Cotierra raises $3m to take decentralised biochar from field pilots to commercial scale
PINC, the venture arm of Finnish food group Paulig, and Carbon Removal Partners co-lead the round for the Zurich company that puts its reactors next
Cotierra, a Zurich-based climate technology company, announced a $3 million funding round on 29 September 2026. PINC, the venture arm of the Finnish food and beverage group Paulig, and Carbon Removal Partners co-led the round. Zürcher Kantonalbank, Carbon Drawdown Initiative, better ventures, GOTA Ventures, Hungry4Impact and Triple Impact Ventures also took part, alongside climate and impact-focused angel investors. The round takes the company's total raised to roughly $4.75 million.
The product pairs hardware with measurement. Cotierra sites decentralised reactors where agricultural residue accumulates, converts that residue into biochar locally and returns it to the soil, where it is intended to improve soil health and reduce fertiliser use while holding carbon. An IoT layer monitors production and feeds verification, so a batch carries a record rather than an estimate. On its own site the company says its verification is validated by Carbon Standards International.
Coffee is the first value chain. Cotierra has been working through coffee supply chains and now plans to extend the same system into cocoa, cotton and citrus. The buyer is the agricultural business that owns the residue rather than the individual grower, which places the purchasing decision with the trader or processor. Proceeds are earmarked for the step from field deployments to what the company describes as repeatable commercial scale.
“We have shown that decentralised biochar offers a highly effective pathway to decarbonise and strengthen tropical agricultural value chains where biomass is widely dispersed,” said Thomas Käslin, chief executive and co-founder. The syndicate mixes a strategic food-industry investor with dedicated carbon-removal capital, a Swiss cantonal bank and a set of specialist climate and impact funds. At $3 million the round is sized for commercial proof rather than for a build-out.
What this means for AgTech founders: three choices in this round are worth copying. First, the unit is small on purpose. Centralised pyrolysis needs biomass hauled to it, and haulage is what breaks the economics when residue sits in thousands of scattered lots, so shrinking the reactor until it can travel to the residue converts a logistics problem into a deployment problem. Second, the hardware is not the product. Carbon that cannot be verified is carbon nobody pays for, so the monitoring and verification layer is what turns a pile of char into a sellable outcome, and it is the part a competitor cannot copy off a datasheet. Third, look at who signs. Selling to a trader or roaster that already owns the residue, carries the supply-chain emissions and wants the soil benefit inside its own sourcing base is a much shorter sale than selling carbon economics to a smallholder. If you are building hardware for dispersed agriculture, the question is less how big the machine should be and more whose balance sheet it sits on.
Cotierra raises $3m to take decentralised biochar from field pilots to commercial scale
PINC, the venture arm of Finnish food group Paulig, and Carbon Removal Partners co-lead the round for the Zurich company that puts its reactors next to the coffee residue they consume.
Cotierra, a Zurich-based climate technology company, announced a $3 million funding round on 29 September 2026. PINC, the venture arm of the Finnish food and beverage group Paulig, and Carbon Removal Partners co-led the round. Zürcher Kantonalbank, Carbon Drawdown Initiative, better ventures, GOTA Ventures, Hungry4Impact and Triple Impact Ventures also took part, alongside climate and impact-focused angel investors. The round takes the company's total raised to roughly $4.75 million.
The product pairs hardware with measurement. Cotierra sites decentralised reactors where agricultural residue accumulates, converts that residue into biochar locally and returns it to the soil, where it is intended to improve soil health and reduce fertiliser use while holding carbon. An IoT layer monitors production and feeds verification, so a batch carries a record rather than an estimate. On its own site the company says its verification is validated by Carbon Standards International.
Coffee is the first value chain. Cotierra has been working through coffee supply chains and now plans to extend the same system into cocoa, cotton and citrus. The buyer is the agricultural business that owns the residue rather than the individual grower, which places the purchasing decision with the trader or processor. Proceeds are earmarked for the step from field deployments to what the company describes as repeatable commercial scale.
“We have shown that decentralised biochar offers a highly effective pathway to decarbonise and strengthen tropical agricultural value chains where biomass is widely dispersed,” said Thomas Käslin, chief executive and co-founder. The syndicate mixes a strategic food-industry investor with dedicated carbon-removal capital, a Swiss cantonal bank and a set of specialist climate and impact funds. At $3 million the round is sized for commercial proof rather than for a build-out.
What this means for AgTech founders: three choices in this round are worth copying. First, the unit is small on purpose. Centralised pyrolysis needs biomass hauled to it, and haulage is what breaks the economics when residue sits in thousands of scattered lots, so shrinking the reactor until it can travel to the residue converts a logistics problem into a deployment problem. Second, the hardware is not the product. Carbon that cannot be verified is carbon nobody pays for, so the monitoring and verification layer is what turns a pile of char into a sellable outcome, and it is the part a competitor cannot copy off a datasheet. Third, look at who signs. Selling to a trader or roaster that already owns the residue, carries the supply-chain emissions and wants the soil benefit inside its own sourcing base is a much shorter sale than selling carbon economics to a smallholder. If you are building hardware for dispersed agriculture, the question is less how big the machine should be and more whose balance sheet it sits on.
