How To Engineer A Carbon-Negative Future

911: What’s Your Climate Emergency?

On a sunny day in San Francisco, California in 2020, Daniel Cavero was in his backyard, tinkering with what looked like a spaceship - a large stainless steel tube with windows, perched next to a makeshift boxing ring. It was an unusual sight, to say the least. Suddenly, his roommate came running down the stairs: “Daniel, there’s a bunch of police outside. And I think it’s because of you.” 

Cavero walked out front to find 14 police cars, a firetruck, and a bomb squad complete with protective gear and a robot designed to defuse explosives. The neighbors, spotting the mysterious contraption from their balcony, had reported a potential bomb threat.

“Can we come in?” the officers asked. “Yeah, of course,” Cavero replied, leading them to the backyard. As the team of officers quickly realized the device was no threat, the conversation shifted. “It actually turned to be more a conversation about why the hell we had a boxing ring and ‘Could they come and box with us?’,” Cavero recalled with a chuckle.

This wasn’t a movie scene or a prank gone wrong. It was just another day in the early life of Noya, a climate-tech startup on a mission to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The “bomb” was actually a repurposed hemp extraction reactor, driven 11 hours from Oregon to serve as a key component in one of Noya’s earliest prototypes.

The incident, while alarming at the time, has become a cherished memory for Cavero. “It was a fun day. It was kind of a circus,” he said, reflecting on the surreal nature of the event. This anecdote perfectly encapsulates the unconventional and sometimes chaotic journey of building a startup from scratch, especially one tackling a challenge as monumental as climate change.

Making it even more remarkable is the backdrop to which it occurred. Cavero and his co-founder, Josh Santos, had quit their jobs just months earlier to pursue their vision of creating a more efficient direct-air-capture (DAC) technology. They were working with a shoestring budget, building their first prototype with materials that cost around $150. The hemp extraction reactor was a key piece of their regeneration system, a crucial component in their DAC process.

These early prototypes were a far cry from the sophisticated technology Noya would later develop, but they represented the company’s core ethos of innovative thinking, resourcefulness, and a willingness to take risks in pursuit of their mission to combat climate change.

Shifting Gears

Cavero’s path to becoming a climate-tech entrepreneur was far from predictable. Born in Venezuela, he came to the United States in 2009 with dreams of becoming a professional mountain biker. “I really wanted to do surf,” Cavero explained, “But surfing was sort of inaccessible for me. The beach was too far and then Venezuela waves are too sporadic. But I really liked that connection with nature and the adrenaline component of that. You know, nature’s dangerous and there’s something beautiful about that. And I think that’s what attracted me to mountain biking.”

Cavero continued, “Once I tried it, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a good replacement for surf.’ Being at the top of a cliff and thinking that it could kill you, but you could conquer it at the same time, is a very exciting feeling to me.”

But it wasn’t just the thrill or the kinship with nature that attracted Cavero to the sport. “I also enjoyed the exploration part of it,” he added. “When I was doing it in the beginning, nobody was really doing it in my hometown. We had to create our own tracks and we had to go explore the mountains. And that component of it was awesome - Building, looking at a mountain and seeing, ‘Okay, how are we going to traverse this?’ It was an interesting problem to solve and sort of interactive with nature at the same time.”

This love for problem-solving, exploration, and even exhilaration would later serve Cavero well in his entrepreneurial journey. His path took an unexpected turn when an injury derailed his professional mountain biking aspirations. But as one door closed, another opened.

During his time away from racing, Cavero found himself captivated by his university professors. “The injury had its silver lining. Did a lot of work in mechanical engineering in school regarding materials and thermodynamics. Had a lot of professors that talked a lot about climate change and had mathematical models explaining it. Very early, I had this concept very well-seeded in my brain that this was a real problem,” he recalled. This early exposure planted a seed that would later blossom into Noya.

Noya's Inception

After graduating, Cavero’s career took him to San Francisco, where he ended up in a house with seven roommates - including Santos, his future co-founder. The two bonded over a wide range of activities, including snowboarding, hiking, and camping. Cavero described Santos as, “a risk taker, for sure.” Not only that, but their shared Latin backgrounds and complementary communication styles formed the basis of a strong partnership.

“We can communicate almost through airwaves,” Cavero said of his relationship with Santos. “There’s something that we have together that our communication is very easy.” He added with a laugh, “We both have Latin backgrounds. And so there’s something there as well where…no matter how stressful or hard a conversation is, there’s that connection back to the Latin roots and what we mostly pull from there are tension breakers, which is basically, make fun of each other…It’s a slight bullying that we apply on each other that, as for Latins, is actually a form of love.”

The idea for Noya emerged from late-night discussions at home about climate change and recycling - Living in an eight-person house, recycling stacked up very quickly. And so, Cavero and Santos found themselves talking about the topics a lot. After exploring various concepts, they stumbled upon the potential of DAC technology. “He [Santos] found this set of papers that were written at Stanford. They described the technology to convert CO2 into something more useful. And we went and talked to the authors of the paper - We just kind of cold-reached out and they were happy to talk to us…We learned a lot about the industry doing the research and figured out that to capture CO2, there’s no real scientific breakthrough required. We’d known how to do it for about 100 years now.”

