Monthly Archives: February 2021

News: VCs are chasing Hopin upwards of $5-6B valuation

• February 24, 2021
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Virtual events platform Hopin is hopin’ for a mega valuation. According to multiple sources who spoke with TechCrunch, the company, which was founded in mid-2019, is running around the fundraise circuit and perhaps nearing the end of a fundraise in which it is looking to raise roughly $400 million at a pre-money valuation of $5

Virtual events platform Hopin is hopin’ for a mega valuation.

According to multiple sources who spoke with TechCrunch, the company, which was founded in mid-2019, is running around the fundraise circuit and perhaps nearing the end of a fundraise in which it is looking to raise roughly $400 million at a pre-money valuation of $5 billion for its Series C. Two sources implied that the valuation could reach as high as $6 billion, but with greater dilution based on some offered terms the company has received. The deal is in flux, and both the round size and valuation are subject to change.

One source told TechCrunch that the company’s ARR has grown to $60 million, implying a valuation multiple of 80-100x if the valuation we’re hearing pans out. That sort of multiple wouldn’t be out of line with other major fundraises for star companies with SaaS-based business models.

Hopin has been on a fundraise tear in recent months. The company raised $125 million at a $2.125 billion valuation late last year for its Series B, which came just a few months after it raised a Series A of $40 million over the summer and a $6.5 million seed round last winter. All told, the roughly 20-month-old company has raised a known $171.4 million in VC according to Crunchbase.

When we last reported on the company, Hopin’s ARR had gone from $0 to $20 million, while its overall userbase had grown from essentially zero to 3.5 million users in November. The company reported then that it had 50,000 groups using its platform.

Hopin’s platform is designed to translate the in-person events experience into a virtual one, providing tools to recreate the experience of walking exhibition floors, networking one-on-one and spontaneously joining fireside chats and panels. It’s become a darling in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen most business and educational conferences canceled in the midst of mass restrictions on domestic and international travel worldwide.

It’s probably also useful to note that our business team uses Hopin to run all of TechCrunch’s editorial events, including Disrupt, Early Stage, Extra Crunch Live and next week’s TechCrunch Sessions: Justice 2021 event (these software selections and their costs are — thankfully — outside the purview of our editorial team).

Hopin may be the mega-leader of the virtual events space right now, but it isn’t the only startup trying to take on this suddenly vital industry. Run The World raised capital last year, Welcome wants to be the ‘Ritz-Carlton for event platforms,’ Spotify is getting into the business, Clubhouse is arguably a contender here, InEvent raised a seed earlier this month and Hubilo is another entrant which nabbed a check from Lightspeed a few months ago. Plus, quite literally dozens of other startups have either started in the space or are pivoting toward it.

We have reached out to Hopin for comment.

News: Marc Benioff and this panel of judges will decide who gets one seat on the first all-civilian spaceflight

• February 24, 2021
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SpaceX’s first all-civilian human spaceflight mission, which will carry four passengers to orbit using a Crew Dragon capsule later this year if all goes to plan, will include one passenger selected by a panel of judges weighing the submissions of entrepreneurs. The panel will include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Fast Company Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Mehta, YouTuber

SpaceX’s first all-civilian human spaceflight mission, which will carry four passengers to orbit using a Crew Dragon capsule later this year if all goes to plan, will include one passenger selected by a panel of judges weighing the submissions of entrepreneurs. The panel will include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Fast Company Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Mehta, YouTuber Mark Rober and Bar Rescue TV host Jon Taffer. It may seem like an eclectic bunch, but there is some reason to the madness.

This seat is one of four on the ride – the first belongs to contest and mission sponsor Jared Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments and a billionaire who has opted to spend a not insignificant chunk of money funding the flight. The second, Isaacman revealed earlier this week, will go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital employee and cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux.

That leaves two more seats, and they’re being decided by two separate contests. One is open to anyone who is a U.S. citizen and who makes a donation to St. Jude via the ongoing charitable contribution drive. The other will be decided by this panel of judges, and will be chosen from a pool of applicants who have build stores on Shift4’s Shift4Shop e-commerce platform.

That’s right: This absurdly expensive and pioneering mission to space is also a growth marketing campaign for Isaacman’s Shopify competitor. But to be fair, the store of the winning entrant doesn’t have to be news – existing customers can also apply and are eligible.

