Running Tide Technologies has been busy. In the past year, the Portland-based climate-tech company has scaled its operations, quadrupled its workforce, deployed a successful pilot project off the coast of Iceland, and even delivered the first carbon credits to a customer. Oh yeah, and it also quietly raised $54 million last year to make it all happen.
The company, which emerged from stealth in 2020 with the backing of some big-name VCs and a big, bold plan to use floating kelp farms to remove gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, published a blog post on Aug. 31 titled, “Killing Godzilla, 100 Tonnes of Carbon at a Time.” (Personally, I prefer the title reflected in the URL 😂)
The post details the company’s first pilot project off the coast of Iceland, which involved deploying limestone-covered buoys made of wood waste, and which serve as a growing medium for kelp, and monitoring where they floated and how much kelp they grew before they sank to the ocean floor, where they would trap the carbon for centuries. The pilot, the company says, successfully removed 275 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere and allowed it to deliver its first batch of 100 carbon credits to Shopify, its first customer. (Fast Company also covered this news.)
“This milestone is the result of a significant multi-year investment of time and money,” the post said.
In explaining how the company achieved this milestone, it mentions raising a $54 million Series B in 2022, and that a news release was drafted but never saw the light of day.
“We never pressed send. Why? Because what matters is not raising money, but how much dirt is behind your shovel. We are here to dig, because in a fight with Godzilla, that is the only thing that matters.”
Lowercarbon Capital, Chris Sacca’s New York-based firm, which invested in Running Tide’s last round in late 2019, led the Series B. Joining the round were new investors Foobar and Greenpoint Partners, as well as returning investors Grantham, Foundry Group, and Venrock.
The never-used news release says the $54 million investment represents “the largest investment in ocean-based carbon removal to date” and allowed the company to scale its operations, growing from a “30 person team in Portland, Maine, to a global team of 120.”
However, the company wants to make one thing clear: “Running Tide is not a kelp sinking company.”
When we raised our Series B eighteen months ago, the goal wasn’t to grow kelp and sink it. The goal was to build an integrated ocean operating system (OceanOS) that combines logistics, hardware, software, and Earth science to coordinate global operations of the lowest cost, highest scale carbon removal “technology” in the world – the ocean.
This isn’t the first time Running Tide has been tight lipped about its funding news. It was three years ago this month that I first broke the news that what appeared to be a traditional Maine oyster hatchery called Running Tide had almost a year prior quietly raised $11.2 million in venture capital (a number sourced from PitchBook, but never confirmed by the company). My speculations, including that Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital was an investor, were proven true a few days later when Fast Company published an exclusive on Running Tide’s initial funding.
Also an investor in that initial round was Shopify’s Sustainability Fund, which came with Shopify as the company’s first customer for carbon credits, which Running Tide CEO Marty Odlin said was a major turning point for the company.
“The dream for us was always to get into carbon removal, but that dream didn’t become real until [Shopify] stepped in and made that first opportunity available,” Odlin said in a conversation with Stacy Kauk, Shopify’s head of sustainability. “Shopify’s investment was that burst of energy that put us out into the world and allowed us to increase our orbit, ask better questions, get better answers, and consolidate all that learning into our development path.”
The company’s goal is to get to the point where it is removing one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) annually.
