What’s funding like in the CCUS market right now?

All funding deals in the CCUS market over the last 24 months

Below is the table listing all the deals. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our report covering the Carbon Capture Market.

Is CCUS funding actually weaker right now?

Yes. The CCUS funding market is clearly weaker today when we look at how many companies can raise and how much capital is available, even though the typical successful round has held up.

We found 18 qualifying financings in the latest 12 months, compared with 32 in the preceding period. Recorded capital fell even harder, from $1.177 billion to $158.8 million.

The average round collapsed from almost $38 million to $8.8 million, although that comparison is heavily distorted by several giant transactions in the earlier period. The median tells a very different story: it edged up from $5.4 million to $5.9 million.

This is why the market looks worse from almost every angle related to access to funding, while the companies that still manage to raise are often getting perfectly respectable rounds.

Metric	Current L12M	Previous 12M	Change
Deals	18	32	-43.8%
Funded companies	18	32	-43.8%
Recorded capital	$158.8M	$1.177B	-86.5%
Median round	$5.90M	$5.40M	+9.3%
Average round	$8.82M	$37.97M	-76.8%
Largest round	$28M	$500M	-94.4%
Zero-deal monthly periods	4	0	+4

Is the 86.5% drop in CCUS funding really as bad as it looks?

The CCUS funding slowdown is real, but the 86.5% headline drop makes the deterioration look much more extreme than ordinary rounds suggest.

The earlier period was packed with megadeals. BKV dCarbon Project was recorded at $500 million, Climeworks raised $162 million, Heirloom raised $150 million, Peak Cluster raised roughly $81 million and Terradot raised $54 million. The latest period had no deal above $50 million.

BKV needs particular care. Its announced $500 million was an investor commitment that could be drawn over five years rather than $500 million transferred when the joint venture was announced. BKV later reported that the outside investor had contributed $17.9 million by the end of 2025. We kept the $500 million announced amount in the headline comparison because that is how the financing was recorded, but treating it like a conventional $500 million closing clearly exaggerates the old baseline.

The slowdown survives every sensible adjustment. Removing all rounds above $50 million cuts the decline to 30.9%. Excluding rounds above $100 million leaves a 56.5% decline. Even deleting BKV entirely still leaves the latest period roughly three-quarters below the old one.

So headline dollars overstate the crash, while the underlying slowdown remains substantial.

Comparison	Current L12M	Previous 12M	Change
All recorded capital	$158.8M	$1.177B	-86.5%
Excluding >$100M rounds	$158.8M	$365.2M	-56.5%
Excluding >$50M rounds	$158.8M	$230.0M	-30.9%
Previous period with BKV removed	-	about $677M	-
Largest deal / total capital	17.6%	42.5%	-24.9 pp
Top 3 / total capital	42.4%	69.0%	-26.6 pp
Top 5 / total capital	65.6%	80.5%	-14.9 pp

Are fewer CCUS companies actually getting funded now?

Yes. Far fewer CCUS companies are getting funded today, and this is probably the cleanest evidence that the market has become harder.

We counted 18 funded companies versus 32 one year earlier. Because every company raised only once inside each comparison period, the drop in funded companies exactly matches the drop in deals.

The monthly pattern makes the contraction easier to picture. Four of the latest twelve aligned monthly windows had no qualifying CCUS funding announcement at all. Every monthly window in the preceding year had at least one.

Average monthly deal activity fell from 2.67 financings to 1.50. The busiest month still produced four deals, so activity has not disappeared. It has simply become much more intermittent.

For founders, that is a meaningful deterioration even when the rounds that do close remain reasonably sized.

Are CCUS investors mostly backing existing winners now?

Yes. CCUS investors are overwhelmingly putting money into companies that have already raised before, while new entrants have become much rarer.

Only three current deals were first financings, compared with 14 in the preceding period. Their share of activity fell from 43.8% to 16.7%.

Meanwhile, 15 of the latest 18 deals were follow-ons. Follow-ons now represent 83.3% of the market, up from 53.1%.

BKV makes the dollar comparison for first financings messy because its $500 million commitment sits in the previous period. The deal count is much harder to dismiss: 14 first-time financings became three.

Interestingly, the three newcomers that did raise were not limited to tiny checks. Their median first financing was $4.2 million, up from $2.69 million previously. Investors are still willing to fund a new CCUS company when they like it; they are simply doing so far less often.

