The Carbon Removal XPRIZE has been a major focal point of the CDR industry for years. And Mati Carbon just won the $50M Grand Prize. How did they do it, and how did their surprising and counterintuitive approach to enhanced rock weathering win over so many other contestants?
Shantanu Agarwal is the Founder and CEO of Mati Carbon, and he's on the show today to discuss how the various novel ways they went to market against the advice of others all added up to being an XPRIZE winner.
Sometimes being mission-driven means breaking all of the other rules!
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Before we begin, I’d like to share a few words from our sponsor, Arbonics. Thank you, Arbonics, for sponsoring Reversing Climate Change. You helped make this show possible. I’m so grateful to you and you deserve it. I don’t like taking sponsorship from people whose companies I just don’t believe in, I don’t want to work with. And thankfully I don’t have to, because there are companies like Arbonics who are willing to come and support Reversing Climate Change. If you don’t know about them, they’re doing amazing forestry projects in the Baltic states in Europe.
Europe has over 14 million hectares of underused land. A lot of it’s abandoned or low quality, not a lot is happening on it. It used to be forest, but it was cleared for farming as farming intensified. And then a lot of that farmland was later abandoned as the global food system moved towards lower cost producers. The land just wasn’t worth tending, and certainly not tending in a way that we would respect as a regenerative and carbon sequestering process. It was just underutilized, maybe unloved.
Arbonics uses technology to help landowners even find this land, and once they do have it, how to restore it back into carbon removing, biodiverse forest. If you care about carbon being removed and you want to see Europe return to the forested continent that it once was, you should be looking at Arbonics. Go talk to them. I had Lisett Luik, their founder, on the podcast. The link is in the show notes if you’d like to listen to it. We talk about a lot of the tricky issues that surround durability and carbon removal and how does forestry fit in. It’s a very thoughtful episode. I really like talking to her.
They made it really easy to pitch Arbonics on doing some business together because I want to see their work be successful, restoring biodiversity and making forestry, especially good forestry, profitable again. Man, that is a game changer and so important if you can pull it off. Thank you again, Arbonics. The link to check out Arbonics’ website is in the show notes. You should listen to the show if you haven’t heard it already that I do with Lisett. It will teach you quite a lot about how they think and what they’re doing. And now we will fade back into the rest of the show. Thank you for listening. Here it is.
Hey, thanks for listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m a carbon removal entrepreneur, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with my friend Shantanu Agarwal, founder and CEO of Mati Carbon. You may know Mati because they just won the grand prize of the Carbon Removal XPRIZE, funded by the Musk Foundation. That’s right, the Musk Foundation, as in Elon Musk — $50 million. It’s a really big deal in carbon removal. Essentially everyone in the entire space applied for it, and Mati won the grand prize.
We discuss all the mechanics of the award and what Mati does, and that’s all, you know, to be expected of a podcast about a company and an entrepreneur. But something to keep in mind here that I think is really interesting is when we talk about when should one believe in one’s vision and when should one ditch that vision. Especially when you’re doing things in a way that are so divergent from what people think will work. When you believe that what you want to do will work and no one else does. If you’re right, then you are just in a fantastic position, but if you’re wrong, then you’re just another crackpot, essentially.
So Shantanu was someone who did things in a number of less conventional ways that took big swings at how to structure a company. The relationship of a nonprofit to the public benefit corporation, working with smallholder farmers in difficult geographies, is another one of those things where you just multiply all these things together and it potentially looks like difficulty. And it does not look like a simple or trivial or even straightforward go to market. And yet somehow it all worked out, all pulled together towards something that was a worthy recipient of the $50 million grand prize at the Carbon Removal XPRIZE.
I think the question for entrepreneurs, or essentially anyone embarking upon any major undertaking, whether it’s in business or anything else, is to ask: is there a chance that it is the world that is right and I am wrong? And unfortunately, I don’t have great advice for how to make this decision. In fact, I basically plied Shantanu for his advice for it, because he took an asymmetric bet and it ended up working out for him. Because essentially, as it turns out, in life and in business, so much of this is wisdom and knowing your own heart, your own mind, why you’re making the decisions you’re making, and are you doing them for the right reasons or not.
