Terraton wants to be the McDonald’s of biochar

If there’s one thing McDonald’s has done for the world, it’s made starting a burger restaurant relatively straightforward. Franchisees buy into the system, and in return they get equipment, marketing, and even an operating manual.

Terraton wants to bring that same model to biochar, a technology that turns agricultural waste into a carbon dioxide-sequestering fertilizer.

Terraton recently raised a $11.5 million seed round for it’s “business-in-a-box” approach to biochar project development, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The series was led by Lowercarbon Capital and Gigascale Capital. ANA Holdings’ ANA Future Frontier Fund and East Japan Railway Company’s Takanawa Gateway Global Co-Benefits Fund participated along with a number of angel investors, including Google’s Jeff Dean and OpenAI board member Bret Taylor.

“Most biochar facilities, people have only ever built one,” said Greg D’Alesandre, co-founder of Terraton. “They’ve never learned and progressed.”

Terraton is betting that it can help a few partners build biochar facilities and, from that experience, clone those facilities with any number of companies that want to get into the business. Along the way, it’s developing a SaaS component to run the plants, measure and verify carbon credits, and sell them to large companies.

Gibbs and D’Alesandre think that biochar is ripe for the franchise approach. The technology burns waste plant material in the absence of oxygen, and the resulting black matter can be incorporated into soil, where it stores carbon for hundreds of years while improving soil health.

“The science is settled. It’s reliable and delivered today. It’s at a good price. But the problem is it’s supply constrained. There’s not enough of it to go around,” co-founder and CEO Kevin Gibbs told TechCrunch. “When we talk to the big buyers like Microsoft, Google, Airbus — those sort of companies — they want to buy more, and they can’t find more places to buy it from.”

Part of the problem, he said, is that biochar facilities need to be built near sources of agricultural waste to minimize transportation costs. A single facility might be able to produce enough biochar annually to capture around 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, Gibbs said. “That’s a lot, but that’s not a lot if you’ve got an AI data center.”

So far, the company has developed two facilities in Africa: one in Ghana and the other in Kenya. The former buys waste from a cocoa producer, and the other takes residue from a nut processor. Together, Terraton expects they’ll remove 20,000 metric tons annually.

Local businesses own the biochar facilities, Gibbs said. “You need the person who has the relationships with all these farmers,” he said. “It’s great for them to have skin in the game and to feel that sense of ownership. But we try to do everything we can to make them successful.”