For now, CCUS fundraising looks much more like a selection process among companies that already have investors than a market constantly creating a fresh crop of funded startups.

Have CCUS round sizes actually shrunk?

No. Typical CCUS rounds have held up, while the market has lost its large growth financings.

As seen above, the median round increased slightly from $5.4 million to $5.9 million. The interesting shift is further up the distribution.

Seven current deals sit between $5 million and $20 million, and another two are between $20 million and $50 million. Those two bands together account for almost 86% of current capital.

At the same time, the entire $50 million-plus layer disappeared. The previous period had five financings above that threshold, including three of at least $100 million. Today there are none.

That combination explains why the average round has fallen so much while the median has barely moved. A company capable of attracting a $5 million, $10 million or $20 million round can still find capital. What has become much harder to find is the $50 million to $150 million growth check needed for aggressive industrial scale-up.

The weak point in CCUS financing these days sits at the top of the market rather than across every round size.

Which part of CCUS has the most funding momentum right now?

CO₂ utilization is easily the strongest part of the CCUS funding market right now.

The category went from five deals to 12 while total CCUS deal activity was falling. Capital increased from $31.2 million to $87.6 million, and the median utilization round rose from $1.4 million to $3.93 million.

This breadth makes the shift convincing. OXCCU raised $28 million for its Series B and is moving from its OX1 demonstration plant toward the larger OX2 plant. D-CRBN raised €17.5 million and has moved from industrial pilot validation toward demonstration units and initial commercial deployments. Co-Reactive raised €6.5 million to push its mineralization process from prototype toward industrial use.

Several smaller utilization companies also raised, so the category is not hanging on one transaction.

The money is increasingly following technologies that turn captured carbon into fuels, chemicals or materials and can show a plausible industrial customer on the other side.

Category	Current deals	Previous deals	Current capital share	Previous capital share
CO₂ Utilization Platforms	12	5	55.2%	2.6%
CO₂ Storage Services	3	5	19.8%	48.2%
Carbon Capture Systems	2	12	13.4%	6.8%
Direct Air Capture	1	9	11.6%	35.5%
CO₂ Transport Infrastructure	0	1	0%	6.9%

Is direct air capture funding collapsing?

Yes. Direct air capture has gone through the sharpest funding reversal anywhere in the CCUS market.

DAC fell from nine deals to one. Recorded capital dropped from $417.8 million to about $18.45 million.

The earlier period contained both a decent number of DAC companies and heavyweight financings. Climeworks alone raised $162 million to continue scaling its technology. Other DAC companies were also able to raise Seed and Series A capital.

The latest period has only Carbonology's Series A in our qualifying dataset. Carbonology itself is hardly standing still: the company broke ground on a 1,000-ton DAC-to-e-SAF pilot in 2026 and said its new capital would support that project, process scale-up and commercialization. The problem is the absence of peers raising alongside it.

That makes the DAC contraction unusually broad. Investor interest has thinned across the category at the same time that large DAC rounds have vanished.

For now, DAC has clearly lost the funding momentum it had a year earlier.

What happened to funding for carbon capture systems?

Funding for carbon capture systems became dramatically narrower, although the companies that survived the cut can still raise meaningful money.

Deal count fell from 12 to two. That is an 83% contraction in one year.

Yet the median deal among those two current financings was about $10.6 million, compared with $3.7 million previously. Mantel accounts for the larger transaction, with roughly $18.3 million raised in 2026.

Mantel is also a good example of what gets funded now. By the time of the financing, the company was talking about commercial deployments across power and heavy industry rather than an early laboratory program. Its new investors included Constellation Technology Ventures, and the money was earmarked for projects already moving toward deployment.

This is a harsh selection environment. A dozen funded capture-system companies became two, while the surviving companies were still capable of raising eight-figure rounds.

Are CCUS investors becoming more selective?

Yes. CCUS investors look considerably more selective now, and the change shows up in both the number of active investors and the type of companies receiving money.

We identified 34 unique disclosed investor names in the latest period, down from 62. That roughly 45% decline closely tracks the contraction in funded companies.

Reporting quality cannot easily explain the change. At least one investor was disclosed for 94.4% of current deals, compared with 84.4% previously. We actually have better investor visibility in the latest period.