It’s funny, the longer that I do this, the less focused I am on very specific business mechanics and commercial strategy. And so much more of this comes down to what I used to see as very hippie-dippie, kind of new agey, emotionally intelligent work. Because so much of this is just making sure you’re doing things for the right reason, understanding yourself, understanding how to relate to others. And there is essentially no substitute that I’ve found the longer I talk with so many founders. I work with lots and lots of startups. And it’s surprising, or maybe not surprising at all, how many conversations just come back to the emotional core of life and how to know those things and what is actually happening inside of one’s mind and inside of one’s body at a given moment.
So as you can listen, you will hear me try to pump Shantanu’s wisdom out of him. And it’s very hard to distill that information. It’s hard to articulate. The best you can do is to live that wisdom and hope it rubs off on people culturally in the right kinds of ways. I don’t always succeed in it. I certainly haven’t been great at this my entire career. It’s like learning. This was a pretty painful process for me. And I’m starting to wrap my head around it more. But I will point you to this section in the podcast. I think it’s an important one to listen to, in addition to all of the amazing progress of what Mati is doing in East Africa and India. It’s amazing work, super fascinating.
And also, hey, there’s bonus content to today’s show too. I asked Shantanu about some of the trade-offs of using silicate versus carbonate rocks and some of the questions around soil water measurement within enhanced weathering right now. So if you want some of those inside baseball, nerdy enhanced rock weathering questions, there’s bonus content — for 5 bucks a month you can get access to ad-free listening. So you’ll still hear your sponsorships at the beginning of the show that I read, but all of the programmatic stuff from Spotify will be taken out for you. You’ll just have a straightforward listening experience. And there’s bonus content, like if you want that detailed enhanced rock weathering content from Shantanu and I, that will exist. $5 a month, link in the show notes.
There’s also the ability to leave a great rating and review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. If you would do that, I’d be very grateful. But in any case, that’s enough prelude. I hope you enjoy this conversation with the grand prize winner of the Carbon Removal XPRIZE. Here it is. Shantanu, thanks for being here with me.
Shantanu Agarwal: Thanks, Ross. Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: I try not to bury the lede, so we should probably just start with XPRIZE. Mati is the grand prize winner of the Carbon Removal XPRIZE. What was that like? Both the winning and the entire process leading up to it.
Shantanu Agarwal: Well, it’s truly an honor. I mean, this is not something which you can plan for. It’s not something which you can hope for even. We were all just part of the process. There were some phenomenal competitors and colleagues. We’re all developing great technologies and we are all fortunate to be part of this amazing process of XPRIZE, which really created an industry in some ways. You know, I mean, 1,300 contestants in carbon removal couldn’t even have been thought of when I started in CDR. I mean, I started in 2018 and worked my way up through developing a DAC company and then moving to enhanced rock weathering.
So I mean, 2018, 2019, there were like two handfuls, three handfuls of companies in the whole world doing CDR. Very, very few companies. And then this whole wave of CDR happened, and there’s still a lot of economic and market things which have to break our way and sort of solve for. But the science and the technology has really come a long way, and lots of amazing technologies exist today because of XPRIZE. And I think it’s a testament to our team effort and our science, our collaborating scientists, our partners, our university partners, our vendors — all these people have kind of come together to really be able to deliver a system which was not only robust, scientifically valid and competent, but also working in a very difficult part of the world to deliver these kind of high quality credits.
So we feel very proud and we feel it’s truly, truly an honor. And we also congratulate all the other competitors who came along the way. And there were also, I mean, five other winners along with us and a lot of top 20 or top 100 companies who are developing phenomenal technologies here.
Ross Kenyon: An amazing accomplishment. And the prize was funded by the Musk Foundation, which I think maybe five years ago wouldn’t have surprised anyone, but it might be maybe more surprising now in hindsight. Was that process noteworthy in any way? Did you end up having any interaction with the Musk Foundation or Elon himself? Was that pretty separate? Was he busy at the time?
Shantanu Agarwal: And so we didn’t get much interaction from Musk Foundation. We are obviously very thankful to Musk Foundation to have won this prize, because this prize had such an influential effect on the industry. And I think it’s a great thing. Wish they did. And the only thing I saw from Elon Musk is when Peter Diamandis posted on Twitter that we were the winner, he responded with a “cool.” So that’s all I have seen from Elon Musk. I’ve not had any direct communication with it.
Ross Kenyon: Well, it is cool, so it’s not nothing, correct?
