Sirona Technologies raises €6M to boost direct air capture tech

Direct air capture (DAC) startup Sirona Technologies has raised a €6 million Seed round.

Founded in 2023 in Brussels and led by a former Tesla engineer, Sirona Technologies is focused on speed, scalability, and low capex designs. 

Reversing climate change using DAC has gone from being a fringe idea that would never work to being a key part of any climate mitigation plan, and the first commercial plants are now operational. 

On top of phasing out fossil fuels to drastically reduce emissions, the role of DAC is to help remove 1 trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. This is necessary to offset emissions that are too hard to avoid, and to clean up historical emissions. It uses machines that filter massive amounts of atmospheric air to remove the CO2, which is then injected and permanently stored in geological formations, where it turns into rock over two years.

Among the multiple ways to remove CO2 from the air, DAC is considered the highest standard because it is highly scalable, permanent and verifiable.

According to Thoralf Gutierrez, CEO and co-founder of Sirona Technologies the amount of CO2 we need to remove from the atmosphere is so big, it’s hard to comprehend:

“If we were to plant trees, we would have to cover an area the size of Asia.

With Direct Air Capture, we need to run our machines on a 150 km x 150 km array of solar panels, which is about 10% of the clean energy that will be built by 2050. Both will play a role, but it’s clear that forests won’t be enough.”

In their first year alone, Sirona Technologies built three generations of prototypes to capture 1 ton of CO2 per year. 

Today, they are building the next generation capable of capturing 20 times that amount by July.

Sirona Technologies, in partnership with local stakeholders, will deploy their machines to build their first capture plant in Kenya. The pilot plant is set to be operational by the end of the year, with a full-scale commercial plant expected by early 2026, and a target to incrementally scale to 1 million tons of CO2 captured per year by 2030.

LocalGlobe and XAnge co-led the round. The investor lineup includes Look Up Ventures, Satgana, VOYAGERS Climate-Tech Fund, Syndicate One, and Renaud Visage. 

This infusion of capital will give Sirona Technologies the fuel to scale up its Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology and deploy its first pilot plant in Kenya.

Lead image: Sirona Technologies. Photo: uncredited.