Holy Grail, a California-based startup specializing in carbon capture devices, has raised $2.7 million in seed funding. The investment was led by LowerCarbon Capital, Stripe founder Patrick Collison, Starlight Ventures, Songkick co-founder Ian Hogarth, Charlie Songhurst, Goat Capital, Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt, and 35 Ventures. Existing investor Oliver Cameron, co-founder of Voyage, Y Combinator and Deep Science Ventures, also contributed.
Holy Grail was founded in 2019 by David Pervan and Nuno Pereira, in Mountain View, California, and the company is currently prototyping a carbon capture device, built to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. The device’s key feature is that it is compact and designed to function as a modular system, as opposed to the large and unwieldy carbon capture technology being built for industrial use. The device would help make carbon capture technology more accessible to smaller companies, and possibly even individual consumers. Manufactured using low cost materials, with a simple design and function, the device would be the first example of a mass manufacturable carbon capture device, and would be built from 100% recycled materials. Co-founder Nuno Pereira explains the project as “essentially shifting the scaling factor from building a very large mega-ton plant and having the project management and all that stuff to building scrubbers in an assembly line, like a consumer product to be manufactured.”
Holy Grail’s chief innovation in this area is the use of electricity to instigate a chemical reaction, removing the CO2 from the air, as opposed to industrial methods, which involve longer processes and require mechanical pumping and large amounts of water and energy. “We developed a simpler way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere that does not need pressure or temperature to operate, just electricity, this enables us to build smaller modular scrubbers.” explains Pereira in an interview with CleanTechnica. Another key factor is that Holy Grail’s carbon capture technology would solely focus on separating the CO2 from the air and storing it, rather than converting it, as is more common in industrial carbon capture projects. The company is hoping to start selling carbon credits by the end of the year, or soon after.
The device is currently still an early prototype, and there is a considerable amount of development needed before the device can be mass manufactured and widely distributed, but Holy Grail’s vision of a small, modular answer to cleaning carbon from the atmosphere is innovative and attracting a lot of interest.
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