What in the event you might flip all of the dangerous emissions from fossil fuel-intensive industries into plastics, paints and extra? That’s the dream behind Copenhagen-based local weather tech startup Once more, which has raised $43 million in Collection A funding from Google Ventures (the enterprise arm of Google dad or mum Alphabet) and HV Capital, Fortune completely reveals.
The corporate will use the funds to commit extra sources to researching meals and feed merchandise that may be fabricated from carbon dioxide.
Cofounder Max Kufner instructed Fortune that the corporate plans to roll out its first operations by the top of 2025 or early 2026 on the newest.
Once more’s expertise pumps carbon dioxide that will in any other case be launched into the ambiance into bioreactors. Micro organism then convert this carbon into invaluable merchandise used to make plastics, paints, and soaps.
Refining petroleum to extract completely different chemical substances is answerable for 4% of the world’s direct greenhouse gasoline emissions, or about 1.8 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, making the petrochemicals trade the third most polluting on the planet.
COURTESY OF AGAIN
Once more has raised about $100 million to this point, partly from a European Union grant and partly from enterprise capital funding. The corporate obtained a $10 million injection from GV, ACME Capital and Atlantic Labs to arrange a manufacturing website.
Based in 2021, the corporate was born from a analysis mission developed over 10 years on the Danish Technical College, Stanford, and MIT. That gave Once more a leg up when it launched, as a lot of the educational curve of growing the expertise had been crossed, making it simpler to construct the corporate and give attention to scaling up.
Torbjørn Jensen and Alex Nielsen, lecturers concerned within the analysis, later turned cofounders at Once more, together with early-stage investor Kufner.
Local weather tech has expanded 45 instances within the final decade, in response to Dealroom. However as international temperatures and excessive climate occasions proceed rising, there’s nonetheless a necessity for considerably extra.
Once more’s expertise helps remedy one among local weather expertise’s greatest limitations—the flexibility to scale it. One of many greatest challenges with fashionable local weather tech firms is that they’re attempting to seize carbon dioxide from the ambiance, flip it into a really small kind and pump it again into the earth, Kufner explains.
Jensen instructed Fortune that the method of capturing and changing carbon dioxide effectively is what makes Once more stand out.
“We’re principally cleansing up the emissions and we simply so occur to additionally produce a brilliant invaluable product on the similar time,” he stated. “But it surely must be low cost, it must be strong, it wants simply to function 24/7 all yr spherical.”
