The Direct Air Capture industry is contracting. Investment in the technology, which is designed to suck carbon out of the air, has dropped by more than 60% from its peak in 2022. The Trump administration has cancelled tens of millions in federal funding for the tech. Customers are prioritizing other, more affordable climate projects. Dozens of DAC startups that have made important advancements are “running out of runway,” according to Jason Hochman.
Hochman would know. For the past four years, he ran the Direct Air Capture Coalition, an industry association. Now, he’s stepping down from the role of advocate and into the role of entrepreneur, launching his own company in order to preserve DAC startups’ valuable innovations, data, and learnings before they disappear.
“A lot of the progress that they’ve made, a lot of the R&D, a lot of the innovation that has been hard-won over the past several years is at risk of being lost because of this shift in external factors,” Hochman told me.
His company, Ctrl-S — a reference to the keyboard command for saving a file — plans to acquire intellectual property, experimental data, and engineering knowledge from distressed DAC companies. It will assemble the assets into a library, making them available to “better positioned companies that can further develop, improve, and deploy the technology,” or at the very least, make use of the data, Hochman said.
Ctrl-S has at least three potential revenue streams — annual subscription sales for access to the library, licensing fees for the IP, and, in the medium-to-longer term, royalties tied to the tech developed from those licenses.
Hochman has several different customers in mind. The library could be useful to the remaining, more stable DAC companies who might find some other startup had developed a solution to a problem they are struggling with, or a more efficient way of accomplishing some part of the process. Large energy companies with more capital to actually deploy DAC, like the Occidentals of the world, could gain access to pre-vetted tech.
The library could also help catalyze innovations in entirely different industries. Direct air capture systems contain several different components, like the “air contactor,” the mechanism that draws air into the system, and the “sorbent,” the proprietary material that captures carbon molecules. Phil De Luna, the former chief scientist for the DAC development company Deep Sky and a member of Ctrl-S’ expert review committee, told me these components could have applications in other processes that involve separating gases. He gave the example of hydrogen gas that’s trapped underground. “It's often mixed with other gasses underground. These air contactors that are used in DAC, could they be repurposed to separate hydrogen from natural gas or other gas impurities underground?”
Another market Hochman thinks the library could serve is AI-driven material science development. The startups working on materials discovery need experimental data to train their models, he said, and a lot of what is available elsewhere is the data behind success stories. “What they don't have access to is the negative learnings.”
The Ctrl-S team has a process to “diligence” the IP it acquires, looking at the technoeconomics, the life-cycle analysis of the carbon removed by the process, and its commercial potential. The company will not only conduct these reviews for the systems as a whole, but for the key components like the sorbent and air contactor. The process will distinguish between companies that were victims of circumstance and those that failed because their tech didn’t work as promised. Both can be of use.
“The stuff that didn't work can be valuable in saving folks time, energy, and resources going down the same dead ends,” Hochman said.
His founding team also includes Nicole Williams, the former IP Lead for Climeworks, the largest and most successful DAC startup in the industry, and Silvan Aeschlimann, who was previously a DAC and carbon removal lead for the clean energy research nonprofit RMI.
There’s some precedent for what Hochman is doing. In the early 2000s, in the wake of the Dot Com bubble bursting, funding for startups dried up and many began to fail. A group of former Microsoft executives started a company called Intellectual Ventures which bought up a lot of those startups’ IP. “Similarly, our concept was that it would be available to larger companies,” Edward Jung, one of the co-founders who now serves as an advisor to Intellectual Ventures, told me.
Jung said the actual uptake and development of the IP by larger companies was less than what he and his partners had hoped. “I'm actually more bullish now, in this thesis that you talk about, because I think AI is going to unlock a lot of complex technologies that will be hard for larger companies to ignore,” he told me when I described Ctrl-S to him. “The ability for AI to go through a lot of different options in a way that humans have difficulty going through opens a lot of opportunities for new materials. So I do think maybe the thesis is better now than it was back when we did it.”
Intellectual Ventures’ trajectory ended up being quite controversial. It was accused of patent-trolling — buying up tens of thousands of patents and then suing companies for infringing on them. But it also used the patent revenue to fund a successful tech incubator called IV Labs that spun out promising companies, like Terrapower, the advanced nuclear startup.
Ctrl-S is still in very early stages. It’s in the process of closing its first two acquisitions, with a “handful of others in the pipeline,” Hochman told me. He’s actively fundraising for a seed round targeting $2.5 million. If all goes according to plan, he hopes to eventually diversify into other types of climate tech.
The European CCS boom. Chart: IEA