Carbon Capture, African Style

Most direct air capture companies are building in North America and Europe, where energy costs make the technology prohibitively expensive. Octavia Carbon flipped the script — they're building the Global South's first commercial-scale DAC plant in Kenya, tapping into the country's abundant geothermal energy to power the capture process at a fraction of the cost of Western peers.

The $5M seed round included $3.9M in equity and $1.1M in advance carbon credit sales, co-led by Lateral Frontiers and E4E Africa with participation from Catalyst Fund, Launch Africa, and Fondation Botnar. Co-founders Martin Freimüller (ex-Dalberg, Cambridge), Duncan Kariuki (mechanical engineer from near Mt. Kenya), and Mike Bwondera (R&D lead) connected through the OpenAir Collective and open-sourced their first prototype design.

Scale and Impact

The team has grown to nearly 60 people, 40 of them engineers, making Octavia one of the five largest DAC companies in the world by team size. Their proprietary sorbent technology adsorbs CO2 from ambient air, then releases it through heating for permanent geological storage via a partnership with Cella Mineral Storage. With 12 clients already onboard, the company is targeting 1,500 tons per year of capture capacity — proving that climate tech doesn't have to be a rich-country monopoly.