The stated criteria for deciding the winner is “a business owner or entrepreneur the exhibits ingenuity, innovation and determination” so in other words it could be just about anybody. I’m extremely curious to see what Benioff, Mehta, Rober (also a former NASA JPL engineer in addition to a YouTuber) and Taffer come up with between them as a winner.

The Inspiration4 mission is currently set to fly in the fourth quarter of 2021, and mission specifics including total duration and target orbit are yet to be determined.

News: Metal 3D printing company Markforged announces plans to go public via SPAC

• February 24, 2021
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Big morning for Massachusetts tech companies planning to go public via SPAC. Shortly after Berkshire Grey unveiled its intentions, Watertown-based Markforged has announced its own plans. The metal 3D printing company intends to merge with ONE, a special purpose acquisition company created by Kevin Hartz, who will join its board. The deal, which could value

Big morning for Massachusetts tech companies planning to go public via SPAC. Shortly after Berkshire Grey unveiled its intentions, Watertown-based Markforged has announced its own plans. The metal 3D printing company intends to merge with ONE, a special purpose acquisition company created by Kevin Hartz, who will join its board.

The deal, which could value the additive manufacturing company at around $2.1 billion, would bring in around $400 million in cash. Markforged plans to use the money on R&D for new products, materials and building out new verticals for its tech. Shai Terem will stay on as CEO.

“We’ve been at the forefront of the additive manufacturing industry,” the executive said in a release tied to the news, “and this transaction will enable us to build on our incredible momentum and provide capital and flexibility to grow our brand, accelerate product innovation, and drive expanded adoption among customers across key verticals.”

The company says its technology has been used to print north of 10 million parts since its 2013 founding, with its machines deployed in some 10,000 locations across 70 countries. Last year, it pulled in around $70 million in revenue. It has raised north of $136 million thus far, including an $82 million round back in 2019.

3D printing seen some strong growth in recent years, and that’s expected to continue as companies look to the technology to expand beyond the rapid prototyping it’s best known for. Metal printing from the likes of Markforged and competitors including Desktop Metal are seen as an important step, offering far more durability than plastic deposits.

SPACs are, of course, becoming an increasingly popular route for taking companies public. Hardware makers haven’t been a huge player thus far (with a few exceptions like smart lock mater, Latch), though that looks like it may be changing. The deal is expected to close over the summer.

News: Understanding Toast’s expected IPO through the lens of Olo’s 2020 results

• February 24, 2021
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If Toast’s recovery was anything like Olo’s ascent, it isn’t impossible to grok why its old $5 billion valuation might be a bit too small here in 2021

Boston-based Toast has been on a roller coaster over the last year.

From raising $400 million in February 2020 at a nearly $5 billion valuation, the company cut staff in March after COVID-19 turned its business upside down. Toast had recorded 109% revenue growth in 2019.

Toast’s ups and downs were hardly over. The company has since recovered greatly since those early-COVID layoffs. Evidence of that comes in the form of the company’s reportedly-pending IPO and reportedly possible $20 billion valuation.

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It feels like every IPO these days is blasting final private valuations out of the water, but Toast’s ascent from layoffs to an IPO in under a year is an impressive turnaround. And that’s if it prices flat at $5 billion. Anything higher is just cream for the software unicorn.

Until we get the S-1, we won’t know the full details. That said, anotherr company that operates in a similar part of the restaurant technology market is going public at the moment, and we have its S-1 filing: New York-based Olo.

This morning, while we await the numbers from Toast that should prove as interesting as Airbnb’s own COVID-19 recovery, let’s peek at Olo’s results to get a taste of the market that Boston’s leading startup dealt with in 2020.

Olo’s IPO

Olo isn’t a company that has been very loud in recent years; The New York-based software company last raised capital in 2016 when it picked up $40 million in a Series D.

It’s business has three parts, per its S-1 filing. First, Olo offers white-labeled ordering software. And its service also helps restaurants handle delivery options, what it calls “dispatch.” Finally, Olo’s software, in a nearly Yext-like fashion, delivers restaurant information to online platforms.

Toast, as a reminder, offers point-of-sale services, along with online ordering and delivery services similar to Olo. Notably, Toast has been expanding its software lineup, adding payroll management recently among other offerings, including email marketing tools.

But both companies generate software (SaaS) and consumption (transaction-based services) incomes from the restaurant space, so if one had a big 2020, it’s likely that the other swam in similar waters.

