Alt Carbon, a climate-tech startup co-founded by Shrey Agarwal and Sparsh Agarwal, has announced a $12 million Seed Round to build out a first-of-its-kind infrastructure platform for scalable, verifiable carbon removal. The round attracted a star-studded list of investors including Lachy Groom, ACT, Shastra VC, Jason Zhao, Awais Ahmed, Amrendra Singh, and several other forward-thinking climate backers.

As the world races to meet its net-zero targets and decarbonize entire economies, Alt Carbon is tackling one of the most critical and underdeveloped parts of the climate puzzle: removing carbon, not just reducing emissions.

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What Alt Carbon Is Building

Alt Carbon is developing a decentralized biochar-based carbon removal network, enabling large-scale sequestration of atmospheric CO₂ via organic biomass transformation. The core of their model lies in converting agricultural and forestry waste into biochar, a carbon-rich material that, when buried in soil, locks carbon for hundreds to thousands of years.

But Alt Carbon isn’t just another carbon offsets provider. They’re building the full-stack infrastructure required to make biochar removal:

• Economically viable
  
• Scientifically verifiable
  
• Digitally trackable
  
• Scalable globally
  

Their software platform also facilitates transparent MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, Verification), integrating satellite imagery, IoT sensors, and blockchain-backed carbon credit issuance to give buyers confidence and traceability.

In essence, Alt Carbon is positioning itself as the AWS for carbon removal infrastructure - a backend layer powering the next wave of decarbonization across agriculture, manufacturing, and corporate ESG initiatives.

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The Bigger Picture: Why Carbon Removal Matters Now

Climate change is no longer a future risk - it's a present emergency.

• According to the IPCC, limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require removing 10 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2050.
  
• Yet today, less than 0.01% of that capacity exists.
  
• Most current climate funding still flows toward avoidance and reduction technologies (solar, EVs, etc.) - not actual atmospheric drawdown.
  

Alt Carbon is part of a new breed of climate startups turning carbon removal into real infrastructure. Instead of simply selling “credits,” they’re building physical networks, data fidelity, and deployment velocity.

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Why This Raise Is a Signal, Not Just a Success

The size of Alt Carbon’s Seed Round - $12 million - is unusual and telling. Seed rounds in the carbon removal space tend to hover around $2M–$5M. This indicates:

1. Deep technical conviction: Investors see not just promise but near-term execution in biochar deployment.
   
2. Market timing: The voluntary carbon market is maturing fast, and buyers are demanding higher-integrity solutions with measurable, verifiable outcomes.
   
3. Infrastructure mindset: Alt Carbon isn’t building a consultancy or marketplace - they’re laying down global-scale physical and digital rails.
   

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This Is Where Most Founders Miss the Shot

There’s a repeated pattern in climate-tech and frontier sectors: startups rush to build "application-layer" solutions - like ESG dashboards, consumer-facing offset apps, or carbon marketplaces. But without the underlying rails, those apps are castles built on sand.

Alt Carbon didn't make that mistake. They went straight to the infrastructure layer - the hard, messy, capital-intensive part of the problem.

Here's the pattern more founders need to see:

In young markets, if you solve the operational constraint that everyone else is assuming will be solved by someone else - you become the “someone else.”

That changes your trajectory entirely. It makes you indispensable. Everyone else - marketplaces, fintech wrappers, even regulators - has to orient around you. You stop participating in markets and start shaping them.

This isn't a philosophical point. It's tactical. Owning the constraint means:

• You create pricing power, not chase it.
  
• Your margins improve over time because you collect the most data and operate the key levers.
  
• You attract the most patient capital, because you're building irreplaceable layers.
  

Alt Carbon is doing this now. By being the first to tie together physical biochar processing, local incentives for farmers, and trust-layer data infrastructure, they’re not just in the game - they're defining the game.

If you’re a founder, the takeaway is simple but powerful: in emerging sectors, be the one who makes the system run - not just the one who helps people use it.

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Biochar’s Billion-Dollar Potential

Let’s talk market tailwinds.

• The global carbon credit market is projected to hit $250 billion by 2030 (McKinsey).
  
• Biochar - a once-niche approach - is now gaining traction. It’s cheap, abundant, and easy to deploy.
  
• Agricultural waste is responsible for 3.3 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually - waste Alt Carbon can redirect into permanent sequestration.
  
• The cost per tonne of biochar-based removal is already dropping, with some pilots reporting <$100/ton - a threshold many corporates are willing to pay for premium, durable credits.
  

More importantly, companies like Microsoft, Shopify, and Stripe have already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to high-integrity carbon removal solutions - signaling growing enterprise demand.

Alt Carbon is well-positioned to serve this shift: offering real carbon drawdown, real traceability, and real scale.

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What’s Next for Alt Carbon?

With the new capital, Alt Carbon will be expanding across several vectors:

• Geographic deployment: Targeting India, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa - regions with abundant biomass and underutilized carbon potential.
  
• Partnerships with farmers and co-ops: Building out the supply side of biochar production through local infrastructure incentives.
  
• Product development: Strengthening their software stack for automated MRV, blockchain-based issuance, and AI-enhanced forecasting.
  
• Regulatory alignment: Working with carbon registries and global standards bodies to ensure their credits meet or exceed emerging compliance frameworks.
  

This is not just growth - it’s climate-scale execution.

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The Bottom Line

Alt Carbon’s $12M raise is far more than a funding announcement. It’s a signal that infrastructure-first thinking is coming to climate-tech, and that the most consequential startups of this decade will be the ones operating behind the scenes, building the connective tissue of a decarbonized world.

With a deep-tech approach, a scalable physical network, and a digital backbone for accountability, Alt Carbon isn’t just removing carbon. They’re removing the friction to act on climate - at industrial scale.

And in a world that needs 10 billion tonnes of removal annually, that kind of ambition is exactly what the market - and the planet - needs.