Applied Carbon’s Farm Bot Turns Plant Waste Into CO2‑Reducing Biochar.

From Waste to Wonder: The Char‑Mazing Story of Biochar

When you think about cutting global smog, your first instinct is to build a giant air‑machine that sucks CO₂ out of the sky. These dinosaur‑sized factories do wow, but they cost a fortune and still do nothing for the trees we’re losing. So some bright minds hit the bar, had a drink, and came up with a simpler, greener hack: turn plant trash into charcoal that locks up carbon for ages.

Meet the Duo Behind the Dust‑Buster

Jason Aramburu and Morgan Williams, two serial founders who usually turn waste into something useful, saw a golden opportunity. Instead of burning brush to fuel power plants—and then trying to capture the emitted CO₂—why not feed the waste into a black‑goldy blender to make biochar? It’s a centuries‑old trick that keeps carbon locked deep in the soil, and when done right, could store up to 2 billion metric tons of CO₂ each year.

What Is Biochar, and Where Did It Come From?

Think of it as a super‑charged charcoal that’s made from nothing more exotic than forest litter and crop residues. For over two millennia, South American farmers burned twigs and leaves to create a soil amendment that helped their crops thrive. Today, about 10% of Amazonian earth still bears the mark of that ancient art, proving its enduring value.

The Big Roadblock: Scaling the Char‑Cycle

Aramburu and Williams had a prototype, but scaling up felt more like a logistical nightmare than a tech hack. It turns out that moving the raw biomass, churning it into biochar, and then hauling that heavy poo back to farms is super expensive. Each hop—curb‑to‑factory, factory‑to‑field—requires a lot of fuel and can cost more than the CO₂ saved.

• Finding enough plant waste is hard; not all farms produce the same amount.
• Transporting the bulk of brown trash to the facility drains budgets.
• Shipping the final charcoal back to fields often erases the environmental win.

“It just becomes really challenging to move that material around,” Jason says, scrolling over a bar table that already had a few beers—that’s where the lightbulb moment hit.

Why It Still Feels Like Magic

Even with logistics playing villain, the promise is huge: a green, low‑cost way to get CO₂ out of the sky while boosting farm yields. Imagine soils that are both richer and greener, and a planet that gets a little sweeter with every tree‑like char chunk. So when entrepreneurs raise capital for carbon, why not invest in a little smoky alchemy instead?

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Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda

Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise.

Applied Carbon: Turning Farms into Mobile Biochar Factories

Imagine a shiny, almost sci‑fi tractor‑pulling machine that chomps up crop leftovers, turns them into a combustible “carbon cloud,” and then spreads out the resulting charcoal back onto the field. Sounds like a steampunk fever dream, right? That’s exactly what Applied Carbon, formerly known as Climate Robotics, is doing. Led by CEO Aramburu and COO Williams, they’ve flipped the whole biochar business on its head—bringing the plant to the field instead of hauling the waste to a remote facility.

The Spark of the Idea

• “Identify the problem and boom!”—that’s what Aramburu said when the team realized the ag industry was built around big harvesters. Instead of trucking waste off‑site, they decided to retrofit the checkout process into the field itself.
• The answer: a mobile pyrolysis unit that takes field residue, chops it up, dries it with recycled hot gas, and converts it into biochar and syngas. The syngas powers the machine, and the biochar is sent back to the soil in a leisurely merry‑go‑round.

How It Works (Plain English)

• The tractor drags the whole kit.
• A harvester feeds crop residues into a hopper.
• Stuff’s chopped, then dried using the pyrolyzer’s hot gas.
• Inside the pyrolyzer: residues turn into biochar and syngas.
• The syngas powers the machine, and the biochar gets sprinkled onto the soil.

All this in one go? That’s the beauty of the design: simplified logistics, lower cost, and an improved carbon accounting that even a chemistry teacher could brag about.

Prototypes to the Rescue

The startup has rolled out five prototypes over the past four years. The latest models pick up corn residue primarily but are versatile enough to munch rice, wheat, straw, sorghum, or sugarcane. A heavy tractor takes the load, and the unit can cover about an acre an hour—though the team is pushing to make it faster.

South‑West Expansion and Carbon Credits

With a recent $21.5 million Series A infusion, Applied Carbon is shifting from prototype to early production, building units in Houston and eyeing Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The produced biochar will store carbon, and the company has already sold offsets to corporations like Microsoft.

Future Plans: Leasing & Carbon Co‑ops

Right now the start‑up is driving the tractors. In the future, the plan is to lease or sell the equipment to farmers and help them monetize the carbon credits generated by their fields. “Getting to gigaton scale would need thousands of tractor operators—handy, but not really scalable,” Aramburu points out. “We’ll be more of a one‑stop shop, like John Deere, rather than a fleet of robots.”

Funding Round Highlights

The Series A was led by TO VC, with angel support from Anglo American, Autodesk Foundation, Congruent Ventures, and many others. Basically, a whole lot of cool investors stood behind the idea that could make farms greener. And the technology is ready for the world—just a few more pushes to scale.