Shantanu Agarwal: It is very deep, by the way. It not only compliments, but we are cooling the world. So, yeah, we are removing the carbon. So it’s got multiple, multiple layers there. It’s very deep.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, true yet pedantic. And it works. So I’m glad to hear it. Yeah. Why you of everyone? I mean, look, it’s an absolute, you know, like, killer’s gallery here of the best of the best of CDR minds. It’s a really impressive list of both the finalists, semifinalists, like everyone who made it that far out of 1,300 companies — like, they’re serious people. So why you and why Mati? How did that happen? What do you think led to you being chosen as potentially the most catalytic person and organization in carbon removal?
Shantanu Agarwal: So obviously I’m the prettiest, that’s why. Or maybe the craziest. No, I don’t know. I don’t think so. None of those things, actually. What I’ve been told by Nikki and Mitch and all these guys who are part of the process is that we had a better solution, which had a better LCA and a better TEA and an overall scalability pathway, which looked better than others. That’s what we’ve been told. So we believe them and they tell us that.
I mean, we were just doing our job of trying to build a company around our mission, which is smallholder farmers as a part of the overall solution to removing carbon with enhanced weathering in their fields. And when we do that, we are not only working in the most degraded soils in the world, which are not producing as well and the productivity is quite low, but also at the same time we’re working in the Global South, which is quite hot and in a lot of cases has a lot of rain. So all those things indirectly help weathering as well, because weathering is faster in a hot, high flux environment with degraded soil.
So I guess not only are we impacting farmers and increasing their incomes, which is kind of life changing for them, but at the same time we are in a pretty cool place on a geographic and climatic pathway, which allows for faster weathering. And it has a scalability potential where, I mean, more than 200 million farmers in our calculation could actually be benefited from this. That’s 900 million acres planet-wide which can actually be benefiting from this process and removing carbon. And I mean, if you actually are able to spread this across this land, then you can do multi-gigaton removal while supporting hundreds of millions of farmers.
That’s like one-eighth of the global population. You know, 100 million farmers means 500 million people, 200 million farmers means 1 billion people, right? So I mean, 1 billion people, like one in eight people in the world who are some of the most climate vulnerable people, can actually benefit from this. So I don’t think it was a social impact decision which the judges made, but that’s what we’ve been told. Basically they were looking at the best technological MRV, the best LCA, best TEA, best sort of scientific basis of scaling up carbon removal process. That’s what we were rated against. And also I think one of the very important criteria was actually doing 1,000 tons of removal during the demonstration period, so showing proof that that has happened. So I think we came through on all of these parameters and probably were better than others. So that gave us a win.
Ross Kenyon: That scalability question is so fascinating to me because while it’s true that there are so many smallholder farmers and there’s so much good work that can be done to help them, I’ve worked with individual farmers at my previous company and the amount of work it is where the unit cost is really hard working with individual farmers. And these are often row croppers in the Midwest for whom their property is very legible. It’s very easy to understand. You might face a lot of heterogeneity, unclear property tenure in some of these places. It’s not big row cropping operations. And while that might look like scalability in the way that you see it, to me it looks like the opposite of that. How did XPRIZE end up agreeing with you on that rather than with me? Because you’re pretty, it sounds like.
Shantanu Agarwal: Yeah, actually we have developed a pretty robust tech stack. I think the first thing we attacked was the smallholder problem. So when I went into doing this in 2022, the first thing people were saying was this can’t be done. You’re basically going after something which is impossible. And the naysayers were predominantly all of them who were trying to sort of help me think through how I should build this. And everybody was saying, Shantanu, not really the right path, think about something else.
So the first thing we attacked was how do we tackle smallholder farmers in an economically viable manner, which allows us to collect highly robust scientific data and create a trail of activities which allows us to audit everything and ensure that there is no cheating at all, no cutting corners, cradle-to-grave samples, data — all these things being tracked all through and being able to sort of, in a very dispersed, discrete manner, execute in these places where in some places there is no network even, you know, there is no Internet, there’s no cell coverage. So you have to really build a set of tools for solving that.
And that’s kind of what we’ve been able to do. We’ve basically built a full-fledged ERP platform — enterprise resource planning platform — which kind of controls every little piece of what we do. And that allows us to operate in a lot of discrete, dispersed individual nodes while still maintaining high quality. So on a typical day, we might have 10,000 data points come into our system or maybe even more, right? So all of them have to go in the right places, connect to the right entities, be recorded, be audited, be verified. We have machine learning, we have AI core, all of these things to really make it more robust.
