This is episode #424 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (subscribe there for its ad-free version), Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever else you listen. Substack paid subscribers get the ad-free version right here on the page.
What do you do when none of the machinery you imported works? If you're Releaf, you build your own nutcracker, name it Kraken, and get it working with about six weeks of runway left in the middle of COVID. And once you have a huge pile of palm kernel shells sitting around, why not get really into biochar?
Today's guest is Uzoma Ayogu, cofounder and CTO of Releaf and cofounder of Biochar Industrial Group (BIG), which just closed a $1.5 million pre-seed. Releaf cracks palm nuts from smallholder farms in Nigeria, where equipment built for plantations met thick-shelled nuts that arrive wet, dusty and full of rocks. BIG is the carbon dioxide removal side, spun out because Releaf's investors understood agriculture and supply chains and did not understand the voluntary carbon market.
They bought their pyrolyzer from a Ukrainian manufacturer during a war, installed it without the manufacturer's engineer, and Uzo slept in the factory on a yoga mat for two weeks. Uptime went from around a third to 87 percent. We also get into cassava yields, what Y Combinator told them when they got in, and my own YC story, which ends with Nori getting in and saying no.
This episode’s sponsor
EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets.
Full disclosure: Uzo, Kenna, and I met in the AirMiners Launchpad Accelerator program and I have worked with them in a few programs since.
Resources
Become a paid subscriber for bonus content and ad-free episodes
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous
BIG raises $1.5m to turn African farm waste into carbon removal, TechCabal
How Releaf is scaling Nigerian biochar, my piece for Rainbow
Carbon Removal Memes, the meme page
Full Transcript
Host introduction
Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is Ross Kenyon. I am the host of Reversing Climate Change. This is a podcast about carbon dioxide removal, climate tech, climate change.
But also so much else that relates to climate change.
That means there's a lot of shows about literature, about film, theology, history, philosophy. I gravitate most towards those topics. There's a lot of stuff happening on Substack right now.
New episodes have full transcripts. I oftentimes am writing an essay or companion piece for a lot of the new things that I'm releasing.
They're standalone essays that don't have podcasts attached to them. All of the carbon removal memes that you may enjoy are also on Substack now. In addition to the other show I've been doing called Climate Workers Anonymous, which is a sort of PostSecret for those who work in climate.
I'm happy to have today's guest here. Uzoma Ayogu is someone that I have worked with for a long time. Uzo is one of the co-founders of Releaf and of Biochar Industrial Group, BIG.
Uzo is a mechanical engineer who invented a novel nut cracking machine for use in Nigeria. His and Kenna's families are from Nigeria, and they grew up in the Nigerian diaspora and then returned back to their ancestral home to find a way to make life easier for smallholder farmers cracking palm nut.
And of course, once you have a huge pile of kernel shells sitting around, why not get really into biochar? So glad we finally got to do this, Uzo.
And I won't belabor this intro because we also just start right at the beginning here and make things easier on listeners., So here is the show. Thanks for listening.
The episode
Ross Kenyon: Uzo, we finally did it. We finally doing a show together. It's only been several years of collaborating in various ways and here we are.
Uzoma Ayogu: A hundred percent. Excited to be here, Ross. Thanks for being patient with me.
Ross Kenyon: It's.
It's, not even that. I don't know. I don't even know what I was waiting for because I've been so energized by your story and what you've been doing for, I think, like, two years at this point. Longer than that?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, yeah. It's about, it's about two years when we first started really exploring CDR industry and seeing if it could really make sense on top of our business. and now it's the main business. So it's, it's really interesting to have you along with the, with us throughout that journey.
Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah 'cause we met in the AirMiners Launchpad Accelerator. That's, that's where we started. So we were paired together there. So Kenna, you and I were doing that.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah.
and w- even when I applied, I remember it was just like, "Oh, this is for teams to really explore this and, like the fundamentals," and yeah, and two years later, like, made a lot of progress. so it really was a launchpad.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that's nice. Good job, AirMiners. And yeah, what a modest way to put it. I think you've had a good go of things. We'll get into the details of it, but you recently raised a round. There's a sort of second company that has grown out of the original vision. There's been some cool changes and growth, and we'll talk about all of those things in detail.
But what if we just went chronological? I didn't just force you to go out of order here. Like, how did.
Uzoma Ayogu: yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Releaf came first. Like, what's your story of how did this get founded? Why are you doing this? how did it end up, becoming the company that it is?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah.
100%. If I start really at the beginning, but I was born in Nigeria but grew up in South Africa. My dad's an economist. He spent his whole career working on, like, economic development on the continent, and I always- I grew up hearing him basically complain about the country and what was happening.
And I always in my head thought "You guys are always just talking, but you're not doing anything." very naive, young person.
Ross Kenyon: A little bit, yeah.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, exa- exactly. but I wrote my college essay about, wanting to study engineering, in the US and go back and, like, make an impact. That was kind of the largerly- the large overall arc.
and I think, like a lot of people who, like, write those things, and then, life happens and et cetera, et cetera. But was fortunate enough, through, like, summer internships to spend some time doing, like, engineering impact projects in rural settings, rural Togo, rural Brazil. And then my junior year, I met Kena, and Isaiah shortly after.
and we both had s- written our college essays about basically the same thing, like going back, making a difference, studying engineering to make a change. and around this time, there was, like the first few African tech companies, like, coming up, Andela, Paystack. and so we're like, "Oh, this is actually possible."
so I'll never forget, like, my, - Ken was supposed to go to Bain. I was supposed to go to Microsoft. and, I remember taking that the letter Ken had first sent to Bain. I'd like-- I copied it, I sent it to Microsoft, and we both basically got deferrals for a year. and that was what made our parents, like, comfortable.
They were like, "Okay, it's-- the job's not gone. You'll go and do this thing. You scratch your itch, and then you'll, you'll come back and go work your cushy job." it's actually kind of funny thinking about Microsoft and CDR, like, full circle in some ways. but yeah, long story short, I never ended up going to work Microsoft in the, in the end, but did kind of...
