Carbon removal tech company attracts $80 from Bill Gates and others

A US based start-up that captures carbon dioxide from the air raised US$80 million from investors, including billionaire Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures, and Lowercarbon Capital.

Verdox said that the investment will be leveraged to develop and deploy the company’s novel electrochemical carbon capture technology.

Founded in 2019, Verdox's technology is still at lab scale. The CEO and founder of the company, Dr Brian Baynes, said the technology can capture carbon from any industrial source or the air with up to 70 percent relative energy savings, giving us the ability to intervene completely.

“Combating climate change requires the world to prevent further increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and eventually return them to pre-industrial levels,” Dr Baynes said in a statement.

Verdox’s core technology was developed by Prof. T. Alan Hatton and Dr. Sahag Voskian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  The technology details were first published in 2019 in Energy & Environmental Science: “Faradaic electro-swing reactive adsorption for CO2 capture.”