Yeah. So we have basically built all the cutting edge technology things which are out there and brought it to a place where it solves for the smallholder farmer problem first, and then going to sort of, OK, let’s now we’ve solved for the smallholder farmer problem and how to really tackle this kind of activity and logistics and operations. Now how do we do carbon removal [unclear]? So that is the reason we have been able to solve for what we’re doing. If you go the reverse manner, typically you might get stuck into a lot of problems, which — I’ll tell you that — it’s not worth it. Don’t do it.
Ross Kenyon: How much of the ways that you solve this are wet versus dry systems? How much of them are actual humans there checking things? How much of it is Internet of Things, remote imaging and sensing? Some mix between the two? Like, what actually makes this possible in a very detailed way?
Shantanu Agarwal: It’s both. So I think in a smallholder farmer setting, you cannot just rely on satellite. It’s just not the way to be. And we like to actually be on the ground to verify most things ourselves, because at the end of the day, we want to deliver the most robust carbon removal for our customers. And that means that we want to be able to provide the quality assurance of each piece of data collection. So we have a lot of field personnel on the ground. And then we also use, obviously, the simple things which are satellite data and remote sensing and all that, really to enhance our systems. But yeah, I mean, you can’t avoid, as you mentioned, the wet system. You know, you actually need a wet system in these settings.
Ross Kenyon: I’d like to ask you about this doing impossible things objection. How do you know when you’re faced with a problem that people are calling impossible and you choose to persist, that you’re not being delusional? There are a lot of crackpots out there. I meet with them somewhat regularly and I’m like, this is crazy. I’m almost certainly wrong about more than one of them. There’s a nonzero number of crackpots I meet with that will probably be visionary and they’re very successful, and I will be totally wrong about most of them. I don’t think that’s the case, but you have to ask that.
If everyone’s telling you something is impossible in a field and you respect their opinion, I think that they’re reasonably intelligent people. You are duty bound to some extent to make sure that you are not on some quixotic mission that will likely lead to a bad outcome for you. You have a limited amount of time on this planet and they could have saved you five years of toiling in obscurity to no effect. How did you decide what is in your own heart and in your own brain to believe in what you actually ended up doing? How did you decide that?
Shantanu Agarwal: Yeah. So for me, I think you’re absolutely right too — sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense and you don’t really want to persist in this case. And the persistence and sort of the mission orientation came because of the actual object of what we were trying to solve for, which was smallholder farmer resilience. And some of these farmers were literally at the edge of survival and being wiped out right in front of our eyes in terms of being able to survive their way of life. In the current setup, in the current market mechanisms which have been created, these guys were not a viable class and they essentially had to leave their farming and become migrant labor, sometimes even have to migrate thousands of miles away from their original lands to just survive for the families.
So the reason I founded Mati was essentially to solve for this. Carbon removal was the only tool I have been working on for the last five, six years when I started this and I was like, OK, this is the tool I have to use and it could actually work out. But the mission for Mati continues to be the farmer. And to that extent, leaving the farmers, or the farmer who I was mission bound to serve, didn’t make any sense, even if the naysayers were saying you’re serving the wrong class of people. I said, but that is my mission. So I have to figure out a way to solve for that, because those are the people who need help, not the large industry of farmers who already have a ton of money.
So the challenge which I was there to solve for was the smallholder farmer. And that gave me sort of the energy to really continue to persist and find a way around it. And had it been a pure mercenary exercise around how to make money and how to really maximize my returns, I would have probably taken different sorts of risks which would have been more aligned with conventional wisdom.
Ross Kenyon: Or maybe just not gone into carbon removal at all? Spent your time doing something else.
Shantanu Agarwal: That’s true. If money making was my object, then carbon removal may not have been the right choice.
Ross Kenyon: Crypto — has anybody heard about that? People made a lot of—
Shantanu Agarwal: I’ve heard about crypto, yeah. That could have been a better path for making money.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, Bitcoin is $100,000 now. There you go right there. Well, you can be mission focused though, and you also could have chosen a different type of carbon removal, especially if your goal is to help farmers that are vulnerable in the Global South. Many people I know who work in biochar and those geographies are there for the same reason. How did you decide that enhanced rock weathering was the way to go rather than biochar?