The faith was almost, was almost rewarded in the fact that, we had said we weren't gonna go work at th-those jobs and then got into YC, Y Combinator. Literally my last day of college, I remember flying back from SF for my last class of college and being like, "I'm on top of the world. We got in, we got in."
but yeah. Well, then the thesis was just how to make agriculture productive, because that's how most poor countries become middle income. and yeah, spent the last decade kind of building agricultural supply chains, building sophisticated agricultural processing technology. We have a patent for, I guess you call it the best nut, nutcracker, or palm nutcracker.
but all of that, doing that, all of that over the last 10 years has kind of prepared me for the work we're doing now. I can discuss it a bit more, but that's, that's speed running, kind of the last 10 years being that we fundamentally believe, that Africa is the next frontier and its industrialization and doing it in a way, that is a bit different from the way other countries did it, is the most powerful, mm, both economic, and impact opportunity of this century.
That's kind of like our thesis and our grounding in, like, everything we do.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. buried the lead just a tiny bit 'cause you invented a better nut cracking machine. I'm sure people were like, "Wait, what was that last part? You, you're saying that you..." That isn't sort of like.
the typical.
pedigree of someone coming carbon removal. That's like a... I've never heard anyone.
else say that.
So how did that come about, and what was it before you invented how is that machine working now? How's it going?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, We, so we didn't set out to create Kraken, that's the name of the nutcracker. We essentially were like, "Ah, we're, we're gonna import machinery from Malaysia and China to work on smallholder oil palms." So that's oil palm that comes from, like, local farms. but everything that's been developed is for plantations, large, of course large-scale plantations, which is very different in West Africa essentially it's driven by smallholders.
so it creates a few problems. The species are mixed. The smallholder species, like, that is non, like, genetically modified has a much thicker shell. and those... And, and then just the input quality, because the whole value chain is not closed, you have a lot of high moisture, huge dust content, and, like, rocks.
So we needed to optimize our processing line to deal with all of those externalities. So none of the technology worked, and we had to essentially... There was a point where the company was gonna run out of money, like, in the next six weeks, and we hadn't figured out the... We hadn't made the nutcracker work, essentially it was still in R&D, and it was the middle of COVID, and so no one wanted to give us more money to finish.
But one of our, mentors, who is now the founder of two unicorns in, out of Nigeria, had known us for the last three years building, and were like, "These guys, I believe in them, they'll get it done." And so that check ended up being enough for us to get the breakthrough, make Kraken work after I guess over 12 months of R&D, and then things kind of went from there.
Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: how does this get into YC? I don't, I don't know if they make a lot of.
investments like.
Uzoma Ayogu: Good, good, question. Yeah, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Who interviewed you, by the.
Uzoma Ayogu: when we first... Yeah, Tim Brady and Adora Cheung. So Tim was the first employee at Yahoo. I still call him Uncle Tim, always wanna ma- make him proud. but yeah, he... And even when we applied to YC, it was kinda like we applied with an idea where we wanted to be, like, maybe Bloomberg for Africa.
The thesis then was like, oh the reason you're not seeing FDI flow in is because people don't understand. It's, like, data poor. and then through that process we found out a lot of agricultural businesses had many different challenges. But even when they let us in, they said, "Look, we actually don't like your idea, but your founding team seems so strong and so, like, committed to solving this problem.
we think you'll find a much better problem and business to so- to solve." And we actually never ended up demoing at our original demo day. We demoed later because we weren't confident of, like the structure, or even what we were building then. So we went back to Nigeria after YC, started almost from square one, figured out this agricultural supply chain, figured out this nut cracking, and then went and demoed, like, two years later, with kind of the very much sophisticated nut cracker that will allow you to kinda own the upstream part of the market because of the bottleneck.
So yeah, that's kind of the how we got.
Ross Kenyon: I've never heard that story, and I guess that does make sense that you pitch this, software data play that they're like.
Eh.
but we like good enough.
Fine.
Uzoma Ayogu: yeah. So I always encourage people, if you, if you can show that, you are really committed to a problem space then and the team is good, you- it's worth a shot. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That's nice. Well, that's cool. Ours was, with Michael Seibel was who, grilled.
Uzoma Ayogu: Ah, nice. Yeah, yeah, he is, yeah, heavy. But, but good. But good.
Ross Kenyon: I don't even know if I'm allow- allowed to say it. I don't know. It's been so long at this point, I'm not even sure that it matters. But.
we.
like, got... They made us wait for a full day, which I'm... You only ever get one interview, and it's like within 15 minutes they're.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, you yeah, we get a call a.
Ross Kenyon: ours we had to wait a full day, and they're like, "Come back for a second one," which I'm told never.
Uzoma Ayogu: Oh, interesting.
Ross Kenyon: And then they said can do it, but we have to change the, like the financing structure and convert, and no longer do this, like, funky, And then we said.
Uzoma Ayogu: crazy.
Ross Kenyon: no.
S.
Uzoma Ayogu: Ah. Ah, I didn't even know that you had that, that you guys interviewed at.
Ross Kenyon: we got in and then s- said no. So I don't.
Uzoma Ayogu: Do you ever look back and say like, "Oh, maybe that could have been interesting"? Or is it, was it just like the structure of it was.
Ross Kenyon: Well, this was during a time period where we thought, like, "Oh, we'll just remain an LLC and we're gonna do this through token financing and not sell equity." And they were like, "We like Nori, but don't like that idea so much. So do the normal 7% deal and you're in, or no." And it's one of those things that we changed later anyways, so I'm like, Hmm.
Uzoma Ayogu: but maybe.
Ross Kenyon: that the fork the road? Like, was that, was that the moment?"
Uzoma Ayogu: the point? Yeah. We'll never know. That's funny. Actually, I had no idea about that. But I have a very funny Michael story where essentially, we're practicing before demo day. It was the day before, I remember, and he was like, "Look, this is... I love you guys, but this is terrible." And he like tore it, he tore the entire pitch down.
And, and we actually had a an amazing pitch the next day. But I remember coming home, like very dejected, but like, "Guys, we can do this." And then like we reworked it through the night and it was great. But yeah, Michael doesn't pull punches, but he definitely like the definition of, "I'm gonna tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear."
great guy.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that's a really good skill in coaching and even just like in friendship of trying to find a way to do that.
Uzoma Ayogu: That's right.
Ross Kenyon: find sometimes I'm very effective at that and sometimes I'm like that middle ground between severity and being too nice. It's like so hard to like that exact right, "I love you, but that was bad."
But.
Uzoma Ayogu: But that was bad, yeah. I'll tell you, I think I feel like as the years you've coached us through different programs, I think you've done, you've done a pretty good job at that. At making clear like, "Hey, this is what I think you should do, but you should do what you think you should do."
Ross Kenyon: That, I, like that is the, it's not my company. Like, like, and also when tells you what.
to do.