With this realization, Cavero and Santos dove headfirst into research and development, eventually building the early prototype that would later cause a stir with the local bomb squad. “And then I think another big step was the realization that, at the moment, we could use cooling towers, which is this piece of equipment that is sort of ubiquitous in industry, as a vehicle for a process. And so that really got us to think,” Cavero recounted.

The decision to quit their jobs and pursue Noya full-time wasn’t taken lightly, but Cavero approached it with a pragmatic mindset. “I could calculate my expenses to be extremely low if I needed them to be,” he explained. “And I also thought a career change could help. So even if I failed, I had an engineering degree. I was in the Bay Area. There was really no risk. Cavero added fondly, “There’s the other thing I think that really helped, which is the machine captured CO2. And so, our smart-product prototype actually worked. And that was a fun day. That was an exciting moment. I think adrenaline and those types of wins, again, I really like them. I think that definitely helped me sort of bolster through any doubts.”

This period of Noya’s development was marked by intense curiosity and hands-on experimentation. Their early work caught the attention of their first real investor, leading to a pivotal moment when they had to quickly assemble their most advanced prototype at the time to demonstrate its potential. This pressure-cooker environment, where they were racing against time to prove their concept, set the tone for Noya’s future development: always striving to make their technology more efficient and scalable.

Solidifying the Idea

Noya’s technology has undergone significant evolution since those early backyard experiments: “The first one was a very, very small sort of fish tank-sized machine. It was very, very simple, and it captured very little CO2.”

Cavero and Santos had recognized a need for two parts: (i) capturing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in some sort of medium and (ii) regenerating it, or essentially squeezing the carbon dioxide out of the medium into a pure form that could be stored. Their fish tank prototype developed into a focus on retrofitting industrial cooling towers with a liquid solution to capture carbon dioxide. “The original concept with the cooling tower was that we could essentially reutilize CAPEX that people were already putting to use for their function of cooling part of a process,” Cavero explained.

“The first one that really felt like, ‘Okay, this is a process. This is real. This could be real.’ was: I essentially built a cooling tower in the backyard and had a reactor for the regeneration process…And it was really exciting to be able to do it with such little money. The cooling tower was essentially an oil drum that someone gave us for free and a sprinkler, like a garden sprinkler that sprayed water downwards and a small fan that pulled air upwards. And so, water would fall down with the chemicals that absorb CO2. Air would flow up, get in contact with the water, absorb the water and would absorb the CO2…We made it with, I think it was 150 bucks. We’d made the whole thing. That was the first time I saw it in action.”

This was the technology that put Noya on the map. However, changes in legislation and further research led them to pivot towards standalone machines using solid sorbents. The Inflation Reduction Act, which stipulates a minimum quantity of carbon dioxide captured per location to get granted credits, was a key factor in this decision. “That quantity is a thousand tons per year and cooling towers were now a cap for us,” Cavero elaborated.

This pivot, while challenging, opened up new opportunities. “It definitely increased the complexity, but it also improved our opportunity,” Cavero noted. “The U.S. essentially is the most progressive country in the world for climate change technology. We’re super thankful and were happy to make that pivot.”

The current iteration of Noya’s technology represents a significant leap forward and takes the form of cylinders made of activated carbon. “Our technology today is a solid, porous substrate that is coated with our active ingredient,” Cavero explained. “We blow air through this porous sponge, it captures CO2, and then to heat it up and reverse the reaction of capture, we just run current through it, through the sorbent itself. And so, that minimizes the amount of moving parts.” This unique feature of solely using electricity to heat the sorbent means that Noya can turn its system on and off to provide grid services, making Noya an ideal partner for renewable power producers - It can run whenever the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

This approach has simplified the process, reduced energy consumption, and minimized the machine’s footprint - crucial factors for scaling the technology. “The capture and regeneration reactor are now one single unit. So land, especially square footage, is much smaller and CAPEX is much smaller. And it also turns out that energy use is much smaller because heating up a solid is usually easier than heating up a liquid…It’s also much cheaper in terms of assembly,” Cavero added. 

The shift to solid sorbents and the use of activated carbon cylinders is a key differentiator for Noya. While it marked a crucial technological evolution, it also marked a development in Cavero and Santos’s approach to pitching to investors. “The whole industry is extremely metrics-driven,” Cavero described. “It really comes down to cost of capture. There’s like that one simple metric, really. And that carried us through, I would say, for the first three years…Then there is a factor of deployability: ‘How quickly can you build up your company?’ - That’s essentially the question…So understanding, ‘What are the barriers of deployment?’ As an engineer, there’s so many barriers to making something work. But there are so many other ones outside of that scope that you truly don’t think of as an engineer: social factors and political factors, especially when you’re trying to build things that in some areas of the world are still considered controversial.”

Community acceptance is crucial for scaling up carbon removal technology, and Noya has positioned itself to address this through its unique technological advantage - the ability to produce clean water alongside carbon removal credits. This dual benefit could prove particularly valuable in water-scarce communities, demonstrating Noya’s commitment to delivering local benefits wherever it builds.

