, Professor, Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia, and Shawn Benner, Terradot Director of Research, formally Professor and Dean, Boise State University.
FinSMEs
12/12/2024