Uzoma Ayogu: always.
make that.
Ross Kenyon: little annoying anyways for your just it's, it's better kinda come to the conclusion. I.
Uzoma Ayogu: The collusion, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: like I want you to succeed, but if you fail I'm just like, "Okay, like another startup didn't quite figure it out."
But like for you it's, your life is radically impacted. It's not, you can only be so.
Uzoma Ayogu: That's right.
Ross Kenyon: It's not my.
Uzoma Ayogu: Y.
Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: But you guys did You guys did pull..., and there were times where you're like, 'cause you came into carbon removal and AirMiners, you're sort of investigating, "Oh, well have huge amounts of - liability biomass that are just sitting in piles.
Like, there's not a lot of economic value." Didn't you figured out biochar, weren't you just like Googling stuff one day and you're like, "Hold on, what was that.
last What.
Uzoma Ayogu: yeah. We got an email about biochar like maybe 2022 and then it was like, "Oh, heard about this." So like found the old email and then like, "Oh yeah, let's... maybe this, these nutshells will have value that we're not doing much with." and yeah, from there it was like, "Oh, like how can we learn about this really quickly?"
And that's how we came across AirMiners. and yeah, from there the big risk was, yeah, can I... Ca- I remember having to pick registry, having to pick the right machine, some of the risks around the machine we picked, finally, issuing and selling credits, even the Milkywire app. And so funny how many points are like very critical and now we look back at them and like, "Oh, cool.
Yeah." But now, literally Nigeria's first industrial biochar credits we managed to sell.
and issue.
yeah, within pretty quick cycle. I think within 12 months from like our final AirMiners to like, Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Very fast. Are, I feel like you're skipping over some real meaty stories too. Wasn't there like, your, like, pyrolyzer was from Ukraine, right? And there was like a whole saga around that.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. So even when I remember telling, kind of like, "Okay, I found this Ukrainian manufacturer," he was like, "No, it doesn't make sense." Why would you... Imagine going to investors and something happened, and telling them, "Oh yeah, we had an issue with our Ukrainian manufacturer." They'll be like, "Well, why would get a system from a, you know, active war zone?"
but yeah, it was a unique deal in that, like, someone had wanted to buy it. We-- That, that person had pulled out, so it was quite heavily discounted. We had very limited capital then, and so we're like, "Okay, let's do a bunch of diligence. Let's understand the machine. Let's do meetings with the technical team.
and let's try and make it work." And so yeah, it came. they couldn't send their engineer, so me and my team had to do all the, like, installation ourselves. The eng- the actual technical team on their side d- doesn't speak English.
yeah, I like slept in the factory for, like, about two weeks. I had a yoga mat a pillow, go to the office. Because, of course, like 24/7, once the system runs, it keeps going. It's kinda like a refinery. So you have to almost be on call. and their team actually was on call quite a bit.
But, we had an issue with the glue the fireproof glue used. the... Yeah, we had to troubleshoot a lot. We ended up replacing a lot of the actuator systems. not because the system was bad, but it was essentially optimized for lighter density nutshells, and ours were far more dense. Again, the, this question of the native species versus the modified ones.
so kind of same issue we had with the cracking problem, we encountered also with a pyrolyzer. And so again the kinda doing that process of, "Okay, how do I make this work for my environment?" But it-- the first quarter the uptime was, like, 30, 38%, but by the fourth quarter, it was.
87.
So we did really go up that experience curve.
Yeah.
What was happening with, just the core, like palm nut oil, like business before the biochar? Was it, was it a healthy going okay? Had had you figured it out.
or did.
you have PMF or not really? Like what happened?
Yeah, definitely had PMF from like a more demand than supply. So I guess we've seen a lot of markets here, you'll see like, oh the demand is really secured. The main business problem to figure out is on the supply side. So can you execute on supply side? And whether it's fragmented, costs are high, poor infrastructure, et cetera.
So PMF was definitely existed on demand side. because of some of the macro forces in Nigeria, whether around currency devaluation, removing the fuel subsidies to energy costs literally going up at like 4X over the last two years. Even, even the war, like the Ir- Iranian war, like we saw 80% spike in energy and because we're largely off grid, so that hits us completely.
But also it's everyone, like cost of living for all our employees. and then the third thing being the, probably the most the toughest being usually if there's a big local cost shock economically, it gets passed on to the price of the, kind of oil product. But in this case the borders were opened because of the new administration and so now you have to compete with the global price for that commodity.
And so now your c- your costs are going up the global price is fixed, you're getting squeezed. And that was kind of why we started thinking more about, all right, what are the other ways we can, look at the products we're producing and create more value? and that's how kind of biochar, came to the fore.
So business was good from the demand side. There was a lot of macro shocks and so we started looking for other ways to become more resilient, which is why we're like, we're not the only ones experiencing this and other people can benefit kind of from this opportunity as well. We'll maybe discuss that a bit more, later.
Ross Kenyon: But okay, so everything we've talked about so far with Kraken and nut cracking, that's all been Releaf, but then you just raised a round as BIG and that's a different entity.
What led to it being a separate entity entirely and like why is it just not Releaf growing, but something else? How did you decide that?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yes, 100%. So, biochar was working within Releaf, which was exciting. but the structure and the risk profile of the voluntary carbon market is not really something that most of our investors signed up for, as well as even ourselves and our capital stack. whereas, like, okay, we're gonna need, more money to simply scale up our biochar, our biochar processing, capacity, and we saw that for ourselves, and actually it was quite tough.
people were like, "Well, yeah, I don't really-- I understand ag, maybe I understand supply chains, but I the VCM doesn't really make sense to me. and I'm glad that this is kind of working for you guys." But we essentially had to say, okay, if we are running two almost business lines, you have the core business, and then you have the CDR business, and we're struggling to scale up the CDR business, how do we create another entity to help us just scale the CDR business?
And then we realized, like, oh, we're having this problem. Likely other people who have boards or funding will also have this challenge of how do you get a-- how do you take-- how do you reduce the risk of doing CDR at a higher scale? And so we realized like, okay, you need a different capital stack with a different mandate to focus exclusively on how to help agro processors scale up.
So we saw it for ourselves and saw the kind of the friction with getting more financing to scale up, CDR via biochar. We also saw even, like the resource allocation question, having to deal with that. So we said, "Okay, how can we help other people who have the same profile of us also go into CDR and set up an entirely new entity as a result?"
so it's, it's accretive to Releaf because we can increase our capacity. Right now we have way more nutshells and residue lying around that we can process with our current system. and BIG will help us scale that up, but then BIG can also do that for other, large agro processors.
