The Brief

The Brief: Mati Carbon scales up soil-based carbon removal

ImpactAlpha · May 15, 2025

Greetings Agents of Impact!

In today’s Brief:

Mati Carbon secures debt financing to remove carbon and restore soils
Lending for value chains and economic clusters in Africa
Repurposing church property as community economic hubs
Calvert Impact and Innovative Finance Network on retooling impact investing

Featured: Carbon Removal

Mati Carbon leverages its $50 million XPRIZE to remove carbon and support farmers in tropical zones. What’s the first thing you would do after winning a $50 million prize for your promising solution for carbon removal and soil health? For Mati Carbon, the answer is: Raise more money. Last month, the Houston-based startup won the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, taking home the $50 million grand prize backed by Elon Musk’s foundation for its “enhanced rock weathering,” or ERW, process that sequesters carbon in soil and improves soil health using pulverized rock additives. This week, Mati Carbon arranged a debt facility from JPMorgan to fund its carbon removal projects in India, Zambia and Tanzania. With the XPRIZE grant funding, Mati Carbon is piloting projects in new geographies; with the debt facility, it will scale proven projects and sell carbon credits to corporate buyers. “We want the risk to be taken on by the grant money, which will fail, and succeed,” Mati Carbon founder Shantanu Agarwal tells ImpactAlpha. “And once that’s done, to bring other funders along to scale up.” The partnership with JPMorgan, he adds, “allows us to have a facility that can be planetary in scale.” Mati’s goal is to reach 100 million farmers.

High-quality credits. With global emissions still rising, removing carbon is a necessary and potentially lucrative business. In carbon markets, credits based on carbon removed from the atmosphere can fetch up to several hundred dollars per ton from buyers eager to offset their environmental footprints. That’s in contrast to the bulk of credits available today for merely avoiding carbon emissions, which fetch less than $10 per ton in voluntary carbon markets (for background see, “Corporate buyers nudge voluntary carbon markets toward higher-quality projects”). Mechanized carbon removal, Agarwals believes, is years away from scalability. “It requires a lot of energy, and until you have sufficient excess renewable energy to power it, there’s no point using a machine that has to be powered by fossil fuels to remove carbon,” he says. Nature-based solutions like Mati Carbon’s are far less energy-intensive and can have significant co-benefits, like restoring soil health.
Farmers first. Agarwal is eyeing a franchise model, with technology licensed from Mati Carbon’s nonprofit and each franchisee raising debt and equity as needed. Each social enterprise offshoot will be required to share 50% of its carbon credit proceeds with farmers. “I started this with a specific purpose: this is for the farmer first, and carbon removal second,” Agarwal says. That approach inadvertently strengthened the business case for investing in the most vulnerable farmers. “We found that the most destitute farmers typically have the most degraded soils, and that’s where ERW happens the fastest, which means faster creation of carbon credits,” he explains (for more see, “How Mati Carbon is using carbon markets to address farmers’ adaptation finance gap and boost their incomes”). As Agarwal was speaking to ImpactAlpha, he had just closed out a day “digging for rocks” and assessing market potential in central Vietnam. “The reason I’m on the ground right now myself is to figure out where to go, to look at the rock, to have conversations with farmers,” he says. “But once the technology is proven, we want third parties to take it and scale it.”
Keep reading, “Mati Carbon leverages its $50 million XPRIZE to remove carbon and support farmers in tropical zones,” by Jessica Pothering on ImpactAlpha.

Dealflow: Private Credit

BluePeak Private Capital secures $80 million for its second African credit fund. The Tunisian asset manager lends to underserved small businesses in Africa’s growth markets. BluePeak Private Capital Fund II will invest in businesses in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, logistics and financial services that support local value chains. BluePeak raised $80 million toward a $250 million target from European development finance institutions, including British International Investment, FMO, Swedfund and the Swiss Investment Fund for Emerging Markets. Funding from the DFIs “plays a critical catalytic role in mobilising the capital needed to close the significant funding gap across the continent,” said BluePeak’s Walid Cherif.

Local resilience. BluePeak has raised $240 million since it launched in 2019. It backed eight portfolio companies in its first fund, including Africure Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures affordable medicines in Cameroon, Namibia, Botswana and Côte d’Ivoire; and Dubai-based Suhara Group, a logistics company operating across Africa.
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ChurchSpace raises $1.2 million to repurpose churches as economic hubs. As children of pastors, Day Edwards and Emmanuel Brown saw firsthand how churches struggle to make ends meet, especially amid declining attendance. The pair started ChurchSpace to help churches develop new income streams by offering underutilized spaces, including kitchens and fellowship halls, for social enterprises and community uses (for background see, “Surplus church properties in Canada get new life as community hubs and affordable housing”). The company has secured $1.2 million in equity funding led by Black Ops Ventures, with participation from Dug Song of Minor Capital and Michigan Rise. The company, said Brown, is building “toward a future where the Church isn’t just surviving but leading community transformation.”

