Aussie startup Farmed Carbon wants to use ancient technology to fix the future
After selling their fintech startup, serial entrepreneurs David Washbrook and Stu Grover have developed carbon removal technology that converts rice straw waste into usable biochar and bitumen products.
It is generally accepted that software businesses are a lot quicker and more straightforward to set up and scale than those involving deep tech solutions, but few entrepreneurs have been on both sides of the fence.
After founding, scaling and exiting their highly successful fintech payments enrichment service Look Who’s Charging, David Washbrook and Stu Grover were ready for their next challenge - they wanted to make a meaningful difference to climate change.
With their fintech nous, the pair could have set up a software company, but in an interview with Capital Brief, Washbrook explains how they believed that a bioengineered solution to a carbon-based problem would have a more direct impact on helping solve the problem.
After setting up a research lab, the pair scoured the globe for a climate problem that could be fixed with a technology that could “remove carbon at a gigaton scale”. After discovering that pyrolysis - a heating reaction in the absence of oxygen - could produce carbon which could then be captured and stored in other materials, Washbrook and Grover set about perfecting the technique using microwave technology.
