The carbon removal startup based on the nature Chestnut Carbon has raised $ 160 million in Serie B financing, the company told britcommerce. The startup buys marginal and degraded culture lands, plant with native trees and collects the resulting carbon credits.
Carbon credits have become a hot product, especially among technological companies that seek to compensate for shooting emissions caused in part by the vertiginous expansion of data centers that serve cloud customers and artificial intelligence.
The new round included the investment of the Investment Board of the Pension Plan of Canada, Cloverlay and DBL Partners, together with unidentified university endowments, family offices, funds of funds and other institutional investors.
For Chestnut carbonThe $ 160 million are actually a somewhat modest sum. When the company was founded, the private capital firm Kimmeridge capitalized it by promising up to $ 200 million. The company generally invests in oil and gas companies, but the managing partner Ben Dell saw the opportunity to claim a claim in the growing carbon credit market.
To make it a reality, Forest Carbon Works acquired, a startup founded by Kyle Holland that helped families administer their forests to sell carbon credits. Holland continued with Chestnut, where he is currently product director.
With Chestnut, the team expanded its approach to include projects developed by the company, not only the management of existing forests.
Chestnut currently has more than 35,000 rates of farmland and marginal pastures and degraded in the southeast of the United States. Part of the objective of fundraising is significantly cultivating Chestnut holdings. The startup hopes to expand its carbon capacity to 100 million metric tons by 2030, which will require hundreds of thousands of acres to become forests.
Last month, Chestnut made an initial payment of that objective with the sale of 7 million carbon credits to Microsoft. (A carbon credit is worth a carbon ton). The 25 -year agreement will help rehabilitate the chestnuts 60,000 acres in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. Chestnut USA Gold Standard to certify their carbon credits for 100 years.
The new financing round should help the startup drastically expand its operations. While there is a lot of high quality carbon credits today, the chestnut target of 100 million metric tons represents a fraction of the percentage of annual carbon emissions, which reached 37.4 billion metric tons in 2023, according To the IEA.
Even so, if Chestnut can ensure its support point in the carbon credit market, afforestation and reforestation have great potential to control the effects of climate warming pollution.
TO Study in 2019 He discovered that the world can support 2.2 billion acres more forest than he has today. Once those forests matured, they would have 205 billion carbon metric tons, or approximately a quarter of the carbon currently in the atmosphere.