News: Primary Venture Partners raises $150M third fund to back NYC startups

• February 24, 2021
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Primary Venture Partners, a firm focused exclusively on investing in New York-area startups, has raised $150 million in its third fund for seed investments (its largest so far), as well as $50 million for its second Select fund (used to participate in later-stage rounds). The firm’s portfolio includes New York success stories like Jet.com (acquired

Primary Venture Partners, a firm focused exclusively on investing in New York-area startups, has raised $150 million in its third fund for seed investments (its largest so far), as well as $50 million for its second Select fund (used to participate in later-stage rounds).

The firm’s portfolio includes New York success stories like Jet.com (acquired by Walmart for $3.3 bill million), Mirror (acquired by Lululemon for $500 million) and Latch (which is planning to go public via SPAC). And the firm has doubled down on its association with New York by publishing an NYC Founder Guide.

Still, the idea of limiting your investments to a specific geography might sound old-fashioned at a time when offices largely go unused, teams are increasingly distributed and some investors are loudly trumpeting new startup hubs. But General Partner Brad Svrluga (who founded Primary with General Partner Ben Sun) told me that the New York focus remains crucial for the firm — for example, in its work to help startups hire the best employees.

“When you think about [our three-person talent team], their charge is to understand, track and be connected to the top 10% of all talent in New York City,” Svrluga said. “That’s a big, ambitious challenge, but it’s also one that we’ve got a really good shot at doing in a relatively confined geography. If we were trying to simultaneously recruit for companies in New York, Seattle, Boston, Austin, L.A., the Bay Area, etc., you just can’t do it — or you’d need an army.”

And while he said San Francisco and Silicon Valley remain “unquestionably the center of the universe that we operate in, the sun around which everything else revolves,” he suggested that New York has unique advantages: “Unlike the Bay Area, New York is powered by a whole collection of industries. That diversity makes the place radically more resilient.”

That doesn’t mean things won’t change as we emerge from the pandemic. For one thing, Svrluga anticipated that companies that are ostensibly New York based will be more distributed, with “a relatively lower percentage of their workforce in New York City proper,” and of that NYC workforce, “fewer of them in the office on any given day.” He’s also hopeful that startup real estate costs will “shrink materially.”

“I would love it if you and your peers continue to trumpet the demise of New York, so other investors can stop paying attention and we can have a less competitive environment,” he added.

Another change — one that’s not limited to geography — is the growing size of seed rounds, which Svrluga said is one of the reasons for the larger fund. The seed, he suggested, has become “the first third of the A” round, but that doesn’t mean startups raising seed rounds need to be more further along.

“A whole bunch of what we do has always been way pre-product,” he said. “It could be just a founder or just two or three people …. some early code might be written but you’re months and months way from launch. They’re now capable raising $2.5, $3, $4 million right out of the gate.”

In addition to the new funds, Primary is also announcing that it has appointed Rebecca Price as operating partner and promoted Jason Shuman to partner.

News: 4 essential truths about venture investing

• February 24, 2021
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After making pre-seed investments for seven years, I’ve observed how different the pre-seed stage is from Series A and later-stage investing. Today, I want to highlight four ideas that are true across different stages of investing.

After making pre-seed investments for seven years, I have observed how different the pre-seed stage is from Series A and later-stage investing.

Today, I want to highlight four ideas that are true across different stages of investing.

Venture outcomes are driven by a power law

Power law is an immutable law of the universe. Examples include the distribution of population in cities, price of artwork, and unfortunately, wealth distribution. This law is also known as the Pareto principle, and colloquially known as the 80%-20% rule.

Venture capital is no exception and the outcomes of every venture portfolio will likely follow a power law distribution. There are two significant things to think about here:

One: Because most startups fail, the distribution is going to have a lot of zeros (or near zeros) in the long tail. The zeros are going to be followed by singles and doubles.

Two: The biggest winners, when they happen, tend to be huge. Unicorns were hard to come by when Aileen Lee penned her now-famous article in 2013. Today, unicorns are no longer as rare and top-tier firms are constructing their portfolio with the goal of funding a decacorn — a company valued at $10 billion or higher.

There is nothing mysterious about the power law dynamic in venture. Just like the rich get richer, the biggest companies get bigger.

A startup that reaches $10 million in revenue is much more likely to double, double again and then cruise by $100 million in revenue versus a startup at the $1 million mark now trying to get to $10 million.

At scale, everything is different — the resources, the possibilities and access to capital. Of course, even companies that reach very substantial scale may run into obstacles and eventually underperform. But that is not the point.

