New Mexico Inno's 2024 Startups to Watch list highlights 10 startups we expect to capture headlines in the year ahead. The New Mexico Inno editorial team picked out the 10 companies through a nomination process and our own research and reporting.
You can read all about these 10 Startups to Watch in the Feb. 2 print edition of Albuquerque Business First. The startups will also be featured individually on the New Mexico Inno site in the coming days.
Spiritus Technologies is in many ways an embodiment of New Mexico's burgeoning startup potential.
Spiritus, based in Los Alamos, is built around a technology first developed and spun out of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Matt Lee, Ph.D., the startup's co-founder and chief technology officer, worked on the tech while at the Northern New Mexico lab.
Lee paired up with Charles Cadieu, Ph.D., an experienced founder from California's Bay Area, to launch Spiritus. The pair took the startup out of "stealth" mode in September 2023 with $11 million in hand.
Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's premier venture firms based in Menlo Park that counts OpenAI and DoorDash among its investment portfolio, led that $11 million round, announced when the company unveiled itself broadly for the first time.
What could make Spiritus so attractive for investment? Its unique approach to a type of carbon removal technology called "direct air capture" — the process of removing carbon from the air at the point of the capture system.
The company's own capture system uses a type of sorbent technology, shaped in the form of small balls, that passively absorb carbon and then release it through a desorption process. The balls, then, can be reused once the released carbon is stored. Spiritus wants that entire process — carbon absorption, release, storage and recycling — to happen at individual sites, rather than having to send the balls elsewhere for carbon removal and storage, or sequestration.
Spiritus claims its approach to direct air capture (DAC), which it wants to happen at sites it calls "Carbon Orchards," is cheaper than existing approaches. A Boston Consulting Group analysis shows existing DAC approaches cost between $600 to $1,000 per ton of carbon dioxide captured; Spiritus says its approach would pull that figure down below $100 per ton.
That's the core part of the startup's DAC play, Cadieu and Lee told New Mexico Inno in early November. And Spiritus already has a few customers for its captured carbon. It has a pre-purchase agreement with Frontier Climate, an advance market commitment to buy over $1 billion of permanent carbon removal, and more recently was selected as a supplier in the carbon removal marketplace operated by Watershed, a climate action platform.
More partnerships like those with Frontier and Watershed could be in store in 2024. As well, Spiritus, which up to this point hasn't disclosed where its first Carbon Orchard site will be, could release the location of that site sometime in the year ahead. The startup has only said it'll be located "in the Western U.S."
