Brazilian startup Mombak has secured $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from existing investors Kaszek, Bain Capital, and AXA IM Alts, as well as new backers Lowercarbon Capital and Copa Investimentos.
This funding will support Mombak’s mission to restore degraded farmland in the Amazon rainforest using native species and generate carbon credits for companies seeking to offset their greenhouse gas emissions, according to Reuters.
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Since its founding in 2021 by Gabriel Silva, former CFO of Nubank, and Peter Fernandez, former CEO of 99, Mombak has planted 5 million native trees across 45,000 acres, an area three times the size of Manhattan, Reuters writes. The company aims to reach 8 million trees planted by June.
“We are moving from startup to scale-up,” co-founder Gabriel Silva told Reuters. “We decided it was time to have a new capital round to invest in this new phase: taking our initial business and doing it in a much larger scale.”
Mombak’s approach involves acquiring or partnering with owners of degraded Amazon land to restore native vegetation, generating carbon credits that companies can purchase to offset their emissions. This model not only helps in carbon sequestration but also contributes to biodiversity and ecosystem restoration in the Amazon.
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According to Reuters, Mombak has already signed $150 million worth of carbon removal offtake contracts and expects that number to quadruple within the next year. Major companies such as Google, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Meta (NASDAQ:META), and McLaren Racing have already committed to purchasing credits from Mombak, a sign that big tech is taking nature-based carbon removal seriously, Reuters writes.
Google recently agreed to buy 50,000 metric tons of carbon credits from Mombak by 2030, marking its first carbon removal partnership in South America. Microsoft, ahead of the curve, also signed a contract in 2023 to purchase up to 1.5 million carbon credits from Mombak. Meta has also pledged support through its participation in the Symbiosis Coalition, a group that includes Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce, which committed to contracting up to 20 million tons of nature-based carbon removal credits by 2030, according to Reuters.