The point is that the ones that do end up winning and driving all the returns keep doubling and continue getting bigger and bigger.

Hence, the outcomes of the venture portfolio fit a power law curve.

The best managers in the business are distinguished by a few more at the very top of the curve.

The average manager faces a very real possibility of making no money at all because of how steep the power law curve is.

Your fund size is your strategy

There is a piece of feedback that fund of fund managers frequently give to GPs: Your fund size is your strategy.

What they are essentially saying is that a fund’s portfolio construction will depend on how much capital is under management, and vice versa. Why is that?

Let’s take two extreme examples — a manager of a $10 million fund and a manager of a $1 billion fund. Let’s assume that both managers want to lead rounds. If the first one decided to be a Series A fund, it would be extremely concentrated. It may be able to lead 1-2 rounds, but that’s it. Given the power law nature of outcomes, it would be extremely unlikely for this manager to generate a good return.

News: Metal 3D printing startup Mantle launches out of stealth with $13M in funding

• February 24, 2021
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Additive manufacturing has been a popular buzz phrase for decades now. With a smattering of notable exceptions, however, 3D printing has largely been focused on rapid prototyping and limited-run, personal products. Metal 3D printing companies like Mantle represent an intriguing use case on the road to truly scaling the tech to mass manufacturing. Arriving out

Additive manufacturing has been a popular buzz phrase for decades now. With a smattering of notable exceptions, however, 3D printing has largely been focused on rapid prototyping and limited-run, personal products. Metal 3D printing companies like Mantle represent an intriguing use case on the road to truly scaling the tech to mass manufacturing.

Arriving out of stealth today, the Bay Area-based company is not focused on replacing traditional manufacturing methods, as much as augmenting and improving them. Specifically, the startup is focusing its technology in helping creating better molds and dies for manufacturers.

There are, of course, a number of companies currently competing in the printable metal category. Notable names include Desktop Metal, ExOne and Markforged. Armed with $13 million in funding from Foundation Capital, Hypertherm Ventures, Future Shape, 11.2 capital, Plug and Play Ventures and Corazon Capital, Mantle seeks to differentiate itself with a machine capable of removing some steps from the process.

“The main difference, having interacted with 3D printing for close to three decades, is really around the focus on these use cases that are production oriented,” Foundation Capital General Partner Steve Vassallo tells TechCrunch. “The vast majority of 3D printing is to make a prototype as quickly as possible. To actually make something that can be used in production environments — real parts that you can use — has never been done before.”

The company’s machine (roughly “The size of two standing desks” its says) builds part finishing into the process.

“Ours is the first sintering-based hybrid technology that does shape refinement prior to going into the furnace,” CEO Ted Sorom tells TechCrunch. “We do it with a unique material that’s designed not only to be deposited into a very dense body but to also be cut with high-speed cutting tools. That allows us to get a totally different level of surface detail than anyone’s able to get today.”

The company has thus far announced L’Oréal as its first partner. The cosmetics giant will be using Mantle’s printers to create precision molds for products and packaging.

Tony Fadell, of Future Shape Mantle, added in a comment offered to TechCrunch, “Mantle gives you the superpowers to make Apple-quality mechanical parts in days not months and lowers your cost by orders of magnitude. That speed and affordability lets you iterate to get your parts to perfection and still lets you launch much earlier.”

News: Hydrolix snares $10M seed to lower the cost of processing log data at scale

• February 24, 2021
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Many companies spend a significant amount of money and resources processing data from logs, traces and metrics, forcing them to make trade-offs about how much to collect and store. Hydrolix, an early stage startup, announced a $10 million seed round today to help tackle logging at scale, while using unique technology to lower the cost

Many companies spend a significant amount of money and resources processing data from logs, traces and metrics, forcing them to make trade-offs about how much to collect and store. Hydrolix, an early stage startup, announced a $10 million seed round today to help tackle logging at scale, while using unique technology to lower the cost of storing and querying this data.

Wing Venture Capital led the round with help from AV8 Ventures, Oregon Venture Fund and Silicon Valley Data Capital.

Company CEO and co-founder Marty Kagan noted that in his previous roles, he saw organizations with tons of data in logs, metrics and traces that could be valuable to various parts of the company, but most organizations couldn’t afford the high cost to maintain these records for very long due to the incredible volume of data involved. He started Hydrolix because he wanted to change the economics to make it easier to store and query this valuable data.

