SAN FRANCISCO — Heirloom, a company that captures direct air and permanently removes CO2 from the atmosphere, has raised $53 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Carbon Direct Capital Management, Ahren Innovation Capital, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, with The Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund as an additional participant.
Alice Newcombe-Ellis of Ahren will join Heirloom’s board of directors.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made it clear that we need to permanently remove tens of billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere to keep global temperature rise below 1.5℃. The funding, among the largest private financings in direct air capture to date, will help Heirloom to scale by funding their continued research and development, and their first deployment.
“The costs of Direct Air Capture have to come way down to make a meaningful impact on climate change,” said Shashank Samala, Co-founder and CEO at Heirloom. “Utilizing low cost, earth abundant minerals as a sponge for CO2 is key to making the economics work. In the 10 months since we launched, we’ve made a breakthrough in the rate we take up CO2 from the atmosphere, giving us a clear path to ultra-low cost, highly scalable carbon removal, and achieving our mission to help reverse climate change.”
Heirloom is fundamentally changing the carbon removal space. By using abundant and affordable minerals, a simple, modular system, and leveraging mature technology and infrastructure, their technology has the lowest peer-reviewed, at-scale cost of any direct air capture technology on the market.
The Series A financing also includes investments from leading climate funds and entrepreneurs, including Breyer Capital, Grantham Environmental Trust, Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Carbon Removal Partners, and Seven Seven Six. Over the last year, Heirloom has also received grant funding from the ARPA-e and the National Science Foundation.
“Carbon removal is essential to hit our climate goals,” said Jonathan Goldberg, founder and CEO of Carbon Direct. “Heirloom’s vision is to remove 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2035 and deliver cost-effective direct air capture. Heirloom is already being deployed, and Carbon Direct is excited to work with Heirloom to hyper-scale its critical technology.”
“To limit the planet’s warming to 1.5°C, we need to combine significant carbon reductions with carbon removal from the atmosphere. Our catalytic investments in durable direct air capture technologies like Heirloom aim to drive mainstream adoption by bringing down the green premium through large-scale deployment,” says Mark Kroese, General Manager, Sustainability Solutions at Microsoft.
