Exclusive: Google is backing a Danish startup ‘brewing’ CO2 that can clean up one of the most polluting industries in the world
What if you could turn all the bad emissions from fossil fuel-intensive industries into plastics, paints and more? That’s the dream behind Copenhagen-based climate tech startup Again, which has raised $43 million in Series A funding from Google Ventures (the venture arm of Google parent Alphabet) and HV Capital, Fortune exclusively reveals.
The company will use the funds to devote more resources to researching food and feed products that can be made of carbon dioxide.
Cofounder Max Kufner told Fortune that the company plans to roll out its first operations by the end of 2025 or early 2026 at the latest.
Again’s technology pumps carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere into bioreactors. Bacteria then convert this carbon into valuable products used to make plastics, paints, and soaps.
Refining petroleum to extract different chemicals is responsible for 4% of the world’s direct greenhouse gas emissions, or about 1.8 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, making the petrochemicals industry the third most polluting in the world.
COURTESY OF AGAIN
Again has raised about $100 million to date, partly from a European Union grant and partly from venture capital funding. The company received a $10 million injection from GV, ACME Capital and Atlantic Labs to set up a production site.
Founded in 2021, the company was born from a research project developed over 10 years at the Danish Technical University, Stanford, and MIT. That gave Again a leg up when it launched, as much of the learning curve of developing the technology had been crossed, making it easier to build the company and focus on scaling up.
Torbjørn Jensen and Alex Nielsen, academics involved in the research, later became cofounders at Again, along with early-stage investor Kufner.
Climate tech has expanded 45 times in the last decade, according to Dealroom. But as global temperatures and extreme weather events continue rising, there’s still a need for significantly more.
Again’s technology helps solve one of climate technology’s biggest barriers—the ability to scale it. One of the biggest challenges with modern climate tech companies is that they’re trying to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, turn it into a very small form and pump it back into the earth, Kufner explains.
Jensen told Fortune that the process of capturing and converting carbon dioxide efficiently is what makes Again stand out.
“We are basically cleaning up the emissions and we just so happen to also produce a super valuable product at the same time,” he said. “But it needs to be cheap, it needs to be robust, it needs just to operate 24/7 all year round.”
