Funga wants to accelerate carbon sequestration using subsurface fungal biodiversity

Fungi claims to be the first company to harness the power of nature to go low carbon and focus on restoring the biodiversity of underground fungi. The company raised a $4 million round.

The company was founded by ecologist and climatologist Dr. Colin Averill, who combines modern DNA sequencing and machine learning technology with advanced forest microbiome research. With this approach, Funga can place the right biodiverse communities of mycorrhizal fungi in the right place. The strategy is based on the idea that reintroducing microbial biodiversity to wild soils can accelerate plant growth by an average of 64%, which in turn accelerates carbon sequestration.

“Under our feet is an entire galaxy consisting of millions of species of bacteria and fungi. These microscopic organisms have profound implications for forest growth and carbon sequestration, previously overlooked as a way to accelerate natural climate solutions by restoring essential microbial biodiversity in our soil,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Our team at the Crowther Laboratory at ETH Zurich has spent years documenting how these fungi affect tree growth. We have learned that restoring subterranean fungal communities can significantly accelerate plant growth and carbon sequestration. We are grateful for the support of our investors, enabling our team to bring this science from the lab to our forests, advancing biodiversity and climate change mitigation at scale.”

The company’s $4 million seed funding round was led by Azolla Ventures. Other participants in the round include Trail Capital, Best Companies and Shared Future Fund as part of a Collaborative Fund vehicle. Funga representatives tell us that the money will be used to accelerate the development of Funga’s proprietary software and datasets; scale the footprint of your forest microbiome restoration projects; and ultimately to deliver a new class of high performance, sustainable CO2 removal at the pace of increasing demand.

Funga recently launched its first microbiome restoration projects in Lexington, Georgia, in partnership with Conservation Resources. Over the next 18 months, Funga will build an additional 2,500 acres of forest microbiome restoration projects in the pine forests of the southern United States. The company’s goal is to capture at least three billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2050 by rebuilding forests. Funga will measure how much additional carbon dioxide is captured by restoring the forest microbiome and making it available to corporate buyers as part of the carbon emissions. mobile portfolio.

“I first learned about the climate crisis as a freshman during the Myspace era in 2004. Since then, the threat of climate change and the collapse of biodiversity has weighed heavily on me. I see these as two of the biggest challenges for my generation and our planet. At that time, I became fascinated with what we still don’t know about the climate crisis,” says Averill. “What limits our ability to understand how much warming will happen and how fast? When studying the global carbon cycle, you quickly learn that many of these uncertainties lie underground. How soil-dwelling microbial life influences the global carbon cycle and climate projections has been the big question mark in the field.

He spent the next 17 years studying how soil microbial biodiversity controls the ability of forests to act as carbon sinks and protect the planet from climate change. At the time, advances in DNA sequencing technology and computing power enabled Averill and his team to “comb the forest for mushrooms,” as he puts it, and the team used this technology to identify how a mushroom looked like: healthy forest mushroom – microbiome . Identify fungi associated with accelerated tree growth and carbon breakdown.

“Our round is led by Azolla Ventures, which focuses on investing in under-exploited climate opportunities. Rebuilding soil fungi to accelerate tree growth and extract carbon from the air has never been done on a large scale before. It requires dealing with molecular biology, the forestry industry and emerging carbon markets,” says Averill. “It’s hard to find all that experience in one place, so we’ve been kind of a home base for a lot of venture capitalists. It has been a privilege to work with Matthew Nordan and the Azolla team. They support our vision of a biodiversity-focused approach to natural climate solutions in an incredible way.”

The company says its two most important milestones are the fungal DNA profile of more than 1,000 forests, which the team hopes will allow them to see in unprecedented detail how the forest’s fungal microbiome affects forest health and carbon sequestration. The goal is to use the dataset to feed the company’s data platform, which recommends the right combinations of wild mushrooms in the right location to achieve the best carbon sequestration results.

The other milestone is the establishment of 1,000 hectares (~2,500 acres) of projects where we plant trees and “plant” fungal communities in the soil.

The company didn’t share the round’s valuation, but told us it was an equity round, converting about $1 million into SAFE and convertibles. The company’s first $1 million was raised in debt securities in the summer of 2022 and the remaining $3 million was raised through equity financing ending at the end of December 2022.

“I am extremely excited to be working with the incredible team we have put together. I recruited some of the best scientists I know in academia and industry, from places like the US Forest Service, NASA, and top mushroom companies. At the same time, we have been able to recruit entrepreneurial talent with extensive experience building biological and environmental technology companies – we have a very strong combination of talent and experience. I love seeing ideas emerge and people on our team working together,” says Averill. “Our scope is fundamentally limited by how much land we can work and how fast. This includes building excellent relationships with forest owners and rangers who do the real work in the field. None of this can happen without your support and commitment. Part of that is learning how to massively expand wild microbial communities, something that has never been done before. We are using this funding round to mitigate risk and address these challenges.”

The company insists that the climate crisis is just a symptom of a global Earth crisis, saying land conversion, pollution and environmental degradation on a global scale are beginning to push the planet toward a sixth mass extinction event.

“The complexity of life on our planet, biodiversity, is a fundamental support system for planetary life. The more we look, the more we discover that this extinction crisis poses a threat not only to plants and animals, but also to fungi, molds, microorganisms. This is really alarming,” says Averill. “Most species on Earth are microbial. Microbial life was the first to inhabit this planet and will probably be the last. Most of our antibiotics were initially isolated from soil fungi. The biodiversity of life in soil is astounding: a handful of soil easily contains over 1,000 coexisting species of microbes. This microbial biodiversity fundamentally determines how ecosystems recycle materials, how plants access growth-limiting nutrients, how long sequestered carbon remains in the soil, and yet we barely understand it. We are eroding soil biodiversity and microbial life in ecosystems and we don’t know what we are losing. We are almost certainly closing the door on ways to work the land more sustainably. These organisms are the product of billions of years of evolution and have been little studied or used as a critical solution to climate change.”