Ross Kenyon: When you're raising money for this, does this confuse potential investors? Are they not sure about the corporate governance and the relationship between these entities?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, yeah. We had to, well we've created an entirely, like, new board structure. the, we call it arm's length agreement between two entity that's governed by like a separate SPV structure, but it's the same commercial agreement that we would give to any other agro processor terms of how value is shared.
Yeah, so it's just like, it's just out the box. It's kind of like, how would I explain? Exomad Green and NetZero, all of them came out of existing large agricultural or timber forestry businesses, and then they put CDR on top. So it's not, it's not uncommon for actually some of the largest CDR companies, biochar CDR companies in the world.
so we kind of, we point to that to say there's a lot of precedent for this, which is pretty useful.
Ross Kenyon: Were you actually using existing project developers as a model when you were designing this?
Uzoma Ayogu: not really, but when we were trying to look for, okay, how,... Is there a precedent for this? We actually just saw like, oh, NetZero in Cameroon, this guy owns a very large, I think it's maybe coffee. Maybe that's the Brazilian entity. And then same for Exomad Green, of course, they like forestry res- residue.
So, it came kind of on the back end. A lot of what we're doing and setting up the idea is just driven by almost first principles. Oh, we wanted to do this. Oh, but this was a challenge, so we actually need to set up this other entity to go and pursue this. but yeah, it definitely, we, spent a long time kind of getting the full sign off, of all our existing stakeholders and making sure it was clean and well-structured.
Ross Kenyon: Nice. And so you just closed around, so you're probably feeling some of relief here. You're able a little bit. good.
Launched.
Uzoma Ayogu: yes. Yeah, but I will say, raising money, like, especially as like a, call it second time founder, it's, it's more of like a responsibility than like, having a party. Like, now you need to go and you need to go and execute. Like, you need to turn that equity into value, which is fine. that's exciting, but it's not like, "Ah, we have a party.
We're raising a round." It's more like, "All right, now we can go get to work to execute on our plan." so yeah, we have two notch lobby systems coming online, which is really exciting. we should have one operational by the end of the year, and the other in Q1 next year, which is pretty cool.
Ross Kenyon: Nice. These are with other types of people with large amounts of waste biomass that you're gonna help them process?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Exactly. One is with, one is with, like, Releaf scaling up, and then the other one is with another pipeline partner. Exactly. yeah.
Ross Kenyon: how do those conversations go in Nigeria? Are people excited to bundle this together where I imagine you present yourselves as being very knowledgeable about carbon dioxide removal and registries and markets, and you're giving them access, and you're probably sharing some amount of the upside here and covering the fixed costs Yeah. H-how do you, like, approach those conversations? Are people interested in them? Does it, does it scare them in some way to be exposed here? Like, what's it like?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. We, we generally don't even like registry audit. We basically say, "Look, we can make your residue, or your waste an exportable product that you can get paid USD for." that's where the conversation starts. And, our structure is 20/60/20. so 20% of the profit from the project, so it's not a revenue, it's based on carbon profit, 20% would flow to BIG, 20% would flow to the partner, and 60% would flow to whoever funds CapEx.
In the beginning, we typically like to take on most of the risk, make it easier for people, and so profit would be shared 80/20. and that's essentially how we share value. and so a lot of people are like, "Okay, well, is this real? Oh, I can come to your factory. I can see you've done it. I can see you've sold these things."
So one, they're, "Okay, that's real. You were just like me a year ago." And so that makes people feel very... That kind of puts people at ease 'cause, "Oh, you're, you're sharing this thing they don't really understand, but it's like, okay, you've done it. You've actually made money from it. All right, I feel way more at ease."
And then the conversation comes, we spend a l- a lot more time around, okay, then what we do, like carbon audit, right? So, is there really a super strong counterfactual? I- is this really underutilized residue? or based on your location, can we make sure that, that there's a traceability for the raw material that came into your site?
are you at the right scale? how stable is the residue you're producing? Is it seasonal? And so then it becomes a lot of just ingesting a bunch of information and then deciding kind of who to partner with.
Ross Kenyon: These are is all agribusiness, right?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. We've, we've looked at, some people in timber, but Nigeria doesn't have any FSC certification, so it's almost, it's impossible basically to do anything around timber.
East Africa does. South, Southern Africa is very good. so yeah, all agribusiness.
Ross Kenyon: The, are there, does that type of, standard only exist at the country level?
Uzoma Ayogu: yeah. I mean, it's like, because it's expensive, it's like kind of the industry, people will be like, "Well, timber from this place doesn't have this wide certification." You have other countries where some pe- they have some in country and some not in country, and mostly comes down to how strong like the monitoring networks are in that country.
Yeah. But there is some like EUDR that exists for timber which could be interesting for.
us.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that is interesting. I hope some of that comes to impact it. It would open up a whole other thing. I imagine you'd like to work with forestry residue as.
well.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yes, yes, Certainly, certainly. Yeah, yeah. certainly. So those people stay in pipeline until maybe that comes to fruition.
Ross Kenyon: When you're talking about exporting a product, you're talking about the credits, right? Or are you exporting the physical biochar?
Uzoma Ayogu: Definitely, definitely the credits. so like, yeah, that's kind of the way we frame it. but we're seeing slowly more demand for the physical biochar. We've had some really good results from our first round of trials in cassava and maize. In cassava explicitly, we've seen about a 34.5% increase in yields, and that's largely because of how acidic the soils we're working in are.
So tropical acidic soil is some of the best to see actual good biochar performance. We have, like, 4.5 to maybe, like, 5.9, on average ranges in terms of acidity.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. You should, I don't know to what degree is cassava commoditized in this way, but I feel like you should get some restaurant or somebody that's making fufu, and then you can also just be like, "This is carbon negative fufu." Like.
Uzoma Ayogu: no, that's interesting. I mean, from a consumer standpoint, people will shrug.
Ross Kenyon: People are like, "What does that mean?" I don't know. Does it, does it taste.
good.
Uzoma Ayogu: yeah. But, but if we could, if they're then exporting and going to maybe more Western markets, that could be interesting. And we've actually thought about that, from a Releaf standpoint, and so we have some exciting stuff that we'll be announcing soon on that side of things.
