Swiss Re was among the participants in a round which pushed the carbon capture system developer's overall financing past the $800m mark.
Switzerland-headquartered carbon capture technology provider Climeworks revaled yesterday it has agreed to raise CHF600m ($646m) of equity funding from investors including reinsurance firm Swiss Re.
Partners Group and GIC are co-leading the round, which also features Baillie Gifford, Carbon Removal Partners, Global Founders Capital, M&G, BigPoint Holding and private investor John Doerr, while JP Morgan Securities was sole placement agent for the deal.
Climeworks has developed technology designed to pull carbon from the air and has 15 such systems in use, having launched what it describes as the world’s largest direct air capture and storage facility in Iceland in September 2021.
Christoph Gebald, co-founder and co-chief executive of Climeworks, said: “We are proud to partner with our new investors and thankful for the renewed trust of our existing ones, all committed to the long-term journey of Climeworks.
“It is thrilling to see the appetite and support of globally leading investors towards the scale up of our technology; this is a great milestone for our company as well as the entire industry.”
The company had secured an undisclosed amount of funding from software producer Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund in January 2021, four months after it closed $110m from unnamed investors that pushed its total equity and grant funding to $160m. Financial services firm Zürcher Kantonalbank is an earlier backer.
The latest round came roughly two weeks after Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund took part in another round for a carbon capture system developer, a $53m series A for Heirloom. One of the other corporate-backed companies operating in the space, LanzaTech, is set to go public in a $2.2bn reverse takeover agreed last month.
Photo courtesy of Climeworks AG.
