Carbo Culture

Henrietta Kekäläinen is the CEO and co-founder of Carbo Culture. Originally from Finland, Henrietta speaks five languages and has lived in four countries. Henrietta is recognised as a World Economic Forum ‘Global Shaper’ and from 2016-2018 she was a board member of a publicly traded electronics company (Nasdaq omx Hel: YEINT). She was the youngest person in the country to have a non-family tied seat in a company on the stock exchange.

Her prior experience includes growing two organisations in edtech: catapulting the women in tech training program Rails Girls to over 300+ events on all continents, and founding Mehackit.org, creative technology community. She’s an alumna of Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, Singularity University and StartX.  

She has advised the Finnish government on their entrepreneurship strategy and spoken alongside Nobel laureates on several occasions. She has been involved in the scouts for most of her life and is a certified Sea Captain.

UN estimates that we have about 60 harvests left until we have depleted all our soils. Every year we lose $100B worth of soil to erosion and degradation. This will accelerate to the trillions by mid-century. In addition, we have a trillion ton debt of carbon in the atmosphere that is already impacting our ecosystem’s resilience - the life-supporting mechanisms that all of us rely on every day.

Carbo Culture has developed a novel technology to rapidly convert waste biomass into functional carbons, which keep CO2 from the atmosphere for thousands of years.

Biochar is one of the ways to safely sequester carbon on a large scale, and help remediate damaged ecosystems, regenerate soils and keep nutrients and toxin away from groundwater and waterways. 

Globally we will need to draw down a trillion tons of CO2 in the coming ten years. Biochar can be a significant part of the solution, e.g IPCC noted biochar as one of the most promising CO2 drawdown methods. 

A ton of Carbo Culture biochar keeps over 3.12 t of CO2 from returning to the atmosphere for a millenia. When added to nutrients, biochar will also hold down potent GhGs such as Methane (34 x CO2e) and NOx (298 x CO2e). 

We have a plan and a roadmap to reach an annual Gigaton of CO2e scale, and start a new biochar ecosystem for environmental remediation, water treatment and carbon negative materials. 

Carbo Culture creates functional biocarbons from waste - we manufacture biocarbon in an entirely new, patented way and produce high quality, consistent biochar for better agricultural performance and soil remediation, in a waste-to-resource, circular model. Biochar is one of the most affordable, technologically ready carbon sequestration methods with the largest potential for CO2 utilization (Nature, IPCC). Our mission is to sequester a gigaton of carbon dioxide annually within a decade - by amplifying nature’s time-tested strategy for regeneration, the carbon cycle. 

We're kickstarting a biocarbon ecosystem for climate relevant carbon drawdown and environmental resilience. We provide biochar for soil management (e.g farms, built environments, biofiltration, rooftop substrates and water treatment) and pre-mixed with fertilizers.

We believe that if climate change isn't stopped or slowed down, most other things won't matter either. Our mission is centered on carbon removal, to sequester as much CO2 as we can, as fast as possible. 

In the near term, the most important stakeholders are cities and municipalities who build green infrastructure, and the agricultural sector and farming applications. We've talked to over 200 customer profiles to understand their needs and are for example, re-working our business model to make the product as accessible as possible to farmers.

Our focus is initially in California and Northern Europe, where we are involved in research into our biochar, but we know that to succeed, we need to take this global: As a combination of owned and licensed facilities around the world, to re-think how we think of organic biomass waste in diverse communities.

With our example of founding Carbo Culture, we want to encourage others to address the really difficult problems in our planet. Working on Carbo Culture has taught us so much about the interconnectedness of the ecological processes of the planet, of biomimicry and the formidable force of nature that is the soil microbiome.

What we're excited about is that biochar is a profitable way tos equester carbon, and can kickstart a new way of thinking about waste, raw materials and circular applications.

Our story goes back to 2013 when Henrietta and Chris met at NASA Ames Research Center for the Singularity Global Grand Challenges summer school, and were tasked to develop projects to impact a billion people. We discovered the work that Professor Michael Antal was doing at the University of Hawaii around flash carbonization of biomass, and its potential to store CO2, and basically, have been thinking and doing biochar work ever since.

We believe that if the climate crisis isn't dealt with, not much else will matter either. A planetary change is here and it’s very difficult to reverse. It will change our habitat and alter our way of life in ways that we can not yet comprehend.

What excites me the most, besides trapping the carbon and putting it to use, is the use of it in soils. Our soils are depleting at record speed. But when this carbon is added to nutrients and then to the soil, it brings new structure and surface area, and helps the soil microbial life thrive — essentially, helping the soil to regenerate.

The added leverage from adding biochar to the soils does not end in making the soil healthier and helping the soil take and store more carbon in the form of roots and healthy biology.

We're passionate entrepreneurs who will not settle for anything else than massive scale impact. This is what we vouched for when starting. We've both had previous companies before, this is our life mission now.

We're working with a technology that has been studied and developed in universities for over a decade, and we know it's more dependable and better able to scale than the current pyrolysis technologies out there.

Our founding team are both second time entrepreneurs, and our core team and network has extensive experience and background in biomass carbonization technology, ramping up production processes, patenting and commercialization, as well as in business development, B2B sales and management. Carbo Culture is a mission- driven business, where profit and purpose are aligned, and people who work for us feel the integrity. That is why we get job applications from people who would be knowingly taking a pay cut or leaving a secure job. We believe in working towards halting climate change as a must – if we don’t solve this, no other businesses will matter either. 

The formation of Carbo Culture was catalyzed by a last minute application to the Carbon X-Prize in July 2016. The challenge required $8,000 to enter, and with only days before the deadline, Henrietta secured the entrance fee from Fortum, one of Finland’s largest utilities, formed the company and negotiated an exclusive option agreement for the IP with the University of Hawaii.

Meanwhile, Chris  pulled three consecutive all-nighters to formulate a technical plan that combined flash carbonization, microwaves and graphene production into a unified carbon sequestration system was also capable of desalinating seawater and producing ammonia. 

While we weren’t invited to the next round of the competition, the experience tested our team, welded us into a tight unit and convinced us of the importance of our shared mission.

After almost half a decade, more than 6000 miles between us, and more setbacks than we care to recall, we still have the enthusiasm and sense of purpose that we did that summer.

I built mehackit.org, company that has taught thousands of teachers and students creative technology skills, democratising the knowledge to automation and programming. Before mehackit, I build Rails Girls from the bottom up as an open-source organisation, which today spans over 300 cities globally. I launched Pioneers festival and have been pushing the European tech scene since it began. 

I personally had no experience in biochar, carbon materials, physics, mechanical engineering, cleantech or pretty much anything other than biomass when I came in. You should have heard my first pitches. They were terrible. The things I was able to utilise were people skills, cap table management, my extensive network, mentors, building a business etc from previous work. Everything else I've had to learn. I'd say by far the coolest thing so far has been the widening of my understanding of ecosystems and how they function, and the soil. The soil has blown my mind, and it does over and over again. It's the basis of all land-based life. Of course, pyrogenic carbon and soil organic carbon are parts of it. Now we can simulate nature to bring carbons back where they belong, which is what we are doing at Carbo Culture.