Chestnut carbon gets $ 160 million to convert old farms into forests

The company told Techcrunch that the start of the nature -based carbon running brought carbon with a value of $ 160 million of financing from the BS. The startup buys marginal and mobile agricultural lands, cultivates them with original trees, and harvested the resulting carbon credits.

Carbon credits have become a hot commodity, especially among technology companies that are looking to compensate for the high emissions that are partially caused by the expansion of data centers that serve cloud customers and artificial intelligence agents.

The new round included investments from the Pension Pension Planning Plan in Canada, Cloverlay, and DBL Partners along with unveiled university endowments, family offices, funds funds, and other institutional investors.

to Carbon chestnut160 million dollars is actually a fairly modest amount. When the company was founded, Kimmeridge has benefited from the pledge of up to $ 200 million. The company usually invests in oil and gas companies, but the administrative partner Bin Del saw an opportunity to participate in the increasing carbon credit market.

To achieve this, it acquired Forest Carbon Works, a startup that was founded by Kyle Holland that helped families manage their forests to sell carbon assets. The Netherlands continued with chestnut, where he is currently the chief product official.

With chestnut, the team expanded its focus to include the projects developed by the company, not only the current forest management.

Chestnut currently has more than 35,000 acres of agricultural, marginal and defaulting lands in the southeastern United States. Part of the goal of collecting donations is to develop a significantly chestnut holdings. The startup hopes to expand its carbon credit capacity to 100 million metric tons by 2030, which will require the conversion of hundreds of thousands of acres into the forests.

Last month, Chestnut paid a batch offered on this goal with the sale 7 million carbon balances to Microsoft. (One carbon credit deserves one ton of carbon.) The 25 -year -old deal will help rehabilitate 60,000 acres in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. Chestnut uses the golden standard to ratify carbon credits for 100 years.

The new financing round should help greatly expand its operations. While there is a lot of demand for high -quality carbon credit today, the target of chestnut of 100 million metric tons represents a small part of the annual carbon emissions, which amounted to 37.4 billion metric tons in 2023, According to To IEA.

However, if chestnut is able to secure a foothold in the carbon credit market, the installation and re -embarrassment carries great potential to curb the effects of climate warming pollution.

A Study in 2019 I found that the world could support 2.2 billion acres more forests than it was today. Once these forests mature, they will acquire 205 billion metric tons of carbon, or about a quarter of carbon in the atmosphere today.