Navigating this transition in both technology and communications further refined Noya’s positioning in the carbon removal industry. But it was just one aspect of Noya’s journey. The path of entrepreneurship alone brought its own set of challenges and triumphs.

From Skepticism to Series A

In the early days, Cavero recalled, “99 percent of the people we talked to told us it was a bad idea. Even our roommates and our friends, our close friends, were like, ‘It’s too hard. The problem’s too massive. How are you going to get funding? What are you going to do if you don’t get funding? It’s not going to work because of this and this and this and this.’” But rather than discourage them, this skepticism fueled their determination.

“The way I thought about it was completely the opposite,” Cavero said. “It’s massive. We have to do something.” It was this frame of thinking, curiosity, and even a little bit of panic that carried him and Santos forward. “The more we read, the more we realized the problem is massive. But the impetus or the motivation was against what people were saying.”

This resilience has paid off. Noya has raised approximately $22 million from investors including, but not limited to, Fifty Years, Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures, and Collaborative Fund. Cavero spoke warmly of their investors: “They have been fantastic. They truly feel like partners and [we’re] very, very thankful for their support…They really taught us a lot.”

Noya’s latest funding round, an $11 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures and Collaborative Fund, is a testament to the growing confidence in Noya’s approach. Noya plans to use the funds to hire new team members, expand testing and manufacturing capabilities, and deploy a first commercial pilot. Cavero shared, “It’ll likely be proximal to headquarters [in Oakland, California]…It’ll be nice to have a machine pulling CO2 from the atmosphere in the Bay Area. I think that’s going to be exciting.”

Cavero and Santos have also secured partnerships with forward-thinking companies like Shopify, who have purchased carbon removal credits Noya has yet to produce. “They’ve been very, very supportive in our growth and our research. And so, those types of partners are great now,” Cavero noted. Shopify’s commitment to purchase over 1,445 tons of carbon removal from Noya over the next several years is a significant milestone for the company.

This journey from backyard prototyping to a well-funded, well-supported, innovative climate-tech company underscores the potential of Noya’s technology and the growing recognition of the importance of carbon removal in addressing climate change.

Beyond Capture

As Noya prepares for its first commercial deployment, Cavero’s vision remains ambitious yet grounded in a profound hope for the planet. “My vision is that we get to a point where we are not needed anymore,” he stated. “I want to see the temperature tick mark go down. That’s what I want Noya to do.”

Interestingly, Noya has put considerable thought into the aesthetic appeal of their machines. “We have taken quite a bit of care to make the machine not look monstrous,” Cavero noted. “And for that reason, we’re likely going to be pretty public about its visual representation and how it works.”

This attention to aesthetics, paired with Noya’s emphasis on transparency - The company is also designing an end-to-end Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification system - reflects its holistic approach to deploying their technology. They understand that for DAC to be widely adopted, it needs to be not just effective and efficient, but also acceptable to the communities where it’s deployed.

The future for Noya looks bright, with the carbon removal market poised for rapid growth in the coming years. As companies and governments race to implement plans to meet their net-zero goals, Noya is well-positioned to play a crucial role. The UN’s International Panel on Climate Change has deemed carbon removal “essential” to keep global temperatures from rising above 2˚C, underlining the importance of Noya’s work.

For aspiring entrepreneurs looking to make a similar impact, Cavero’s advice is simple: Follow your interests, take risks, don’t be afraid to reach out to people, no matter how out-of-reach they may seem, and let people help you.

“People are so helpful, generally,” he said. “If I have one belief, it is that people are good and their existence is good. And that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. I want to allow for people to keep existing.”

Cavero shared a personal anecdote to illustrate this point. Early in Noya’s journey, he reached out to Anish Kapoor, the renowned architect who designed the Cloud Gate sculpture (commonly known as “The Bean”) in Chicago, Illinois. “I did it out of pure fandom. I had zero hope and I was just doing it because I love The Bean. I thought we could make something like The Bean that could capture CO2,” he recounted. To his surprise, Kapoor’s team responded, opening Cavero’s eyes to the power of bold outreach.

As Noya continues to grow and evolve, Cavero, Santos, and their team remain focused on their ultimate goal of creating a world where carbon capture technology is no longer necessary. It’s a lofty ambition, but as Cavero’s journey from mountain biker to climate-tech innovator shows, sometimes the most improbable paths lead to the most important destinations.

In reflecting on the most rewarding moments of his entrepreneurial journey, Cavero shared a touching memory that demonstrates the collective determination and vision that drives Noya forward: “I was in the chemistry lab with a few of the scientists there and we were talking about some idea that I thought at the moment was kind of wild…a type of idea that you tell people and people are like, ‘It’s impossible. It’s too risky. It’s going to be too hard.’ Everyone in the room was like, ‘Let’s try it. Let’s figure out how to make it work.’…And I just remember feeling something new. Like, I never felt that in my life, where everyone was ready to risk their time and effort for something that was potentially good for the planet.”