Ross Kenyon: On the, like, potentially the packaging side of things?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, 'cause right now Releaf completely B2B, but we're, we're thinking about B2C. so that's really exciting, since we kind of have that.
Ross Kenyon: I'm waiting. I'm, I'm always watching for the of standards. Like, there's some- I see regen organic rice, like Lundberg and others, and like, there's like some chocolate and like a couple things like that. But, I'm waiting for someone to do biochar on products. I'm like... I don't know if, I don't know if that is you.
Someone should do it if it's not I.
I.
I wanna see stuff like.
Uzoma Ayogu: Not a biofield product, but it's related, it's related to the core product and the, some of the things you can make, and then maybe the personal care industry. But yeah, we'll, we'll definitely have more on that, over the next few is.
Ross Kenyon: How exciting. Are you fairly dependent upon VCM revenue right now?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah.
the structure would be basically VCM revenue would be... We wouldn't partner with someone where we didn't believe that a project could stand on its own two feet on carbon revenue alone. But over time, like I said the agronomic pull, will become more and more clear. So like right now we've sold about 20% of all the biochar we've made.
over time, that we have made as that much, but it'll, it'll grow over time. and so, we believe that we'll also be seeding basically an entirely new kind of industry, in Nigeria and West Africa. I will say the other thing is, what's super cool is, high integrity, high quality credits.
in some ways you could say they're, they're, they're a commodity because, they go through, they go through the same-- They should go through the tonne of carbon removed there, same as the tonne of carbon removed elsewhere, as long as it's verified in the same way. And so what's pretty cool is we can be globally competitive regardless of some of the infrastructure challenges that exist in Africa.
So for a lot of manufacturing industries, it's very hard for African nations to be globally competitive. But actually in CDR, biochar-based CDR, we can actually be globally competitive, which is super exciting for industry to grow in that way.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. 'Cause when I think about, and like maybe this came from your father, and I'm sure y- all of you have your own thoughts on this, but, even if you take away the historical difficulties as like the super light way of putting what's happened to Africa by like Europe and America, but also just like the lack of navigable rivers and how far inland a lot of stuff is, it's just like not...
It's just like hard to move stuff around in.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Typically, like road access the fact that we work in very rural communities, very close to where the farmers and the feed stock is, and then you'll be very far from a port, typically that's a huge problem, right? But now, if I have extremely strong MRV and tracking, like that's not a problem for me.
I can create that digital product, I can export it, and I don't have to deal with the other downsides. In fact, my cost of removing may actually be better because I'm in this other very remote area. So it completely turns things on the head, like on their head in that way, which is like honestly so cool.
Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: And are the farmers and growers, are they supportive of putting biochar in their fields? Do they get it? Is there still, like still learning? What's it.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. So this is like the key BIG thesis that like for in order for biochar to scale, you have to sit on top of existing physical. So that's, existing agribusinesses. They have the permitting, they have the land, they have the weigh bridge. The existing physical regulatory, and then the key, I think, was social infrastructure.
And so if you're telling someone, "Hey, I either make my daily bread from this piece of land," or, "I feed my family from this piece of land," and you want to suddenly put some products that I've not go- never heard of in the land, as a complete stranger, people will be-- look side at you and tell you no. But the fact that these are businesses that are the main off-takers of oftentimes their main product that employ their family members or some of them, in different seasonal times the trust is already strong.
And so for you to say, "Hey, just on this section of your plot, put 50 kg into the ground and let's see how it goes and we can compare." And that's what we did for the cassava trials, you know. We carved out usually about a 25% of the plot they had, and then we would just do-- be able to compare side by side.
And you would always see within the first four to six, four to six, four to seven weeks the speed of growth. That's where you always see the largest difference. But then when it's time to harvest, then you could actually see the actual weight of the harvest being materially, higher. On the low end, 20, 21%.
On the high end, up to 50%. But that would, that would vary based on the application rate we would use. on the low end, five tonnes per hectare. On the high end, 20 tonnes per hectare.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. I'm trying to think if there's any other case where I've seen tubers be improved with biochar and rate of growth. I feel like that's all above ground growth. Is there... Am I forgetting anything? There, there's no, like, carrots or potatoes that are doing this. It's just, is cassava it?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Cassava, yeah, cassava tube. In fact the way we even do the planting, we... People have mounds, where they make these mounds, and then we would p- put a hole in the mound and then insert the biochar in the hole and then close. so we've done some maize, but we haven't had the maize harvest yet. But yeah, we have to come up with, like, okay, what's the best protocol for putting it in the ground, and how do we do it efficiently?
And it is, it- honestly, it is expensive to do, last mile, application, i.e., directly to the smaller farmers, 'cause you can't increase their costs, so you have to take on all the cost of getting it to them directly. maybe over time, again, agronomic pull, people will come and pick up. That would be ideal for us, because they're like, "Okay, there's enough value."
But in the beginning, you take on all that cost. yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, but last mile is a famously difficult problem to solve, and it can really eat into your thin.
margins.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, th- that's where certainly the carbon revenue helps materially, and that's why maybe we can make a price... we made and have made a case for high initial pricing for them with that last mile revenue and taking on the cost to almost seed and build the market, at least in Nigeria.
but then it also helps, so you have... We have another distribution channel where we go to people who are already working with very large numbers of farmers. In this case, one partner works with about half a million farmers in northern Nigeria. They already give them fertilizer. They already monitor and do, like, MRV and tracking on the plot performance.
And so for them, it's saying, "Hey, I can reduce the amount of fertilizer you need to give these farmers, and you can get the same yield or in some cases a bit better yield. and then let's... And then it's risk-free for you. If I save you money on fertilizer, you pay me half the savings." So that's also another approach we've taken to kind of reduce the cost of our last mile delivery.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting. W- I think you were toying with the idea of having mobile units at some point, but m- maybe that didn't h- for this reason, I think, right?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, yeah. We, I mean a lot of what's nice since even we were looking at mobile a lot of the methodologies have come Isometric and Rainbow have both released quite comprehensive mobile methodologies. The technology has also continued to improve, which again is, like, our view, if you think of, like, things like, okay, note transcription for, like, AI note takers.
People that were doing that when the technology was expensive and not bad now are, like, so far ahead because the technology is... Even, like, solar, I guess, is another good example. Eventually, if you position yourself the cost of both the technology and its performance is gonna con- like, materially improve.
