The Future is CO2Made: Twelve Raises $57M Series A

Record heat waves in the Pacific Northwest. Historic hurricanes making landfall year after year. The ocean on fire.

Dutifully conserving energy in homes or packing groceries in reusable bags won’t mean­ing­fully reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change when our whole civi­liza­tion is powered by fossil fuels. But rather than giving in to hope­less­ness, we could combine our sense of personal respon­si­bility with incentives for businesses to change how they operate. One place to start is by eliminating petro­chem­i­cals from as many aspects of our daily lives as possible by encouraging companies to stop using them in their products.

That’s the opportunity in front of Twelve, which announced it has raised a $57M Series A from DCVC and other investors this morning. Pioneering carbon trans­for­ma­tion, Twelve helps companies like Mercedes-Benz and Procter & Gamble make products like laundry detergent or foam car dashboards carbon-negative while maintaining the same quality or better of petroleum-based alter­na­tives. What’s more, the company does all this by using waste CO2 from the existing manu­fac­turing supply chain, capturing carbon before it even enters our atmosphere. Your clothes still get clean, but not at the cost of the environment.

Twelve’s advantage is that it doesn’t force companies like P&G to choose between providing products to customers and taking steps to reduce their envi­ron­mental impact. Instead, it incen­tivizes them to commit to Twelve’s CO2Made products, allowing them to produce better solutions for their customers and the planet.

We led Twelve’s Seed round and invested in the Series A because we believe technology has a role to play in helping address our climate crisis. It’s not a silver bullet. Break­through companies like Twelve will need to stand alongside global efforts from business leaders, world governments and nonprofit orga­ni­za­tions to stem and reverse the changes we’re already seeing to our climate. But Twelve and companies like it are part of the solution.

Twelve is also emblematic of our Deep Tech thesis, which we define as combining computing and new science to reduce the capital and operational costs needed to attack previously intractable problems in nearly any industry. Many of humanity’s largest challenges — the climate crisis among them — have plausible technical solutions, but progress has been slow or impossible because the solutions seemed too expensive. Deep Tech’s use of the computing break­throughs of the past 20 years means companies like Twelve have a viable business helping P&G bring carbon-free Tide to your laundry room.

As we celebrate Twelve’s continued momentum with today’s Series A, we look forward to a future where everything from the shoes we wear to the paint on our walls is CO2Made.