Why discovery grants

Novel carbon removal pathways attract purchases and investment before anyone has produced the basic field datasets that tell us whether an approach works outside the lab. Discovery grants fill that gap, and a well-executed null result is as valuable an output as a validated hypothesis: it may help prevent larger investments in approaches that are unlikely to work.

These grants came out of Category A of our 2026 call for proposals, the discovery track for genuinely untested carbon removal concepts at TRL 3-4. Category B, for methods that have proven themselves at pilot scale and need catalytic pre-purchases to cross the valley of death, produced the carbon removal purchases we announced in September. Category A is for discovery-stage research, where the right instrument is a grant rather than a purchase, because the expected output is knowledge rather than tonnes of removal. These four awards follow the three research grants made through the Climate Transformation Fund in 2025.

The four grants

Mafix Inc. (USD 180,000), enhanced rock weathering. Rock designed to weather in as fast as a single growing season instead of decades. Mafix, a Stanford spinout whose underlying chemistry was published in Nature in 2025, thermochemically activates cheap, abundant minerals into phases that weather orders of magnitude faster than the raw basalt and olivine used in conventional ERW. This grant funds the first field validation of the activated material, with parallel trials in Illinois corn systems and tea and rice systems in India. The cross-geography comparison directly tests whether the weathering advantage observed in mesocosms holds under real agricultural conditions.

North Carolina State University, BioRock (USD 141,024), biomass carbon removal and storage. A cement shell built to keep biomass carbon out of the atmosphere while also providing infrastructure co-benefits. A team led by Dr. Joe Sagues, along with three other investigators at NC State, is testing whether biomass encapsulated in engineered cementitious shells stays preserved at timescales relevant to carbon removal. The proposed preservation mechanisms rest on established concrete and microbial science, but nobody has systematically studied them for biomass storage. The grant produces the first durability dataset for encapsulated biomass under aerobic and anaerobic conditions, along with experimentally grounded life cycle carbon accounting and techno-economic assessment.

University of Toronto, eMining Consortium (USD 150,000), ocean alkalinity enhancement. Turning mine waste into the reagents that let the ocean absorb more CO2. Three University of Toronto labs are working in parallel on a closed-loop electrochemical process that produces OAE reagents from mine tailings, with high-purity silica as a saleable co-product. Most OAE research focuses on ocean-side chemistry; this project fills the upstream engineering gap of how reagents get produced and at what cost. Confirmed co-funding from Canadian sources - including seed funding from the Lawson Climate Institute - brings total project resources to nearly 1.75 times the grant amount.

Banyu Carbon Inc. (USD 170,367), direct air capture. A DAC system that runs on sunlight directly, being tested in Seattle. Banyu, a University of Washington spinoff, has developed proprietary photoacid molecules that drive a sunlight-powered pH swing: alkaline in the dark to absorb CO2 from air, acidic under illumination to release it as concentrated gas. The grant funds the testing of an integrated photoacid DAC system above 100 kg CO2 per year, roughly 1,000 times larger than previous bench-scale tests, together with integrated photovoltaic electricity production. Photoacid DAC uses sunlight as the regeneration energy input itself, a fundamentally different mechanism from the solid sorbent and liquid solvent approaches that dominate the field today.

What happens next

All four grant agreements have been executed and the projects are underway. Each agreement carries defined deliverables, decision gates, and reporting requirements, the same discipline we apply to purchases. Results will emerge over the next nine to eighteen months. The grantees will publish their findings, and we will share what we learn.

“The alkalinity trapped inside silicate rocks is one of the largest untapped resources on the planet. Our breakthrough is releasing it deliberately and quickly, transforming the most abundant rocks on Earth into a fertilizer that feeds crops and permanently removes CO2 at the same time.” Jade Marcus, CEO, Mafix Inc. 

“BioRock has the potential to meet all five critical criteria for carbon removal (durability, low cost, scalability, modularity, and strong co-benefits) by using natural, earth-abundant materials to preserve biomass over the long term while enabling simple, flexible deployment with existing equipment and infrastructure.” Joe Sagues, Biorock

"Milkywire spends an immense amount of time and effort ensuring that the Climate Transformation Fund supports work at the leading edge of carbon removal. This year, we identified four projects pushing the field forward, each pursuing a key open question and producing data that are useful to the industry at large," says Aidan Preston, Ph.D., Senior Impact Manager, Milkywire. 

“This is catalytic funding in its purest form: capital for the stage where the open question is still scientific, not commercial. These are exactly the kind of projects that funding is built for. Whatever they find, we'll know more than we do today. And because transparency is part of every grant we make, so will the rest of the field. That's how one grant ends up accelerating an entire pathway,” says Jennifer Novotney, Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer, WRLD Foundation

Fund the next round

If your company or foundation wants to help fund discovery-stage research that the negative-emissions industry builds on, we would love to talk: impact@milkywire.com. 

And if you are a researcher working on early-stage carbon removal, sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of this page to be notified when our next call for proposals opens.

——————

About Milkywire: Milkywire is an impact firm with eight years of experience helping companies take action for climate and nature, creating ambitious climate strategies and channeling funding to durable carbon removal and other critical solutions that global climate targets depend on. 

Milkywire has facilitated purchases of more than $12 million of durable carbon removal across 45+ projects in more than 20 countries, and is a top-three global carbon removal buyer by project diversity. 

About WRLD Foundation: WRLD Foundation is a US 501(c)(3) public charity and the Climate Transformation Fund's granting partner, receiving donor contributions and administering the legal agreements, disbursement, and oversight for every grant. (European donors can alternatively give through WRLD Foundation Sweden, a separate, independently governed nonprofit.) WRLD Foundation funds catalytic, community-led environmental solutions with complete transparency, turning donor generosity into verified impact across climate, water, and ecosystems.