“The classic problem with these cluster-based databases is that they’ve got locally attached storage. So as the data set gets larger, you have no choice but to either spend a ton of money to grow your cluster or separate your hot and cold data to keep your costs under control,” Kagan told me.

What’s more, he says that when it comes to querying, the solutions out there like BigQuery and Snowflake are not well suited for this kind of data. “They rely really heavily on caching and bulk column scans, so they’re not really useful for […] these infrastructure plays where you want to do live stream ingest, and you want to be able to do ad hoc data exploration,” he said.

Hydrolix wanted to create a more cost-effective way of storing and querying log data, while solving these issues with other tooling. “So we built a new storage layer which delivers […] SSD-like performance using nothing but cloud storage and diskless spot instances,” Kagan explained. He says that this means that there is no caching or column scales, enabling them to do index searches. “You’re getting the low cost, unlimited retention benefits of cloud storage, but with the interactive performance of fully indexed search,” he added.

Peter Wagner, founding partner at investor Wing Venture Capital, says that the beauty of this tool is that it eliminates tradeoffs, while lowering customers overall data processing costs. “The Hydrolix team has built a real-time data platform optimized not only to deliver superior performance at a fraction of the cost of current analytics solutions, but one architected to offer those same advantages as data volumes grow by orders of magnitude,” Wagner said in a statement.

It’s worth pointing out that in the past couple of weeks SentinelOne bought high speed logging platform Scalyr for $155 million, then CrowdStrike grabbed Humio, another high speed logging tool for $400 million, so this category is getting attention.

The product is currently compatible with AWS and offered through the Amazon Marketplace, but Kagan says they are working on versions for Azure and Google Cloud and expect to have those available later this year. The company was founded at the end of 2018 and currently has 20 employees spread out over six countries with headquarters in Portland, Oregon.

News: Scope AR launches a browser-based AR creation platform for the enterprise

• February 24, 2021
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Enticing the enterprise world to embrace augmented reality has proven a more difficult task than many startups in the AR space anticipated, but as the hardware and software behind the tech becomes increasingly commodified, customers are starting to find use cases that align with their shifting remote workflows. Scope AR has been selling the vision

Enticing the enterprise world to embrace augmented reality has proven a more difficult task than many startups in the AR space anticipated, but as the hardware and software behind the tech becomes increasingly commodified, customers are starting to find use cases that align with their shifting remote workflows.

Scope AR has been selling the vision of using 3D models to help the manufacturing industry scale training and collaboration since they launched back in 2010. Now, the startup is looking to build a more scalable future for themselves as they revamp their central product WorkLink for the web, Scope AR CEO Scott Montgomerie tells TechCrunch.

The new platform called WorkLink Create allows customers to sidestep complexity and author 3D content on top of CAD models without using Unity, an effort to make the product more approachable to non-technical users and customers that might not have access to Unity developers to roll out an integration.

“Unity is awesome but to do anything you have to code,” Montgomerie tells TechCrunch, calling WorkLink Create a “more user-friendly and scalable” option compared to software from its competitors.

The browser-based platform allows users to upload 3D files and edit them with comments, detailed instructions and animations via a drag-and-drop interface. The platform automatically scales down the level of detail on CAD models to meet the capabilities of the devices that will be rendering them. Once published, a customer’s users can access the models and instructions via WorkLink’s mobile and HoloLens apps.

Image via Scope AR

Scope AR’s focus on commercial education, on-the-job training and troubleshooting have seen renewed interest as COVID era guidelines have pushed more meetings into virtual spaces.

While AR hasn’t seen the full embrace of the COVID-era digital transformation, the remote work boom in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has also boosted business for Scope AR’s products, Montgomerie says. With the company expanding its list of customers while also helping frontline manufacturing operations that have aimed to quickly build and repair medical equipment necessary for COVID-19 testing and treatment.

Montgomerie says that he had always expected AR adoption to take some time, but the the slow pace of AR headset adoption had exceeded his expectations, something that has pushed the company to fully embrace mobile-based AR integrations on phones and tablets over the years. Scope AR is an authorized reseller of the HoloLens 2, though HoloLens makes its own remote collaboration software for enterprise users as well called Remote Assist.

Scope AR closed a $9.7 million Series A back in 2019 — the bulk of the company’s nearly $12 million raised to date from investors.