And so if you can do it at, maybe when the technology is not as good or the methodology is still early, then you can be f- way far ahead. but to answer your question directly around mobile, we've seen, like rice husk is a great one. Kokas is another. we still need to better, structure some of the way those supply chains run, and, as an early company, you can't do too many things, so we kind of wanna nail the large agribusiness GTM approach.
But we are looking at actually getting some grant funding to better explore some mobile and even wet biomass opportunities.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. does this biochar not go back into palm fields because the causal link between putting the biochar in and the marketing of the kernel is just, like, too far apart? Is that a part of this?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. not really. I guess for them the palm, even at some of the smallholders who are having the palm plantations, the, because of the maturity of the trees the impact is not as strong as the seasonal crops. If you, if you have a nursery or something that's much earlier in their maturity, biochar will have a lot, much larger immediate impact.
It can improve still the soil, but those impacts on the large trees from the studies we've looked at are on, like the 24 to 36-month, like, cycle. But if you have a much, younger tree, you'll have much better, biochar impact. The soil impact will be further felt. Yeah. It's kinda like a if you...
Some people who are a bit shorter will say, like, "Oh I didn't eat enough veggies when I was young, and then that's why they're short now." Where if they eat veggies now, it doesn't really make a big difference. yeah.
Ross Kenyon: makes sense. whi-which state are you guys in or multiple states?
Uzoma Ayogu: Cross River State, in terms of the pilot site, so that's bordering Cameroon. but we've looked at, I mean, I wouldn't even say we're only N- we're definitely not only Nigeria specific. We've seen a lot of exciting opportunities in West Africa. Opportunistically looked at some in East Africa, one in Southern Africa.
but we do think it's important to kind of have a strong geographic base and be kind of the known player in that area.
Ross Kenyon: Well, so you're looking.
Uzoma Ayogu: So West Africa is kind of our view.
Ross Kenyon: You s- H- Sorry, you said you think West Africa is your view? Is that what you said?
Uzoma Ayogu: West Africans are definitely up here, yeah, in that way. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I've heard, I've heard stories of people,... I went to Nigeria years ago, as and I heard stories of people, like even doing business in the like long, skinny countries west of Nigeria, like Benin and Togo, like crossing those borders are like, I think the customs are like very expensive. It's like, people get like, it's hard to cross those borders. It's not easy. I was asked for a bribe on my way into Nigeria.
like, because I didn't have like the right stamp on my yellow, fever.
Uzoma Ayogu: Fever.
Ross Kenyon: And I was like, "I did it.
I got the shot." But.
it was just.
Uzoma Ayogu: yeah, Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: it, is that like a problem for like crossing border? Is that still an issue to the same extent like that?
Uzoma Ayogu: Oh, ECOWAS, I don't know, what year was that? ECOWAS is pretty, is a lot stronger would.
Ross Kenyon: '11? Okay, so there's like a free trade agreement these countries.
Uzoma Ayogu: Free trade, yeah. So yeah, so the West Africa block, which is, which is pretty great, but you will see some distinction between Francophone and Anglophone West Africa. Francophone in many ways is very easy.
I mean, same currency, right? So CFA, that's very nice. but between the Anglophone countries, separate currencies. I would say that Zasala, there's actually a really good partner that makes it quite easy to register entities across West African countries pretty easily. and yeah, there's definitely nuances in, like, how people do business, but again, I think people are like, "Oh, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere."
That's kind of how that view around Nigeria, like it's never as hard as Nigeria, so if you can make it work here, can kind of make it work in other places. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I've always had a lot of faith in you guys. Re- like, s- as long as I meet with people and in the same way that Y Combinator is like, "The idea's not that good, but like, I basically think you're gonna figure it out." And I have that with companies I work with sometimes too, and I've had that for you in particular, where I'm like, "I think you're probably gonna, like, keep hammering at this thing until you figure out how to make.
Uzoma Ayogu: to figure it out.
Ross Kenyon: And it sounds... And you did.
Uzoma Ayogu: Ross. I appreciate Yeah, I mean, in many ways, yeah. It was like, "Oh, is this thing gonna work? Are we gonna be able to make this work?" I remember, I think you were the fir- you were the first person I told that we, yeah, we got Milkywire, as our first customer, which was really great.
Yeah. And I think, I think they were excited about, like, our view of, okay, to scale this, you need to sit on top of existing infrastructure. Spending the two, three years to try and get the project financed, to buy the land, to get the permit, all, by that time, market has moved. so yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, getting the stamp from Milkywire is maybe the best single proxy or heuristic for quality that exists in CDR. Like, if you're able to... Yeah, Aidan and Robert Höglund and Anna Samuelson, like if they're like, "This this is g- that's..." Okay, it's hard to impress these people. Like, they're serious people.
Uzoma Ayogu: They've seen so much. yeah.
Ross Kenyon: and you did it.
Uzoma Ayogu: and they're great as partners, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: If you're listening right now and you're, and you haven't yet gone through the Milkywire process, I would say like start.
Uzoma Ayogu: even I always tell people that actually, like even for YC, I would tell people, "Oh, you should just do the application. It'll help crystallize your thinking. It'll help..." Yeah, so that just helps in and of itself. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: You keep talking about the capital stack and like sitting on top of other, of like just like the agricultural value chains. What exactly do you mean by that and where do you plug in and how does this make sense for... These companies are big and they oftentimes are conservative and not making, big changes to operations and famously thin margins.
So why work with you? Like how do you break into that?
Uzoma Ayogu: S- yeah, we ended up making our manufacturing a mobile unit in Nigeria, using an existing design. and we have basically put that on the back of a vehicle. We bring it down to the sites, and we let people see what it's like to... We take their residue, and we put it in that mobile system, and then we make the biochar on site.
And it-- You see that some of the excitement both from-- 'Cause now you have some bottoms up where the team the factory managers the people on the plant are like, "Oh, actually this is how this works. Oh, maybe a larger system can go in this place." Kind of explain the system to them. and if you can get that go ahead to do that mobile trial, again, it's, it's easy for them.
It's, you just have to come and set up for a day, run it, see what it looks like. that creates a lot of like, "Okay, this is real." And then, we, again, we make it pretty easy from the perspective of give me some space, give me a feedstock. the amount of energy I use is quite marginal. You're already running a 24/7 process most of the time.
And so, let's make this work. And so again, using a system that isn't huge, so let's say they have 10,000 tonnes of feedstock, or residue, I might not say, "Hey, I'm gonna bring a system that can process all 10,000 tonnes." We'll just start off with 1,000, and then we can bring in a larger system later.
