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 mum or dad Alphabet) and HV Capital, Fortune completely reveals.
The corporate will use the funds to dedicate extra sources to researching meals and feed merchandise that may be product of carbon dioxide.
Cofounder Max Kufner advised 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 might in any other case be launched into the ambiance into bioreactors. Micro organism then convert this carbon into worthwhile merchandise used to make plastics, paints, and soaps.
Refining petroleum to extract totally different chemical compounds is chargeable for 4% of the world’s direct greenhouse fuel 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 so far, 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 challenge 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 training curve of growing the expertise had been crossed, making it simpler to construct the corporate and concentrate on scaling up.
Torbjørn Jensen and Alex Nielsen, teachers concerned within the analysis, later grew to become cofounders at Once more, together with early-stage investor Kufner.
Local weather tech has expanded 45 instances within the final decade, based on Dealroom. However as world temperatures and excessive climate occasions proceed rising, there’s nonetheless a necessity for considerably extra.
Once more’s expertise helps remedy one in all local weather expertise’s greatest obstacles—the power to scale it. One of many greatest challenges with trendy local weather tech firms is that they’re making an attempt to seize carbon dioxide from the ambiance, flip it into a really small kind and pump it again into the earth, Kufner explains.
Jensen advised Fortune that the method of capturing and changing carbon dioxide effectively is what makes Once more stand out.
“We are basically cleaning up the emissions and we just so happen to also produce a super valuable product at the same time,” he stated. “But it needs to be cheap, it needs to be robust, it needs just to operate 24/7 all year round.”