News: Noya Labs turns cooling towers into direct air capture devices for CO2 emissions

• February 24, 2021
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Not every company’s founders find themselves on a first name basis with the local bomb squad, but then again not every company is Noya Labs, which wants to turn the roughly 2 million cooling towers at industrial sites and buildings across the U.S. into CO2 sucking weapons in the fight against global climate change. When

Not every company’s founders find themselves on a first name basis with the local bomb squad, but then again not every company is Noya Labs, which wants to turn the roughly 2 million cooling towers at industrial sites and buildings across the U.S. into CO2 sucking weapons in the fight against global climate change.

When the company first started developing prototypes of its devices that attach to water coolers, the company’s founders, Josh Santos and Daniel Cavero, did what all good founders do, they started building in their backyard.

The sight of a 55 gallon oil drum, a yellow refrigeration tank in a sous vide bath attached to red and blue cables didn’t sit so well with the neighbors, so Santos and Cavero found themselves playing host to the bomb squad multiple times, according to the company’s chief executive, Santos.

“We proved that it could capture CO2, and we achieved something that no startup should achieve,” Santos said of the dubious bomb squad distinction.

Santos and Cavero were inspired to begin their experiments with direct air capture by an article describing some research into plants’ declining ability to capture carbon dioxide that Santos read on the Caltrain on his way to work back in 2019. That article spurred the would-be entrepreneur and his roommate to get to work on experimenting with carbon chemistry.

Their first product was a consumer air purifier that would pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in homes and capture it. Homeowners could then sell the captured gases to Santos and Cavero who would then resell it. But the two quickly realized that the business model wasn’t economical, and went back to the drawing board.

They found their eventual application in industrial cooling towers, which the company’s tech can turn into CO2 capturing devices that have the capacity to take in between half a ton and a ton of carbon dioxide per day.

Noya’s tech works by adding a blend of CO2 absorbing chemicals to the water in the cooling towers. They then add an attachment to the cooling tower that activates what Santos called a regeneration process to convert the captured CO2 back into gas. Once they have captured the CO2 the company will look to resell it to industrial Co2 consumers.

It’s not green yet, at least not exactly, because that CO2 is being recirculated instead of sequestered, but Santos said it’s greener existing sources of the gas, which come from ammonia and ethanol plants.

Noya Labs co-founders Josh Santos and Daniel Cavero. Image Credit: Noya Labs

“Five years from now we fully intend to have vertically integrated carbon capture and sequestration. Our first step is locally produced low cost atmospherically captured CO2,” said Santos. “If we were to go all in on a carbon capture that would require a lot of time for us to develop. What this initial model allows us to do is fine tune our capture technology while building up longterm to go to market.”

Santos called it the “Tesla roadster approach” so that the company can build up capital and get revenue and prove one piece of it as an MVP so they can prove other steps of it down the line.

Noya Labs already is developing a pilot plant with the Alexandre Family Farm that should capture between the estimated half a ton and one ton target.

To develop the initial pilot and build out its team, the company has managed to raise $1.2 million from the frontier tech investment firm Fifty Years, founded by Ela Madej and Seth Bannon, and Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital (whose mission statement to invest in companies that will buy time to “unf*ck the planet” might be one of the greatest). The company’s also in Y Combinator.

“One of the things that makes us excited about this technology is that in the U.S. alone there are 2 million cooling towers. Looking conservatively — if our initial pilot plant can capture 1 ton per day — we’re at right over half a gigaton of CO2 capture.”

And companies are already raising their hands to pick up the CO2 that Noya would sell on the market. There’s a growing collection of startups that are using CO2 to make products. These companies range from the slightly silly, like Aether Diamonds, which uses CO2 to make… diamonds; to companies like Dimensional Energy or Prometheus fuels, which make synthetic fuels with CO2, or Opus12, which uses CO2 in its replacements for petrochemicals.

Prices for commercial CO2 range between $125 per ton to $5,000 per ton, according to Santos. And Noya would be producing at less than $100 per ton. Current Direct Air Capture companies sell their CO2 from somewhere between $600 to $700 per ton.

Stoya’s first installation could cost around $250,000, Santos said. For Bannon, that means the company passes his “Mr. Burns test.”

“We’ve been digging into the DAC space but haven’t liked the techno-economics we’ve seen. Previous approaches have had too much capex and opex and not enough revenue potential,” Bannon wrote in an email. “That’s what Noya has solved. By leveraging existing industrial equipment, their model is profitable. And better yet, they make their carbon capture partners money, allowing them to scale this up fast. This creates an opportunity to profitably remove 1 gigaton plus a year.”