Dive Brief:
- Bio-waste carbon removal startup Vaulted Deep announced Monday that it had secured $35 million in debt financing, supported by the company’s long-term carbon removal deals and waste servicing agreements.
- Vaulted Deep will use the funding to expand its operations across the U.S., according to a Monday press release. Italian investment bank Mediobanca Group will provide the debt facility, which was arranged by United Kingdom-based investment and trading firm CFP Energy, the release said.
- The debt financing adds to the $56 million the company has previously received in equity and awards. Carbon removal contracts with Frontier Climate buyers — including Google, Stripe and others — were used to help secure the financing.
Dive Insight:
Vaulted Deep said in the release that the debt facility is “the largest publicly disclosed U.S. commercial debt deal in durable carbon removal to be secured by long-term purchase contracts.” Frontier Climate — whose members also include Shopify, Meta, JPMorgan Chase and, most recently, Anthropic — signed a $58.3 million deal with Vaulted Deep in 2024 to have the company remove 152,480 tons of carbon dioxide for its buyers between 2024 and 2027.
Vaulted Deep, which initially spun out of industrial waste management company Advantek, uses a bio-waste removal technology to turn organic waste and biomass into a carbon-dense slurry that is then injected deep into disposal wells for permanent storage, according to its website. Feedstocks for the carbon removal company include food waste, paper sludge, manure, agricultural byproducts and biosolids that otherwise would end up in landfills, wastewater treatment and manure management facilities and contribute to methane emissions.
Vaulted Deep Co-founder and CEO Julia Reichelstein called the debt facility “a meaningful milestone” for the company. The carbon removal company uses a proprietary artificial intelligence-powered tool to help discover sites and work through the permitting process, and the company said the funding will help the company advance more projects through that platform.
“Waste operators across the country need new options as traditional disposal options become limited,” Reichelstein said in the release. “This financing lets us take on more projects and invest in the tools that help us evaluate and develop new sites faster.”
Vaulted Deep said in the release that it delivered 20,000 tons of carbon removals to Frontier buyers just in the first half of 2026, which it said was “more than the total amount delivered in 2025.” The company said its use of Frontier contracts to help secure additional funding “demonstrates how such contracts can help companies borrow from mainstream lenders to build physical infrastructure.”
Frontier operates under a theory of change that market commitments that show robust demand for carbon removal will help companies raise the financing required to expand their businesses, and the Vaulted Deep financing “is a great example of this theory in practice,” Frontier spokesperson Hannah Bebbington Valori said in the release.
In addition to the debt facility financing announced Monday, Vaulted Deep has raised $48 million in equity funding and received $8 million as the second-runner-up in the 2025 XPrize Carbon removal competition. Last year, the company also announced deals with Frontier Climate member Google to remove 50,000 metric tons of CO2 by 2030 and another with Microsoft to remove 4.9 million metric tons of CO2 by 2038 for the tech giants.
Its agreements with the tech giants have allowed the business to expand, Reichelstein previously told ESG Dive sister publication Waste Dive. Vaulted Deep currently has injection well sites in California, operational since 2008, and Kansas, which opened in 2023. The company also has plans for a new facility in Weld County, Colorado, to come online in 2027.
