Heirloom raises another $150m to drive direct air capture

Direct air capture business Heirloom Carbon Technologies, based in San Francisco, California, has raised $150m in its latest fundraising round – almost three times the amount it brought in from its prior funding round two years ago.

The scale-up business opened the first direct air capture facility in the US last year. It now has two more under construction in Louisiana.

Heirloom was founded in 2020 and is also involved in one of the US Department of Energy-backed regional direct air capture hubs. Each of these is targeting 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide captured each year once operational.

For now, Heirloom is working on the facility in Louisiana that it hopes will be able to capture about 17,000 tonnes of CO2 a year and be up and running in 2026.

Heirloom’s latest funding round is one of the largest for a firm working on direct air capture technology. Other players in the global market include Skytree, Aircapture, and Holocene.

Heirloom said it plans to use the latest funding to try to lower the cost of direct air capture and to work on more projects.

“We believe DAC is all about cost, cost, and cost – and that it will only scale to make a meaningful difference on climate change if it is affordable,” said Heirloom’s CEO and co-founder Shashank Samala in a statement.

Like others in the space, the company reckons it remains on course to hit the target cost of $100 per ton at some point in the years ahead, as projects ramp up. This has long been seen as the ideal price point for direct air capture.

Heirloom’s direct air capture process involves hastening the speed with which limestone captures CO2, shortening it from years to a few days. The company’s partners then inject the captured CO2 into concrete or else store it underground in suitable Class VI underground wells.

Heirloom has deals in place with the likes of Microsoft and Frontier for them to buy the  removed carbon dioxide. A company spokesperson said the participants in its new funding round don’t get any offtake agreements attached to their investments.

Future Positive and Lowercarbon Capital both led the Series B fundraising round for Heirloom. Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mitsubishi Corporation in the Americas, and Siemens Financial Services were some of the other investors.

Heirloom’s latest fundraise follows a $53m Series A fundraise announced in March 2022. Lowercarbon Capital and Breakthrough Energy Ventures were also investors in that round.

In November 2023 Heirloom launched what was hailed as the US’s first commercial-scale DAC facility, capable of capturing up to 1,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, in Tracy, California.

Fully powered by renewable energy, the plant captures atmospheric CO2 and permanently sequesters it in concrete through a partnership with CO2-in-concrete company CarbonCure Technologies.