Motor City. The Houston-born startup moved its headquarters to Detroit, where it is working with the city to activate church properties as flexible-use spaces, such as pop-ups, event venues, micro-logistics hubs, and last-mile delivery centers for local businesses addressing food insecurity. In Texas, some churches on the platform have earned up to $100,000 annually, reinvesting the income into ministries, food programs and other initiatives. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said ChurchSpace’s arrival will help houses of worship “continue to be anchors of opportunity and resilience in our city’s future.”
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Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has reportedly raised $1 billion in an extension of its Series B round to support the buildout of its demonstration fusion power reactor. (Axios)
University of Wisconsin spinout Realta raised $36 million for its modular magnetic mirror fusion technology. The Series A round was led by Future Ventures, alongside Mayfield, Avila VC, GSBackers, Khosla Ventures and other investors. (Realta)
London-based wealth manager Tribe Impact Capital acquired Snowball Impact Management to enable Tribe to meet “accelerating demand” for private and public impact investments. (Tribe)

Impact Voices: Rethinking Impact Investing

Doing better. Some of impact investing’s most seasoned practitioners are getting impatient. “Our work is not delivering results at the speed our local, national and global conditions require,” writes Jenn Pryce of Calvert Impact in a guest post. Innovative Finance Network’s Aunnie Patton Power and Doughnut Economics Action Lab’s Erinch Sahan put it more bluntly: “The tools we have developed as a field have largely failed to scale or radically change traditional financial market architecture.” What’s next? In separate guest posts, these Agents of Impact advocate for new designs for impact funds, and the broader market shaping needed to take impact investing forward. Share your thoughts on what’s needed.

Calvert Impact’s market-shaping strategy for the future of impact. Impact investors need to become capital market shapers, says Pryce. “We need to move from doing deals to making markets; from building funds to building market-shaping institutions that don’t just invest in underserved communities but are committed to shaping how capital flows more freely to them,” she argues. Calvert has a track record of overcoming market limitations. During the Covid pandemic, it worked with partners to structure liquidity solutions for community lenders to free up more capital to make small business loans. Calvert created Cut Carbon Notes, an asset-backed retail product, to fund broad-based building decarbonization. And it built a market-making strategy via Climate United to leverage a once-in-a-lifetime federal government investment in clean energy adoption. Calvert, says Pryce, “is now shifting our strategic focus and operations to become the most effective capital markets shaper we can be.”

Market-shaping. Pryce sees opportunity for intermediation to expand shared ownership investment models, to unlock capital for community banks and lenders, and facilitate the flow of capital to affordable, high-quality childcare. She calls on the impact field to join her in moving “from bespoke deals and funds, to aggregating and standardizing assets to enable them to reach sufficient scale to be served by the mainstream capital markets.” Such a shift will require taking early risks, often with public or philanthropic support, and forging partnerships across and outside of the industry. “This is our collective calling over the next decade: to create and back institutions that have the intentionality and flexibility to forge capital markets that can better share our prosperity.”
Read Pryce’s full post.

Innovative Finance Initiative’s fund designs for radical impact. Traditional legal, capital and investment structures, like venture capital and private equity and debt funds, may restrict a fund manager’s ability to have deep impact, write Patton Power and Sahan. Alternative options: Permanent capital vehicles, open-ended funds, holding companies, nonprofit vehicles, crowdfunding, rolling funds, and innovative syndication models. Patton Power and Sahan this week launched the Innovative Finance Initiative “to map, connect and convene those embracing Impact Investing 3.0,” including family offices and foundations, impact management, tax, legal and structuring experts, fund managers and ecosystem builders.

Design thinking. Patton Power and Sahan outline five components of fund design: purpose, structure, incentives, governance and exits. They cite The Purpose Fund’s steward ownership model, Fair Capital Partners’ evergreen structure, Citizenfund’s cooperative governance, Prime Coalition’s impact-linked compensation, and Apis & Heritage’s employee-ownership exits as examples of how intentional fund construction deepens impact. “Design determines who gets funded, what strategies are viable, and ultimately, whether impact ambitions are achieved,” they write.
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Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Clean Energy Ventures taps David Meyer, previously with MassChallenge, as community manager… Renovous Capital Partners welcomes Phil Garbarini, an MBA student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, as an Impact Capital Managers mosaic fellow… The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is recruiting an intern in London… Earthjustice is looking for a senior foundations officer in San Francisco… Align Impact seeks an advisor in New York or Denver.

Hamilton Community Foundation has an opening for a director of social finance investments in Ontario… National Wealth Fund is on the hunt for a principal impact analyst in the UK… Full Circle Communities is searching for a mission impact portfolio manager in Michigan… The New York City Comptroller’s Office is hiring a senior climate finance officer… Enable Ventures, Strada Education Foundation and SmartJob will host the 2025 Disability Innovation Forum, Thursday, Sept. 18 in Washington, DC.