Following closure of the company’s seed financing round, the investment – from Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) and Anglo American – will also be used to build a subsequent commercial project.
Created in 2020 by Anglo American and Deep Science Ventures (DSV), MZT aims to accelerate the decarbonisation potential across key industries.
Having also received a grant from payments company Stripe for early stage R&D, the company was also award funding from the UK’s Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to design a first pilot plant.
Commenting on the scaling up of its commercial processes, Dr. Shiladitya Ghosh, Co-founder, CPO, MZT, said, “Going from concept to pilot and then to commercial scale in less than half a decade speaks volumes about how the world views our market’s potential as hyper-critical.”
“This milestone is the first of many in our journey to fulfilling that potential aided with early backing from government, industry, and society.”
Another major milestone was reached after MZT and carbon sequestration company 44.01 were awarded $1m for their joint project entitled Project Hajar, which was one of winners of the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition backed by entrepreneur Elon Musk and the Foundation.
By using electrochemical direct air capture (DAC), MZT aims to utilise the growing renewable and low-carbon electricity supply to help provide high-grade CO2 that easily integrates downstream.
“MZT has combined mature technologies with innovative yet simple chemistry to create a heat-free, modular, and energy-efficient DAC process that is economical and works at ambient conditions,” said Dr. Gael Gobaille-Shaw, Co-founder, CTO, MZT.
“By making use of existing technology and widely available chemicals, we can rapidly scale-up and deploy our plants to contribute to the large-scale removal required within our tight planetary deadline.”