A sustainability-focused startup in Berkeley has raised $130 million in a Series B round to help further its mission to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into an array of goods from jet fuel to sunglasses.
Formerly known as Opus 12, Twelve converts CO₂ into chemicals, fuel and other materials that can be used as a replacement for fossil fuels in industrial and manufacturing applications.
The investment was led by DCVC and included Capricorn Technology Impact Fund, Carbon Direct Capital Management, Breakout Ventures, Munich Re Ventures, Elementum Ventures, Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
While there's a large marketplace for businesses to buy credits that will offset the carbon footprint of their activity, there's a growing chorus of advocates calling for more than carbon neutrality. The next step is actually reducing emissions to become carbon negative.
“Companies and governments no longer need to rely on fossil fuels for the carbon that goes into everything from apparel and cleaning products to electronics and jet fuel,” co-founder and CEO Nicholas Flanders said in a statement. “This fresh funding ensures we can reach industrial scale to help new and existing partners achieve rapid emissions-reduction.”
The company currently partners with Mercedes-Benz, Procter & Gamble, Shopify, NASA and the U.S. Air Force.
Its first commercial products include what it calls "CO2Made" sunglasses, which are produced in collaboration with the U.K.-based textile and clothing company Pangaia, as well as E-Jet, a carbon neutral aviation fuel.
On its website, Twelve touts additional product lines in development from laundry detergent to car parts to tools for space travel; it describes its technology as "industrial photosynthesis."
"Just as plants use CO₂, water and the sun’s energy to create carbon-based products, our technology converts CO₂ emissions into critical chemicals and fuels with just water and renewable energy as inputs," its website state.
The company was founded in 2016 by Flanders, Etosha Cave and Kendra Kuhl. It has 163 employees and the Series B brings its total funding to $198 million.
Several other companies are developing carbon capture technology for manufacturing purchases.
Sausalito-based Rubi Laboratories is creating textiles from carbon, Pleasanton-based Air Protein is developing a technique to transform carbon into edible protein powder and New York-based Aether is using captured carbon to make lab-grown diamonds.
