Earthmover Raises $7.2M to Scale Carbon Removal Technology

Today, we are thrilled to announce that Earthmover has closed a $7.2 million seed round to accelerate the development and deployment of our carbon removal measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) platform. This funding marks a pivotal moment for our team and for the broader carbon removal ecosystem we are working to build. With this capital, we will expand our engineering and science teams, deepen our measurement infrastructure, and bring our platform to new project developers, corporate buyers, and government programs across North America and Europe.

The round was led by Lowercarbon Capital, with participation from Congruent Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and several strategic angel investors who bring deep expertise in carbon markets, environmental science, and enterprise software. We are grateful for the trust our investors have placed in the Earthmover team and in the importance of the problem we are solving. The carbon removal sector urgently needs robust, credible measurement infrastructure — and we believe that is precisely where the greatest leverage lies.

Why Measurement Is the Bottleneck

Carbon removal has emerged as a critical component of the global climate strategy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made clear that reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century will require not only deep cuts in fossil fuel use, but also the active removal of billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere annually. A growing ecosystem of carbon removal methods — direct air capture, enhanced weathering, biochar, soil carbon, ocean-based approaches, and more — is now moving from research and pilot phases toward commercial deployment.

Yet the carbon removal sector faces a fundamental trust problem. Buyers — whether corporations seeking to fulfill net-zero commitments or governments procuring carbon credits for national policy — cannot easily verify whether a claimed tonne of carbon removal is real, additional, durable, and accurately quantified. The measurement tools that project developers use today are often inconsistent, proprietary, or unverified. This creates uncertainty that depresses market prices, stifles investment, and ultimately slows the scaling of technologies the world desperately needs. Earthmover was founded to solve this problem directly.

What We Have Built

Earthmover's platform combines field measurement hardware, satellite-derived remote sensing data, and machine learning models to produce high-quality, third-party verifiable carbon accounting for removal projects. Rather than asking project developers to trust a single measurement approach or registry methodology, we integrate multiple data streams — soil sampling, LiDAR canopy analysis, flux tower measurements, and atmospheric inversions — and produce ensemble estimates with quantified uncertainty bounds. This approach dramatically raises the evidentiary standard for carbon removal claims.

Over the past eighteen months, we have deployed our platform in partnership with seven project developers spanning biochar application, enhanced rock weathering, soil organic carbon, and afforestation. In those pilots, we identified an average measurement uncertainty of plus or minus 12 percent, compared to the plus or minus 30 to 50 percent typical of standard registry methodologies. Tighter uncertainty means buyers can bid with confidence, developers can plan with precision, and regulators can trust the numbers they are working with.

How the Funding Will Be Used

The $7.2 million in seed capital will be deployed across three primary areas. First, we will invest heavily in engineering to scale our data pipeline, which currently processes tens of thousands of field measurements per month. We expect to handle millions of measurements monthly by year-end, enabling coverage across a much wider range of project types, geographies, and scales. Second, we will expand our science team to deepen our modeling capabilities for project types where measurement science is still evolving, including enhanced weathering, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and deep-sea biomass sequestration.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, we will begin building the integrations and API infrastructure that allows our measurement data to flow directly into carbon registries, corporate sustainability platforms, and government procurement systems. Carbon removal measurement cannot remain a siloed, bespoke activity — it needs to become as standardized and interoperable as financial auditing. Our goal is for Earthmover's data to become a trusted, neutral source of truth that all market participants can rely on, regardless of which registry, standard, or procurement framework they are operating within.

The Market Opportunity

The voluntary carbon market reached approximately $2 billion in transaction value in 2023, with projections from BloombergNEF and McKinsey suggesting it could grow to $50 billion or more by 2030 and potentially $250 billion by 2050, driven by net-zero corporate commitments and increasing government carbon procurement. The compliance carbon market is an order of magnitude larger. Critically, both markets are moving toward higher-quality, higher-durability carbon credits — precisely the segment where rigorous measurement infrastructure becomes a prerequisite rather than a nice-to-have.

We see a clear path toward Earthmover becoming the essential measurement infrastructure layer for the carbon removal economy, analogous to what MSCI does for ESG investment ratings or what S&P does for credit ratings — a trusted, independent, technically rigorous third party that raises market confidence and accelerates capital deployment. The network effects of this position are significant: as more project types and geographies are covered, our models improve, our data set becomes richer, and our ability to catch fraudulent or low-quality claims becomes sharper.

Our Team and Culture

Earthmover was founded in Portland, Oregon by a team that combines deep technical expertise in carbon science, remote sensing, machine learning, and climate policy. Our founders have backgrounds at NREL, NOAA, and leading climate research universities, and have spent their careers working on the hard measurement and modeling problems that underpin credible carbon accounting. We believe that intellectual rigor and speed are not in tension — careful science, when well-organized and tool-assisted, can move faster than sloppy estimation.

We are currently a team of 22 people, and with this seed funding, we plan to grow to approximately 45 by the end of 2025. We are hiring across software engineering, geospatial data science, carbon science, and enterprise sales. If you are motivated by the intersection of climate urgency, scientific integrity, and market design, we would love to hear from you. Every measurement we improve, every fraudulent claim we catch, and every buyer we give confidence to is a direct contribution to scaling the carbon removal technologies the world needs.

Key Takeaways

• Earthmover has closed a $7.2M seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital to scale its carbon removal MRV platform.
• The platform integrates field measurements, remote sensing, and machine learning to produce ensemble carbon estimates with quantified uncertainty bounds.
• Pilots with seven project developers showed average measurement uncertainty of ±12%, compared to ±30–50% for standard registry methodologies.
• Funding will be used to scale engineering infrastructure, expand the science team, and build integrations with carbon registries and corporate platforms.
• Earthmover is hiring across software engineering, geospatial science, and carbon markets as it grows from 22 to approximately 45 people by end of 2025.
• The voluntary carbon market is projected to reach $50B by 2030, with high-quality, verifiable carbon removal credits commanding significant price premiums.

Conclusion

The next decade will determine whether carbon removal scales from a niche research topic to a genuine pillar of global climate strategy. That scaling depends on trust — and trust depends on measurement. We founded Earthmover because we believe that building the best measurement platform in the world is one of the highest-leverage things a small team can do for the climate. This seed round gives us the resources to execute on that vision with speed and rigor. We are enormously grateful to our investors, our partners, our early customers, and our team for making this moment possible.

We look forward to sharing more about our technology, our science, and our progress in the months ahead. If you are a project developer, corporate buyer, government agency, or researcher working in the carbon removal space, we invite you to reach out — there has never been a better time to build the measurement foundation that the carbon removal economy needs.