Shantanu Agarwal: So I think biochar is a good pathway, but biochar has some very limiting restrictions compared to enhanced rock weathering, because biochar depends on the collection of biomass and then processing of biomass into a biochar. And if you’re truly wanting to take waste biomass, then collection makes you make a biochar system to be a dispersed system. That means it has to be a small scale system which has to be dispersed all around where the material is available. That doesn’t make it a very cost efficient system. So your price point goes up. And even so, I mean, I think the overall process is quite complicated at small scale, so it doesn’t produce as high quality product in some cases. In Kon-Tiki kilns you’re actually polluting — rather, you could be polluting rather than creating a carbon sink.
So biochar has its own problems and the scalability challenges, which I believe will allow it to scale to some megatons, some maybe even hundreds of megatons. But there will be challenges for it to scale really to a planetary scale solution because of the way the mechanics work and the cost works. Because if you scale to a large factory, then you need to bring biomass from far away, which makes the cost higher. If you make small scale factories, then they’re not as efficient and the cost is anyway higher. So then you’re anyway restricted to biomass. You don’t want to change land use. So you’re essentially restricted to not producing land use for specifically producing biomass for biochar, because that is going to be a really not such a good outcome. You’re not producing food anymore and you’re producing biomass for biochar.
And so all those things are kind of restricting biochar in the global scheme of things. But enhanced rock weathering does not have those restrictions, and rock weathering actually can scale quite significantly, and there are massive amounts of these rock deposits on the planet which can be essentially durably and easily quarried. And in fact they’re already being quarried at scales which are — in India at least, for example, the rocks which are being quarried are probably 100X already of what could be a megaton scale of carbon removal, multi-megaton scale carbon removal. So they’re already quarrying more rock than that existing.
So you’re not really requiring infrastructure change, you’re not requiring new quarrying, you’re not requiring technology, and most importantly, you are not requiring new land use change. And you’re essentially distributing on existing farmlands to improve the degraded soils. So the scalability and the effectiveness of this pathway, which is also a natural pathway, which is very interesting because rock weathering is not a manufactured pathway. Biochar is not a natural thing. Biochar is humanly made, right? Rock weathering is natural, just like trees, as natural as it comes.
No fear, I’m not going to anger the biochar people listening right now. No, no, I believe in biochar. I’m fine with biochar, but nature doesn’t make biochar, does it? At least I don’t know. I don’t think nature pyrolyzes, too. I mean, it might pyrolyze under the earth, but it doesn’t really make biochar on the surface. So I think the two ways the nature of the planet removes carbon is rock weathering and photosynthesis. So I think those two pathways which the planet wants to do should be scaled infinitely as much as possible. And that’s the reason I think rock weathering should scale in my view. That’s why I’m [unclear] of this. But—
Ross Kenyon: The reframe is really interesting to me because people tend to think that biochar is the most democratic form of carbon removal. You can get, for a couple hundred dollars, your own kiln and do it in your yard if you want. Kon-Tikis are obviously not an expensive piece of hardware to acquire. But the biochar deals, both for scale and for cost and for quality, they’re all centralized industrial productions at this point, like Exomad. They’re all either waste biomass to biochar operations — if you have a large quantity of bagasse on a regular basis at your sugar operation, the pathway to biochar is, you know, pretty simple. It’s trivial relative to doing something else. And it’s funny to reframe that as actually biochar may be less democratic than is typically assumed that it is. And that enhanced rock weathering may be more democratic. I don’t think most people think of it that way. And it’s sort of an interesting contrarian take, Shantanu.
Shantanu Agarwal: Yeah. I mean, I would say democratic and not democratic is something which is business model dependent. But I think scalability is definitely more, in my book, for enhanced rock weathering globally. And how it actually gets implemented in the Mati Carbon model, we definitely want it in the hands of smallholder farmers and make it as democratized as possible. But there are other companies which will retain control and create large scale, maybe mechanized ways of deploying enhanced rock weathering, and that is equally beneficial for the planet. So I have no issues around that.
But yeah, I mean, I like rock weathering because it’s a natural process. I also like biochar. It’s something which seems technologically and every other way which you look at it quite beneficial to the soils and the planet. So but there are restrictions around the scalability which we already talked about. So yeah, that’s what my take is.
