Soil Carbon Co raises $6.9m in round led by Li Ka-shing's VC firm

Lowercarbon Capital – a climate-focused fund established by early Uber and Twitter backer Chris Sacca – also participated, as did the Australian government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation. But here was a mechanism to stabilize it and trap it in the soil long-term.” Webb and his co-founders, farmers Mick Wettenhall and Frank Oly, developed the solution — which they call ‘microbe-mediated carbon sequestration’ — after attending a talk given by University of Sydney professor Peter McGee, who had undertaken extensive research in the area. “As momentum built, we got a few more results that helped prove it out, and finally got to the stage of attracting external funding.” The SoilCQuest team realized that, for their microbe-mediated solution to go mainstream and have a wider impact, they’d need to commercialize it – and to do that, they’d need venture backers. That’s when they teamed up with Guy Hudson, who previously ran SparkLabs’ Cultiv8 agrifoodtech accelerator and fund, and agricultural policy specialist Tegan Nock to launch Soil Carbon Co last year. Hudson says that Soil Carbon Co’s exact business model is still “to be decided,” though he indicates that the startup is likely to work directly with farmers in combination with its affiliate and majority shareholder, SoilCQuest.