• Andes

  Participated · Series A · Mar 2023

  Andes develops beneficial microorganisms that grow with plant roots to capture carbon dioxide and convert it into minerals in the ground, providing a high‑permanence carbon removal solution. The company deploys its technology across working farmland without disrupting existing agricultural practices and reports having removed more than 50,000 tonnes of CO2 to date. Andes has partnered with farmers across the Midwest on 25,000 acres and says enrolling in its Carbon Removal Program can increase farmers' net income by up to 25%. The company also reports a 3X increase in farmer interest this year. In parallel with carbon removal, Andes is developing biological nitrogen technology that integrates with seeds. Andes plans to use the new funding to expand partnerships with farmers, continue developing its microorganism technology, and make its carbon removal credits available to organizations of all sizes. Andes develops a seed-applied microbial technology called Microprime that integrates a library of microbes with seeds so they colonize roots and enable biological nitrogen fixation, reducing reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. The company’s first-generation Microprime-treated corn seeds deliver the equivalent of 30 to 50 lbs/acre of nitrogen; Andes is developing second-generation microbes aimed at roughly doubling that amount. Andes is also engineering microbial strains intended for nature-based permanent carbon capture to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere into soil, initially focusing on microbial-powered corn crops with the potential for gigaton-scale capture if deployed at scale. The technology is positioned as a scalable, grower-facing solution that can save time and input costs while lowering agriculture’s greenhouse-gas footprint; the article notes synthetic fertilizers account for roughly 3% (1.5 gigatons) of global emissions. Andes plans to scale its self-sustaining, nitrogen-fixing seeds across the U.S., expand into South America, and continue R&D on its carbon-capture technology funded by the recent investment. No operating revenue or user metrics are reported in the article.

No current team members are available.