Biochar Industrial Group (BIG), a Nigerian climate technology company, has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding to expand its industrial-scale carbon removal business across Sub-Saharan Africa.
The funding, led by BREEGA with participation from The Catalyst Fund, will enable BIG to deepen partnerships with food-processing factories and deploy its Biochar-as-a-Service model, converting agricultural waste into carbon removal products while creating additional revenue streams for processors.
The Mulago Foundation also provided non-dilutive funding as part of the financing.
BIG is targeting the intersection of three growing challenges in Africa’s food and agricultural economy: industrial waste, carbon emissions and declining soil quality.
Africa generates an estimated one billion tonnes of non-edible agricultural biomass annually, including nut shells, cobs, husks and stalks. Much of this waste has little or no commercial value and can release carbon dioxide when left to decompose.
At the same time, agricultural soils across the continent are facing increasing pressure from intensive cultivation and the use of synthetic fertilisers, contributing to nutrient depletion and declining productivity.
BIG’s model is designed to turn this waste problem into an industrial input.
The company partners directly with food processors to install continuous pyrolysis systems at factory sites. The technology heats agricultural biomass at temperatures above 600°C in an oxygen-deprived environment, converting the waste into biochar while locking away carbon for hundreds to thousands of years.
The resulting carbon removal can generate independently auditable carbon removal credits, while the biochar can be returned to agricultural value chains as a soil amendment.
The company said its approach allows food factories to transform what would otherwise be a disposal liability into a potential source of shared revenue.
By co-locating pyrolysis units within food-processing facilities and staffing them locally, BIG also aims to reduce logistics costs, create technical jobs in rural communities and return biochar to farms through existing agribusiness supply chains.
The company said its technology has been modified to accommodate local feedstocks and operating conditions.
Biochar could have particular relevance for Africa’s tropical and acidic soils, where the soil amendment can improve soil health and agricultural productivity.
In controlled field trials, plots treated with BIG’s biochar recorded yield increases of up to 50 percent, according to the company.
‘Africa has natural advantages to lead the most scalable and cost effective biomass-based carbon removal globally,’ said Ikenna Nzewi, CEO of Biochar Industrial Group.
‘By forming true win-win partnerships with agricultural processors to produce biochar, we have the opportunity to turn localised waste liabilities into a transformative global solution.’
The investment also represents a bet on the growing market for durable carbon removal, as companies and investors increasingly look beyond conventional emissions reduction towards technologies capable of permanently removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Tosin Faniro-Dada, partner at BREEGA, said BIG had developed an approach capable of converting an industrial waste challenge into repeatable, audit-grade carbon credits.
She said the founding team’s previous experience operating industrial infrastructure was central to the investment decision.
The founders – Nzewi, Uzoma Ayogu and Isaiah Udotong, previously spent nearly a decade building industrial agricultural infrastructure through Releaf Earth, a Y Combinator-backed agro-processing company.
At Releaf Earth, the team developed patented nut-cracking machinery, operated four industrial factories and built supply chains involving thousands of smallholder farmers.
That experience is now being transferred to the carbon removal industry, where the founders are seeking to combine industrial operations with carbon markets and agricultural productivity.
‘We’re proud to back them as they scale that same execution discipline into carbon removal at a continental scale,’ Faniro-Dada said.
Oluwatoyin Emmanuel-Olubake, Chief Investment Officer at Catalyst Fund, said the investment was driven by BIG’s ability to address multiple challenges facing agribusinesses through a single business model.
‘We invested in BIG because it developed an innovative approach to solve multiple problems for agribusinesses critical to African and global economic growth with a single, self-reinforcing model,’ Emmanuel-Olubake said.
She acknowledged that the company remains at an early stage, with execution risks, but said its model is grounded in the operational realities of factories and farms and supported by growing demand for durable carbon removal.