Verdant Labs wants to turn carbon removal into an industry

The first thing Lina Björk wants to make clear, sitting in Verdant Labs' second-floor lab in Stockholm's Hammarby district, is that her company isn't trying to save the planet.

"We're trying to build an industry," she says. "There's a difference."

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Verdant Labs, which Björk founded in 2020 with two former colleagues from the chemistry department at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, is one of a small handful of companies trying to turn engineered carbon removal — the literal extraction of CO₂ from the atmosphere — into a real economic sector with multiple buyers, predictable unit costs, and infrastructure that can be financed like any other industrial asset.

That language is deliberate. The dominant frame in early climate-tech was "save the planet" — heroic, urgent, ill-suited to the kind of disciplined operational rigor that turns a chemistry breakthrough into a $10-billion-a-year industry. Björk's bet is that nothing scales without that rigor.

The technology

Verdant's core technology is a variant of mineralization. The company runs ambient air through a series of contactor units that bind atmospheric CO₂ to alkaline minerals — predominantly olivine and serpentine derivatives sourced from European mining waste streams. The bound carbon then becomes a stable inorganic carbonate, durable on geological timescales.

The chemistry isn't new. What's new is the engineering. Verdant has cut the energy intensity of the process by roughly 60% from the public state-of-the-art three years ago. The current operating unit, sited next to a hydroelectric facility outside Stockholm, sequesters about 2,800 tonnes of CO₂ per year. The company says it has line-of-sight to ten times that throughput per unit by end of 2027.

The market problem

Here is where Björk's argument turns from chemistry to economics. The hardest part of building a carbon-removal company in 2026 isn't the science. It's the demand side. The voluntary corporate-carbon market is volatile, fragmented, and prone to greenwashing scandals that compress prices. The compliance-driven market — driven by regulators in the EU, Singapore, and increasingly California — is more durable but still small.

Verdant has tried to engineer around that volatility by diversifying buyers aggressively. Today the company's largest contracts are with two European reinsurers, a US tech company doing climate accounting against scope-three emissions, and — in a recent deal — a sovereign wealth fund buying durable removals as part of a national net-zero commitment.

"If your business depends on one buyer category, you don't have a business," Björk says. "You have a contract. That's the lesson the first wave of climate companies didn't learn."

What scaling actually looks like

The most striking part of Verdant's plan isn't the carbon volume. It's the financing structure. The company is intentionally building toward a model where each future contactor unit can be project-financed against off-take contracts the way solar farms are. That requires three things to be true: predictable engineering costs, multi-decade off-take agreements, and a credible monitoring layer.

The third piece is where the climate sector keeps tripping. Buyers are increasingly skeptical of paper carbon claims, and rightly so. Verdant's verification stack — built in collaboration with two independent academic groups — produces public, auditable measurement of each tonne sequestered. The data feed is open, the methodology is peer-reviewed, and contracts are written to penalize the company financially if measured tonnage falls short.

That last point is the one Björk emphasizes. "We're the only carbon-removal company I know of that has clawback in our contracts. If we don't sequester what we promised, we pay back. It costs us deals. We don't care."

What comes next

The next eighteen months are about scaling the second unit, which broke ground in Q1 just outside Trondheim, and closing a Series B that Björk expects to be in the $80–120 million range. The company is also in early conversations with two Gulf-state buyers, a development she's careful not to over-discuss.

For more from Verdant's founder, read our long interview with Lina Björk on deep-tech timelines. For more on the climate funding landscape, see our latest quarterly pulse.