Terradot: Carbon Removal Company Raises $58.2 Million

Terradot – a climate company uniting global leaders in science, technology, and climate – announced it launched to scale Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) as a cornerstone of global carbon removal efforts. The company debuts with $58.2 million in funding. Terradot’s investors include John Doerr; individuals: Sheryl Sandberg & Tom Bernthal, George Roberts; strategics: Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Google, and Cisco; and venture funds such as Floodgate, Kleiner Perkins, Acre Venture Partners, Gigascale Capital, Valor Capital, and Ponderosa Ventures. This funding includes $4.2 million in seed funding and a $54 million Series A round, recently closed. The investments from Google and Microsoft also represent both companies’ first-ever direct investment in an ERW company.

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Early Agreements

The company has also signed carbon removal agreements, including a 90,000-ton $27 million purchase by Frontier buyers for delivery between 2025 and 2029. Google, a Frontier member, has signed an additional deal with Terradot to remove 200,000 tons in 2029 and beyond. This represents Google’s largest single purchase of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and its largest single purchase from an enhanced weathering project. Early purchases from Frontier buyers for deployments between 2025 and 2030 will lower the price per ton, allowing Google to benefit from reduced costs for later deployment.

Transforming ERW

Launched in 2022 at Stanford University, Terradot aims to transform the natural process of rock weathering into a global carbon removal solution within the next decade. The company has assembled a team of leading scientists, engineers, and operators to solve key problems in ERW, including maximizing CO₂ uptake and developing precise measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) tools. Terradot’s research is being built into a digital platform to enable ERW integration into existing agricultural and industrial systems worldwide, offering a pathway to scale within this decade.

Scaled Pilot in Brazil

Terradot is conducting scaled pilot operations in Brazil, one of the world’s most optimal locations for ERW due to its tropical soils, agricultural strength, and 93% clean electricity matrix. The pilot brings together industry, government, and academic partners to scale ERW projects nationwide. By leveraging farmland near quarries, the project reduces complexity and cost in development and deployment.

Terradot has collaborated with EMBRAPA, Brazil’s leading agricultural research institution, to advance this scalable ERW model. Together, Terradot and EMBRAPA Cerrados are building pilot projects to create an ERW framework that can scale nationwide, tapping into Brazil’s vast agricultural strength and carbon removal potential.

Promising Results

In just over a year, Terradot has spread over 48,000 tons of rock across 1,800 hectares of agricultural land in Brazil. These trials indicate that tropical temperatures and humidity improve weathering rates. Terradot has also made progress in MRV approaches, using advanced tools like reactive transport models and geostatistical techniques to measure weathering in soil and water. These innovations aim to enable high-quality ERW quantification at scale while lowering costs globally.

Industry Collaboration

Frontier facilitated purchases on behalf of founding members Stripe, Google, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability, as well as Autodesk, H&M Group, Workday, and Salesforce. Other buyers include Aledade, Canva, Match Group, Samsara, SKIMS, Skyscanner, Wise, and Zendesk through Watershed’s partnership with Frontier.##Founding Team

Terradot was launched by James Kanoff, co-founder of The Farmlink Project; Sasankh Munukutla, who published AI for Climate research at Stanford University; and Scott Fendorf, an Earth System Sciences professor at Stanford with over 30 years of soil research experience. The team also includes Julia Marisa Sekula, a Brazilian climate author, and Connor Sendel, a climate-tech operator.

The founding science team includes Peter Nico, Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; Uli Mayer, Earth Sciences Professor at the University of British Columbia; and Shawn Benner, Terradot Director of Research and former Professor at Boise State University.

Key Quotes

James Kanoff, CEO of Terradot: “ERW has the potential to remove billions of tons of CO₂ this decade. Realizing that potential demands overcoming major scientific, engineering, and operational challenges within a tight timeline. We founded Terradot to do the improbable: to solve these challenges and transform Earth’s natural processes into a global carbon removal solution.”

Randy Spock, Carbon Credits & Removals Lead for Google: “To unlock enhanced rock weathering as a useful tool for CO2 removal, we need to deploy it at scale and learn how to measure the results rigorously using real-world data. Terradot is well-positioned to do that work in an especially promising geography, and we’re excited to support them to help deliver significant amounts of CO2 removal both for Google’s net zero goal and for the planet.”

Sheryl Sandberg: “I’ve known James, the CEO, since long before this company started. These are proven leaders, which is rare to find in an early-stage company. They have the drive, the right technology and a strong focus on execution to succeed. Tom and I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of Terradot’s mission to combat climate change.”

Tom Bernthal: “Of all the companies we’ve considered investing in, Terradot was one of the easiest to get to ‘yes’. The idea is transformative and important, the team is absolutely top-notch, and now our co-investing lineup and initial partner list is as strong as any company we’ve seen at this stage.”

John Doerr: “Terradot aims to deliver customers with cost-effective permanent carbon removal. With pioneers in the field, Terradot’s platform scales the ERW industry’s strongest scientific team to deliver gigatons of permanent CO₂ removal this decade. Terradot is tackling climate change at the speed and scale it demands. This is the kind of leadership and innovation we need in the fight for our planet’s future.”