Ross Kenyon: Your answer to this last question is intriguing to me as well, where you’re pointing to — it’s OK if enhanced weathering companies are potentially less democratic because the impact on the climate may be the same. But your motivation and way of organizing corporately is different, and I suspect there are probably very intentional reasons for why and how you do things. Is that a correct read of what you’re maybe implying?
Shantanu Agarwal: Yeah. So we have intentionally structured Mati so that we can actually serve the smallholder farmers. And when I started Mati, we obviously had the collaboration with Yale and University of Sheffield and we had the technology. So we could have gone for large farmers as well ourselves and raised private equity, venture capital, and go the path which others have gone. But as I told you earlier, my mission was a smallholder farmer, who’s the customer I was trying to benefit. So to that extent we thought through that. Are we better structured as a private equity funded company, or are we better structured as a company which can actually be serving the farmers and not taking equity return as a primary goal?
So to that extent we have not taken any equity till date, and the core technology company Mati Carbon PBC is essentially a controlled entity of a 501(c)(3). And we work in conjunction with the 501(c)(3) to help with the mission of smallholder farmers. And we have not taken equity because equity returns are not the guiding force. Farmer impact is the guiding force for our execution and how we choose where we go and what farmers we serve and what locations we serve.
Ross Kenyon: Mati’s governance structure has always been fascinating to me. Is there anyone else that’s doing it quite like you, where you are, you know, almost entirely owned by a nonprofit entity?
Shantanu Agarwal: So I did not copy anyone. We basically structured it ourselves. And this actually — it structured itself, because the project was founded inside a nonprofit. I came out of a private equity led company where I was a CEO. I came out of it and started this project as a nonprofit initiative inside a nonprofit. But then when Frontier and others wanted to sign carbon removal contracts with us, the nonprofit said that we’re not in the business of doing this carbon removal contracts and we don’t want to be on the hook for delivering carbon removal credits. What are you talking about? So then the project, which was inside a nonprofit, spun out and started an entity really to be able to sign contracts with all these customers so that they can deliver carbon removal credits.
And then because we were essentially partly funded by myself and partly funded through this nonprofit and all that, so we structured it in this manner where the nonprofit retained the control, but we were able to sign these contracts and also take debt in a public benefit corp, which is a Delaware registered public benefit corp. And it’s kind of organically emerged rather than me designing for it. And I think it’s worked well. Now we have entities in Zambia, Tanzania, India, which are operating in its own right, deploying in these countries. And we have the other company in the US. And yeah, we are able to prioritize our mission, go after smallholder farmers and the most difficult territories in India and similarly in Zambia, and go and solve for them and develop the science which can actually produce high quality credits while serving some of the most vulnerable people in the world.
Ross Kenyon: I advise a number of startups, and I almost always tell them to not do anything weird or creative on the corporate structure side, because you’re going to give people a reason to say no to you because it’s weird to understand, or they’re going to trust it less. They don’t really gain that much benefit from trying to do it in that way anyways. Am I wrong?
Shantanu Agarwal: No, you’re right.
Ross Kenyon: I’m not — why are you doing everything in this weird bass-ackwards way and somehow magic falls out the other end? Like, how — like, just why, how, how does it work this way? Are you — you just know something I don’t? Surely you do.
Shantanu Agarwal: No, no, I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. For a traditional company who was trying to raise venture capital, a straight C corp is the best place to do it. No, don’t do any fancy structuring. It’s easier for investors. And really a public benefit corp is a C corp. I mean, we are not too fancy either. It’s a C corp with a mission, right? So it’s a B corp really, and a B corp is a mission oriented C corp. So on all practical purposes, we are not very that weird either. The only thing is we’ve got a nonprofit in the mix and we’ve got controlling — it’s taken — we’re not taking any equity money. So that’s like the—
Ross Kenyon: Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play — kind of exception, you know? Like, those are pretty big exceptions you just carved out, but—
Shantanu Agarwal: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. And there’s a reason for that. I’ll explain to you that. So you’re absolutely right. I mean, I have started a few companies in my life. I was a private equity partner. I’ve invested in more than 15 companies in my life. I’ve been on 10, 12 boards, maybe 15 boards. So I am absolutely in agreement with your point that — don’t do the weird things, stay, stay focused on your product and technology and business rather than trying to do creative structuring, because that’s not where the value is going to be created. The value is going to be created from your product and your delivery of that product.