So a lot of it is, it's, it's project specific, but it-- The goal is not to have 1,000, 2,000. I think 100 very large could make a huge impact in terms of removals. I mean, I think top the ninth biggest CDR company in terms of deliveries is about 30,000 tonnes. if we were to part- We have some partners that have in the pipeline, like they alone could be 20,000 to even 60,000 tonnes a year.
So yeah, it's finding the right partners. It's long sales cycle or yeah, partnership cycle. But, yeah, you just to build trust. That's the most important thing. And I think there are some other players who have like looked at this model of, "Okay, how do I partner with agri-processors?" And maybe they approach it from maybe a top-down standpoint.
We're approaching it very much from a, "We're like you. We did this, it worked for us. Let's see how we can make this work." And some of these people are our old like customers and people we've worked with over the last 10 years, which is pretty-- makes it a lot easier too.
Ross Kenyon: You've already built the trust. You already know a lot of these people. You've been doing business in Nigeria for years and years at this point, and they're able to be like, "Okay, this is a, serious operation. These people know what they're doing." You've done that work, and that doesn't come overnight either.
That's like.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, it doesn't. Yeah. It, it definitely is beginning to compound, which is.
Ross Kenyon: I think it's just farming in general. It's the same in the US too. Like, if you just show up somewhere and you're like, "I got a cool new thing for farmers," most farmers are like, "-huh.
Don't believe.
you at all. No, thank.
you.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, And I think even telling them, like, it was actually really hard for us to do this, and we don't think everyone that wants to go and do this should have to go through, two, three quarters of how to make the machine run well, figuring out the right MRV structure, hiring and training the team, how to showing the traceability of, like the raw material feedstock, like, all those steps.
yeah, w- w- we think, again, to catalyze the industry, you need to make it easy for people to adopt. And so telling people, "Hey, I've gone through all these things you're worried about, and here's how I solved them step by step. They're real worries, and I've-- and here's how I've overcome them, and I don't want you to have to go through that pain."
And then I can be flexible about how we share value is powerful, I.
think.
Ross Kenyon: I've long loved the, diasporic story and then coming back to the homeland kind of thing. Are there commercial advantages to it too? I mean, Nigerians are everywhere, like cult- all around the world.
c.
like often done pretty well in business. Like, there's a lot of, like, prominent, like, art and business people that are in...
Like, is there a way to, like, plug into that can... No one else has that available to them. Is that, is it useful to you or not.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah I think it's, it's useful from a talent standpoint, certainly. Recruiting very talented people to come and work who have a connection to kind of, I call it the real African growth story. that's like my thing. so there's, there's that. But I think some of it is helpful from a... There's a very small nexus of people who, like okay, have a global background so that they- either their education or the place they worked or their experience and training is kind of recognizable to the Western CDR VCM market.
And then the people that have also now spent time on the ground slogging through things, actually being in the rural areas who can, like... There's a very small nexus of where that overlaps, sits, and that's where I think where we, yeah, are very well-positioned. but I would say also from a, like no one is coming to save you, we have to save ourselves, like that is also like a very powerful view.
'Cause if you look at who gets impacted the most from climate change, it is like largely a lot of the smallholder stakeholders we work with. We've seen even ourselves like, "Oh wow, some of the supply, supplies reduced over the, over the years from these different areas." Like y- you... It is not a idea.
It's not a, "Oh, this should be what I should do or care about." Like, you actually see the impact in people's lives, right? Like, not just the inconvenience of, ah, summer is so much hotter this year. That you actually see like the livelihood changes. And so now it's like, wow the people being impacted can actually now create, be part of making that difference and like, changing their, some of their destiny or their children's destiny.
So I think that's also very powerful too. And that helps when it's very hard, being able to remember why you're doing this work. We have this thing called North Star and next step. So North Star, you're, you're reminded why you're doing what you're doing. and you don't know how you're gonna achieve the very big thing, but all you have to know is like the next step and make sure you're moving like in the right direction.
Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, let's get out the, to utilize that a little bit more. It's ni- nice to keep the vision in mind, and also.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Just immediate. Yeah, immediate next thing. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: you've,... When did Releaf get founded? What year was that?
Uzoma Ayogu: 2017, but we've been working on it in college since, January 2016 or yeah, or even like the most earliest date would've been July 2015. But I kind of paired up with Kenna and Isaiah January 2016. So yeah, it's been over a decade. but yeah, we graduated college May 2017.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was gonna guess 2017, but it sounded too long ago to me. I guess that's, Nori was also 2017. That's.
Uzoma Ayogu: Ah, okay. Wow.
Ross Kenyon: really old though.
Uzoma Ayogu: time. It's all of my 20s.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, especially for CDR, that's, that's super long. Granted, not all of it was in CDR, but one, first question here, they're a little bit nested, but the first one is just how do you keep a company alive for that long?
That's a really long time to keep going, and especially like.
n without.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, juking and jiving.
Ross Kenyon: pivoting and jiving. Okay, maybe that is the answer.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Yeah, I, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: start.
there.
Uzoma Ayogu: yeah. I think the most important thing is just being, like, brutally honest about what the market is telling you. and so lead with, like, strong thesis around, you ask even, oh, do they have PMF? Like, what you believe. And for me the best indicator, one of the learnings I got from actually Shola from Paystack is that the best indicator of PMF is you're growing.
Like, people are demanding whatever you're, you're, you're trying to sell. And if you begin to not be able to grow, you find creative ways around how to keep growing. And if you can't grow anymore, then you probably are not in the right market. And so, like, you need to, you need to be thoughtful about, that and then continuing to, like, chase that.
And then just being thoughtful about, okay, what are the capabilities you've built, and how can you apply that in a market to differentiate yourself again? Can it grow or provide a service better than what's being provided? But yeah a lot of it is just being honest about what's actually happening and then, being resilient enough and thoughtful enough about how to change your approach, I would say.
