Octavia Carbon, a Kenyan Direct Air Capture startup has raised $3.9 million in a seed funding round. Octavia raised the equity funding in a round co-led by Lateral Frontiers and E4E Africa, with participation from Catalyst Fund, Launch Africa, Fondation Botnar, and Renew Capital.
Octavia, founded in Kenya two years ago, builds DAC machines that it uses to capture carbon, a greenhouse gas that is the biggest contributor of global warming, from the air for storage underground.
Octavia Carbon, which begun capturing carbon in February after a period of developing the tech, now plans to build more machines to add to its existing two devices with a carbon capture capacity of 50 tonnes per year.
The startup expects to reach a capture capacity of 1,500 tons per year beginning in 2025 when operating at capacity and a storage site run by partner company Cella Mineral Storage comes online. Cella, is a carbon sequestration startup that will inject it into the ground for storage.
Octavia’s co-founder and CEO Martin Freimüller, said “We’ve been developing the tech and now we’re taking it out of the lab for carbon removal at scale in the field. Once we have that liquid carbon dioxide, we give that to our storage partner, and they would sort of inject it underground at high pressures to seep into volcanic rock pores, and those are quite rich in calcium and magnesium that reacts with the CO2 to form carbonate minerals like calcium carbonate or limestone. Naturally occurring materials, naturally occurring process and we’re just accelerating that in geologic areas where that hasn’t really happened over long periods of time.”
Injection of the startup’s first batch of captured carbon is expected to happen before the year ends, and Freimüller said the project will be among the first ones in the world to turn captured carbon into rock underground.