London-based cleantech firm Carbon Clean has received a $150m (£121m) funding boost, a record figure for a carbon capture company investment.
The Series C round for the UK climate company was led by US oil giant Chevron, along with a series of big-name backers, including Samsung Ventures, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, and AXA Investment Managers.
Carbon Clean specialises in a form of climate technology called carbon capture, a process in which excess carbon produced during industrial work is captured before it enters the atmosphere.
The storage of captured carbon on a large scale comes with significant costs, with a recent paper estimating it to be around $80 to $90 per tonne.
Carbon Clean, however, claims it can compress the size of the required equipment and increase efficiency in storage with its proprietary technology.
Company co-founder and CEO Aniruddha Sharma said the equipment used by his company requires 10 times less space and “means you don’t have to have ugly towers, you can have everything within a shipping container, and that makes adoption much, much easier”.
The climate tech firm generally works with companies in heavy industrial sectors such as steel and cement.
Chris Powers, vice president, carbon capture, Chevron New Energies said: “We look forward to partnering with Carbon Clean to help advance Chevron’s pursuit of lower-carbon solutions.”
Sharma told UKTN: “Our immediate focus is on deploying the Series C funding to cement our position as the leading provider of carbon capture solutions for heavy industry.
“Most important to that is scaling production of our breakthrough fully modular technology, which will overcome the biggest challenges facing widespread adoption of CCUS – cost and scale.”
The latest funding round for Carbon Clean follows its $22m Series B round in 2020. It comes as investments into European climate tech have increased significantly, with European climate funding jumping ten times over from £840m in 2017, to £8.4bn in 2021.
Carbon Clean’s later-stage investment also bucks the trend of UK energy and cleantech startups struggling to get funding beyond the early stage to help them scale.
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