Swiss carbon removal scaleup Climeworks has raised $162m in equity, in a small glimmer of good news for the subdued climate tech sector.
The latest round brings total funding for the company, which specialises in direct-air-capture technology, to over $1bn.
It comes amid a broadening of strategy for Climeworks, which until recently has been focused on sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but last year pivoted to also selling carbon credits purchased from other organisations to customers on its platform.
Climeworks’ flagship plant is a facility in Iceland, called Mammoth, which is able to remove 36,000 tons of C02 from the atmosphere per year.
The company has also been at work on a plant in the US, but those plans have been thrown up in the air owing to the Trump administration’s less friendly stance towards climate technologies. In April, a leaked memo suggested that Climeworks may lose US government funding for the project that it had been promised under the previous administration.
In May, the company told Sifted it is continuing work on the project whilst it awaits a decision on funding. “If the future of the funding changes, we will need to re-evaluate the project at that time,” a spokesperson said.
Climeworks also made cuts to its staff in May, laying off 106 people, which equated to 22% of its workforce.
The main investors in the latest funding round are Swiss billionaire Martin Haefner’s BigPoint Holding and Swiss private equity firm Partners Group.