German cleantech startup NeoCarbon bags €3.2M to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

Berlin-based NeoCarbon, a cleantech startup that retrofits industrial sites to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, announced on Tuesday that it has secured €3.2M in a seed round of funding.

The funding round was led by RAISE Seed For Good, a Seed and Pre-Seed fund operated by RAISE Ventures. 

The fund supports Europe’s responsible tech leaders with investment from PT1 – Proptech1 Ventures, Speedinvest, and Antler.

Additionally, several new high-profile angel investors, including Christian Vollmann and Matthias Gotta, participated in the round.

The recent capital injection will accelerate the roll-out of the company’s units to customer sites through the creation of an operations team and the finalisation of the first full-scale capture unit using its proprietary reactor technology.

René Haas, NeoCarbon CEO, says, “Every year, the climate crisis is causing more tangible and costly damages. Thus, experts from leading climate research like the IPCC are now urging actions to scale carbon dioxide removal as fast as possible. NeoCarbon is a core actor of this impactful mission, and with our first unit being rolled out in the coming months to one of our partners’ industrial sites, we are starting to see the tangible impact of our company. We need to accelerate this rollout, and the Seed round will enable us to answer demand better and faster, to reach the climate potential of NeoCarbon.”

NeoCarbon: Fighting climate change by removing CO2 

Founded in 2022, NeoCarbon removes CO2 cost-efficiently from ambient air, leveraging existing waste heat streams from industrial sites to tackle climate change. 

The company has developed a novel reactor for its Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology and the first paid customer pilot with a major industrial player will go live in Q1 2024. 

It enables the company to drastically reduce the cost and time associated with capturing CO2 from ambient air, encouraging mass-market adoption.

Hundreds of thousands of industrial sites produce excess heat around Europe that they cannot utilise. 

By efficiently retrofitting their system at these sites, NeoCarbon removes the carbondioxide from ambient air with much lower capital and operational costs.

NeoCarbon is focusing on scaling carbon removal credit pre-procurements and accelerating rollouts to industrial sites with waste heat, like glass, paper, and metal manufacturers, among others.

The investor

RAISE Ventures is dedicated to early-stage investing in European Tech startups (€150M in AUM). The VC invests between €1 and €5M and currently has an interest in 25 portfolio companies.

Sophia Martin, Co-head at RAISE Ventures says, “DAC is, and will stay, a critical topic, as it is the only way to achieve carbon neutrality and provide a scalable approach to mitigate the effects of climate change. With a decentralised approach, Neocarbon is the first autonomous system that leverages existing infrastructures and captures CO2 scalably. This round aims at accelerating the product rollout with existing and new clients willing to implement their net-zero commitments and tackle a multi-gigatons per year climate impact opportunity.”