So I think that’s how I would recommend to anybody who’s starting a company. And in our case, really we haven’t done anything fancy either. This has all fallen out organically of what you’re trying to do. We have not spent time and energy to try to sort of strategize towards this structure. As I told you, this kind of started as a project to serve the farmers and it became a PBC after that because we had to sign some contracts, and it essentially organically emerged as the most convenient way of operating the way we’re operating.
Ross Kenyon: Is it possible to draw general conclusions about your success at this point that people listening might be able to emulate?
Shantanu Agarwal: So I would say success is relative. And in the carbon removal world today, I think we are all kind of still in the throes of trying to succeed. I would not call ourselves a success. A big check from XPRIZE is really not success. It’s essentially an opportunity to succeed. So we have to do a lot of work here to really succeed. And a successful business is one which has got tons of customers, tons of repeat customers, tons of product already delivered, tons of repeat cycling of this product delivery mechanism which is happening. And probably 2025 was the first year where we would deliver some substantial amount of tons to our customers. We did some deliveries like, what, 800, 900 tons last year, but this year we’re going to do a bunch of thousands of tons for customers.
So I think success is defined by EBITDA break even business, or EBITDA positive business, making profits, making their customers repeat customers and continuously delivering on their promises. And Mati still has to do that. So we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. We have got a huge vote of confidence from XPRIZE and the judges and the auditors and the technology evaluators that we have one of the highest potential to do that. But I think still a long way to go to succeed.
So I would say nothing to emulate here yet, but what you can emulate is that we are extremely mission focused and we are very lean. We operate lean. We do not have any excess spending even with $50 million in the bag. We are not going to be just drunken sailors spending here. We’re going to be extremely careful about how we spend our money and we want to stretch this money as far as possible and bring more money in, really deliver for the 100 million farmers. I mean, the type of challenge we’ve taken upon ourselves is such a huge challenge that 50 million is just a drop in the bucket. I mean, 100 million farmers in the world where we can actually deliver $30 billion of annual increased income to these farmers if we actually do this right over the next 20, 25 years. 50 million is nothing in front of it. So this is our impetus, this is our catalyst to allow us to run towards the longer term vision. And let’s hope we can achieve that. Once we do that, then I’ll call ourselves a success. Not yet.
Ross Kenyon: Humble almost to a fault, I have to say. Could I infer from your work that maybe a piece of advice you could give is that you’re focused on farmers, you’re focused on agricultural resilience in the Global South, and it almost seems that carbon removal may be a byproduct of that focus rather than the thing itself. It’s about farmers, not about parts per million in the atmosphere. I don’t even know if you would agree with that. But is that the kind of focus that someone might be able to build a company around, that might see carbon removal as a secondary product? Is that something that you could endorse?
Shantanu Agarwal: So we only got one tool in our — one arrow in our quiver, which is carbon removal to make money, right? So yes, our mission and our target is the farmer we want to create an impact for. But the way we create that impact, the way we create that value, is through carbon removal. So yes, we have put the farmer first, because that’s how we have basically structured our solutions, and that has actually in very strange ways benefited our carbon removal as well, because the carbon removal, as I said to you, in some of these countries is actually better — the weathering is better because of the conditions they are in. So both of those things are intertwined.
We pride ourselves to be one of the most robust and scientifically mature and working very hard in terms of R&D to continue to sort of improve that maturity for the MRV in terms of enhanced weathering science. And so carbon removal is definitely the tool which we are using and we are a carbon removal technology company, but our mission to benefit remains the farmer. So I think you have to figure out what your mission is always as a company. If a new company wants to think about what they want to do, you have to figure out what your mission is, what is the problem you’re trying to solve? And that will give you purpose, that will give you the sort of creative thinking, creative ideas to how do I actually solve for that? And that’s where innovation and new ideas will come from.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being on, Shantanu. We’ve wanted to do this for a long time. I’m so glad it’s finally happened. Thanks for being on Reversing Climate Change.
Shantanu Agarwal: Thank you, Ross, it was my pleasure and I hope people enjoyed this. We are trying to build a phenomenal planetary scale solution, and we want to work across the whole Global South. So people who want to join forces with us, please let us know. You can write to us at contact@mati.earth. Our website is mati.earth. And please feel free to contact us and reach out and love to collaborate.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. And links to all those things are in the show notes, too, if you’d like to get in touch with Shantanu and Mati. Thanks again, Shantanu.
Shantanu Agarwal: Thank you, Ross.