Yeah. And yeah, keep just learning. Rate of learning probably is, like... That if someone's like, "Oh, yeah, how do you pivot?" I'm like, "Oh, you wanna make sure you have a pretty high rate of learning and create space for that." Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: For a lot of venture-backed companies the mantra, especially during boom macro times, is that your investors will say, like, "Spend the money we gave you and keep growing." But my inference from working with you is you tend to be a lot more conservative. You kind of being like, "Actually, we prefer to have a treasury that's well-funded and that can, weather these storms, and we're not actually Is that, is that, is that true?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, yeah. Maybe, like, not as much on the extreme side, but 100%, like, where we, yeah, in the boom years, we'll call it boom years, but like call it 2021, 2022, it was certainly like, get the expensive management team, grow the revenue. You'll figure out the the cost structure later.
very much I'd say in these markets, especially, like the volatility in some emerging markets, that that doesn't work. You want your unit economics to be strong from literally from day one. that's very much how we've kind of structured the BIG approach. you want to fundamentally believe that, your customers become your main funding source over the long term, that equity is only, to grow what's already profitable at making money.
and that can be hard in, like, things that require infrastructure, et cetera, but then you need to say, "Okay, how capital efficient is this infrastructure?" Can it pay itself back in 24 months? Is kind of our hurdle rate. and so yeah, I think it's very much like grow, but not grow revenue. You wanna grow absolute profit is kind of more the metric, we focused on.
Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, growing revenue without growing profit means you have to go back to your investors and ask for more money.
Uzoma Ayogu: Exactly.
Ross Kenyon: spending your money faster, but you're...
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. And again, there's of course like there's, spend money and then the breakthrough, you can do more. Like, of course that, that's still important. But your investors also, they love it if you make money 'cause then you don't have to keep diluting them, you And burning equity. Yeah. So.
Ross Kenyon: What advice might you have for, I guess there's different categories here, probably business in general, but also there are CDR project developers who skipped your whole first many years of just.
Uzoma Ayogu: yeah.
Ross Kenyon: a, yeah, nut cracking But what about, I think one of the company types that I have the most hope for are those that are, companies that have large amounts of waste biomass, liability biomass that they're gonna transform into value.
That I think is a, is a type that we all look at and think they're gonna be okay relative to.
many others.
But, there's also who has some of that yourself, but you're also servicing companies like that. yeah, give advice to at least some of the groups that I named, 'cause there are several.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yes. so maybe like Call it, greenfield project developers. yeah, I think you d- you just ha- you have to figure out maybe some approach. And maybe the greenfield project developer, their background is, I don't know, bio-bitumen or asphalt roads, and so they have-- they understand like, "Oh, this co-product of some biochars, I actually re- I'm really good at doing that, and then I can do the CDR stuff."
So even if they don't have that, co-operating business where they have the biomass, ideally in some part of the stack, whether it's access to the biomass, maybe access to financing for the machines, maybe it's how you run the machine, so your background is doing, I don't know, super large steel, many of like machinery or like...
There should be something in where you s- have some zone of genius or some compounded advantage, ideally along that stack, whether could even maybe be on the credit sales side or maybe could be sales of the physical product, where again, you can kind of say "This is kind of where my niche sits and this is where I can be a bit better."
I think re- realistically that should be how people approach the market because there's probably, too many projects that are just, not just, but are just are sitting at the conception stage and someone's like, "Well, why you versus so and so?" And so being thoughtful about here's how, where I've developed some zone of genius, or compounded advantage, why I can take this forward.
This, that's like my two cents for maybe you could call it a greenfield project developer who maybe doesn't have a large, operating facility. for people who, do have a lot of liability biomass or waste biomass, come to.
BIG.
Well, if you wanna do it yourself, very, that's good.
but just be ready to figure out how you split resources, time, stakeholder communication, shareholder communication as a result, 'cause that's gonna be pretty important. yeah. And figure out what you wanna do yourself versus maybe have others support you with. yeah.
Ross Kenyon: What's.
Uzoma Ayogu: Oh, and then probably the thing I will say is I think there is a-- I mean, you probably talk about this a lot in a lot of your podcasts, but I think it's largely a, sup- like now a supply constrained market.
So yeah, more a bit more demand than maybe supply. I think a lot of supply is coming online, actually, like a good amount of CapEx has been deployed. and so we are gonna see people who can just focus on deliverability versus saying, "Oh, I'm gonna do thirty thousand, fifty thousand." You know, do the first one thousand, then three thousand.
Build that credibility. You'll likely be able to access financing to scale up when if you can do that, essentially. So I think, people should be thoughtful about how they phase and structure projects too. But I definitely understand like, "Oh I can only get financing if it's- 20,000 tonnes of removals a year.
But in some ways it's, our approach has been doing it in, to your point around Canada and like, oh, treasury, like de-risk, de-risk in stages. Do that thoughtfully. Otherwise, you set up a huge project and then boom, it goes to zero and you're not, you don't, you couldn't really figure out what part of the project broke down 'cause you had to manage like six new things at a time versus trying to de-risk one thing at a time.
Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: What's next?
Uzoma Ayogu: Yes. Yes. so yeah, since our closing the pre-seed for BIG, we are actively, just signing our first external term sheet to deploy the system and then also getting just indicative pipeline for like the next three, four. we are also in now conversation with some pretty large off-takers, so getting-- trying to get the off-take agreements, ensure we have the biomass, locked up and then just say, "Hey, I just need a little bit more money to unlock this bottleneck in my processing capacity."
and so that would look like debt, but also maybe additional equity. our goal is to be super clear on, hey, we can remove a fully blown cost of removal, get that closer to 50 to $70 per tonne. And like, if we can do that, we think that's, that's gonna be a really important metric for us to really point to say this is why, we're gonna be very, competitive in this market.
And then I think also there's gonna be a lot of consolidation, in the next few years in the biochar market. So again the thing that can help, differentiate you, is I would say your cost of removal. yeah. and then on the Releaf side, like I said, there's just some really exciting things we're doing on maybe the B2C side of things, and then also just nice to see Releaf scaling up its current biochar operations.
So, exciting things on both fronts happening.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. That's wonderful. I'm glad to hear all of that. I was hoping you might say that you and Kenna might get a Nollywood, biopic about y- your story. When i- is that gonna happen too?
Uzoma Ayogu: So I think when we release this podcast, I think the folks will pick it up and we'll, we'll go from there.
Ross Kenyon: That's goal.
Huge listenership in.
Uzoma Ayogu: Boom. Yeah, yeah.
yeah.
yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you again, Uzo. It's so fun working with you and seeing your development over the past couple years, and I'm glad we got to do this.
Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Thanks Ross for being as persistent and open and being excited about our story. 'Cause sometimes we forget that we have exciting stories to tell that inspire and, encourage people. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you're, you're one of a kind. I, like there's like, I don't think that various parts of your story, there's no one else that even I can compare to really. I think it's, it's like only you. So yeah, storyteller recognizes story. I'm like, yes.
