Startup awarded $50 million for volcanic rock technique with potential to address growing crisis: 'This … is going to go a long way'
Mati's technology is based on a naturally occurring process called enhanced rock weathering. The company grinds up basalt, a volcanic rock, into fine dust, which is then spread across farmland. As the rock weathers, it reacts with CO2 in the air and locks it away in mineral form for thousands of years, all while enriching soil and improving crop yields.
"This material is the difference between having a crop and having no crop," Mati founder and CEO Shantanu Agarwal said. "We've seen that in Zambia this year. There were farmers who put this in half of the field — and half of the field was like normal — and there was no crop [in the] normal half because everything died because there was a drought."
While the idea sounds low-tech, that's exactly its advantage. Enhanced rock weathering doesn't require fancy machinery or rare minerals. Basalt is widely available, often as a byproduct of construction, and the process itself has been happening in nature for millions of years. Mati's innovation is that the company found a way to scale it for modern agriculture. Mati provides the basalt dust to farmers at no cost, funding the program through carbon credit sales and grant funding.
"You deploy that into carbon removal, you get more than a gigaton of removal every year while increasing income of these farmers who are extremely poor," Agarwal said. By Mati's estimates, around 200 million smallholder farms across low-income countries (covering nearly 900 million acres) could benefit from this soil-boosting, carbon-sequestering dust.
The company's approach is especially appealing because it solves multiple problems at once, pulling carbon from the air, reviving degraded farmland, improving water retention, and boosting productivity — up to 70% in struggling soils. All this could also mean more income and food security for farmers in places such as Zambia, India, and Tanzania, where Mati is already operating.
To scale faster, Mati is offering free licenses to its enterprise platform for any organization willing to share at least 50% of profits with the farmers they serve. "I want to build a market mechanism and scale a nonprofit to global scale, which allows for a large portion of the value to accrue [to] the farmer," Agarwal said. "This Xprize is going to go a long way to push us in that direction."
By the early 2030s, Mati hopes to sell carbon credits for under $100 per ton — a competitive price point in the carbon removal market. In the long run, it wants to go even lower. The startup expects to deliver up to 6,000 tons' worth of credits in 2025. And with fresh funding from the Xprize, Mati is one big step closer to turning farmland into one of the most powerful climate action tools.
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