Swiss biochar company Cotierra has raised $3 million in a new funding round as it looks to take its decentralised biochar systems from field deployments to commercial scale. The round was co-led by Carbon Removal Partners and PINC, the venture arm of international food and beverage company Paulig. Zürcher Kantonalbank, Carbon Drawdown Initiative, better ventures, GOTA Ventures, Hungry4Impact and Triple Impact Ventures, along with climate-focused angel investors, also participated.
The latest funding brings Cotierra’s total capital raised to approximately $4.75 million. For Cotierra, the next phase is less about proving the concept of decentralised biochar production and more about making the system repeatable across agricultural operations.
The Zurich-based company develops systems that allow agricultural businesses to convert biomass into biochar close to where that material is generated. Its model combines reactor hardware with a digital platform for operating, monitoring and verifying production. That decentralised approach is designed to reduce the distance biomass needs to travel while allowing agricultural businesses to return biochar to soils and track its production and use.
Cotierra plans to use the new capital to optimise its technology and expand its field deployments into a more standardised commercial model. The company’s platform is intended to provide monitoring, traceability and reporting alongside the physical biochar production system.
The combination of hardware and software is central to Cotierra’s pitch to agricultural businesses. Rather than treating biochar production as a standalone processing operation, the company is building an integrated system that links biomass sourcing, conversion, monitoring and reporting.
Biochar has attracted growing interest as a potential carbon-removal and soil-management tool because it can lock carbon into a relatively stable form while creating a potential agricultural use for biomass residues. But scaling the economics of production remains a challenge, particularly where biomass is dispersed across farms and agricultural supply chains.
Cotierra’s decentralised model is aimed at that logistical problem. By locating reactors closer to biomass sources, the company aims to make agricultural residue conversion more practical while creating a digital record of the resulting biochar.
The latest investment gives Cotierra additional capital to test that proposition at commercial scale. Its focus now is on turning individual field deployments into a system that can be replicated across agricultural value chains.
