Blume Ventures-Backed Carbon Clean Solutions Raises $16 Mn Funding

London-headquartered and IIT Kharagpur-incubated cleantech startup Carbon Clean Solutions today (February 17) announced that it has raised $16 Mn in a fresh round of funding. The investment came in from WAVE Equity Partners, Chevron Technology Ventures, and Marubeni Corporation.

Earlier, the company has raised funds from Blume Ventures among other marquee investors. The company plans to use the funds to deliver an existing pipeline of global projects to lower emissions from industry. The company will also invest in the development of “containerised” solutions to achieve $30/tonne cost of CO2 capture by 2021.

Founded in 2009 by Aniruddha Sharma and Prateek Bumb, Carbon Clean Solutions provides a  low-cost carbon dioxide (CO2) separation technology. The company began its journey as an IIT Kharagpur campus startup and had raised funds from Blume Ventures in 2011. Having showcased the technology at industrial-scale carbon capture and utilisation plant in Tuticorin, India, CCSL plans to further expand its customer base.

“CCSL reduces the cost of carbon capture from industrial emissions by more than half. This is the hardest 25% of GHG emission to control, and this affordable solution turns an economic liability into an asset. It has the potential to unlock hundreds of billions of markets for profitable at-source CO2 capture and beneficial reuse, and change the industry debate from an ethical and political imperative to a free-market driven financially rational decision,” said Praveen Sahay, Managing Director at WAVE.

The company says that its patented APBS technology significantly reduces the costs and environmental impacts of CO2 separation when compared to existing techniques. The Carbon Clean Solutions technology has been proven at demonstration scale in over 10 locations, including the UK, USA, Germany, India, Norway and the Netherlands, and is currently in use at Tuticorin, India.

Carbon Clean Solutions CEO Sharma said, “We can now grow our company to a size that can help deliver projects to make a ‘net zero’ emissions world possible and expand our modularised CO2 capture technology to heavy industry. We look forward to collaborating closely with them to advance our technology and deliver real impact, on gigatonne or 1 Bn tonne CO2 abatement scale.”

Blume Partner, Karthik Reddy said “Carbon Clean Solutions is one of the best examples of seeing a novel lab technology reach commercialisation at a global level that too in a space like cleantech. It took them half a decade to transition into the European market and establish themselves. It was difficult to prove their tech prowess sitting in India. Once they achieved that though, they have achieved more and more visibility and scale.”

As of 2019, more than 30 facilities have used Carbon Clean Solutions’ technology or solvents in Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS), Industrial Carbon Capture & Utilization (ICCU) and Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) applications.

“With CCSL’s innovative and cost-competitive technology, we are very keen to jointly develop Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage business across the world by leveraging our global networks deeply rooted in various industries,” said Eiji Okada, Chief Operating Officer of Plant Division of Marubeni Corporation.

Cleantech ecosystem in India has become the need of the hour as India addresses its efforts to conserve renewable energy in the face of increasing pollution and exhausted non-renewable energy sources.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.