Repeat activity also dropped sharply. Seven investor names appeared in more than one deal in the previous year; only Fassa Bortolo did so in the latest period.

Strategic investors remain important, but they have not filled the gap. Corporate or strategic investors participated in 44.4% of current deals, down from 53.1%. Their typical check remained fairly stable, with a median strategic-backed round of about $13.3 million versus $14 million previously.

Stage labels add an interesting twist. Early-stage deals still make up more than 80% of the market, almost unchanged year over year. The selectivity therefore shows up much more clearly in which companies receive another check than in a wholesale move toward late-stage rounds.

Investors still fund technical risk. These days they simply appear to be concentrating that risk on fewer teams.

Is Europe taking over more of CCUS funding now?

Europe has taken a much bigger share of current CCUS funding, although the shift is partly amplified by the disappearance of giant North American deals.

European companies completed ten of the 18 current financings and received 54.6% of recorded capital. Europe had 28.7% of capital in the preceding period.

North America moved from 69.1% to 32.9%. BKV's $500 million commitment and Heirloom's $150 million round explain a large part of that old dominance, so the capital-share swing looks more dramatic than the deal counts.

Europe's current position has a broader base. OXCCU in the UK, D-CRBN in Belgium, Co-Reactive in Germany and Sequestra in Austria are part of a group of ten separate European deals.

Asia-Pacific also moved from 0.6% to 12.5% of capital, although only two companies raised there. Carbonology's financing does much of the work, which makes that regional jump much less broad than Europe's.

Europe currently looks like the most consistently active CCUS funding region in our data, while North America has lost the exceptional transactions that previously dominated global dollars.

What does a CCUS startup need to show to raise money now?

The strongest CCUS rounds today increasingly go to companies that can show real industrial progress and explain exactly what the next tranche of capital will build.

OXCCU is a good example. Its OX1 plant had already taken the technology out of the lab, and its Series B is supporting commercialization and the next scale-up step around OX2. The company currently describes OX2 as its second demonstration plant on the road toward commercial SAF production.

D-CRBN had already validated its plasma technology at industrial pilot scale before raising €17.5 million. By late August 2026, the company was discussing operation under real industrial conditions and several demonstration projects moving toward commercial deployment. Its funding is being used for industrial units, engineering capacity and rollout.

Carbonology shows a similar pattern on the DAC side. Its current work includes a 1,000-ton DAC-to-e-SAF pilot, while its Series A was tied to the pilot line, e-SAF process scale-up and the move from technical validation toward commercialization.

Mantel's financing is another version of the same story: capital going into large-scale projects that are already being developed for real industrial sites.

Our database does not contain a standardized milestone field for every deal, so this part should not be pushed too far. Still, the best-documented current rounds repeatedly show investors funding a concrete next deployment rather than a vague promise to keep developing the technology.

That is a higher bar for execution, especially once a CCUS company wants an eight-figure round.

Is the CCUS market actually becoming more mature?

The funded part of the CCUS market is becoming more mature operationally, while the financing ecosystem around it has become thinner.

Follow-on rounds dominate current fundraising, and several of the most important deals are funding demonstration plants, commercial deployments and industrial scale-up. That points to companies moving further along the path from scientific validation to deployment.

The financing ladder itself looks less developed. There are no $50 million-plus rounds in the latest period, fewer investors are active, and very few new companies are entering the funded cohort.

A healthy maturing market would ideally produce both: companies graduating into larger rounds and enough new startups entering behind them. Current CCUS funding is much stronger on the first half of that progression than the second.

That leaves a more experienced group of surviving companies operating inside a smaller capital market.

Is CCUS funding healthier, weaker or simply different than a year ago?

CCUS funding is weaker overall today, but the surviving market is more disciplined and far less dependent on a handful of enormous deals.

The weakness is hard to argue away. Funding reaches fewer companies, new-company formation has dropped sharply, fewer investors are active, and the market has lost its entire megadeal layer.

At the same time, typical rounds remain healthy enough for the companies that make it through the filter. Capital is also spread more evenly among current deals, and CO₂ utilization has built genuine momentum across several companies.

The biggest structural change is selectivity. A year ago, CCUS supported a wider mix of new entrants, capture companies, DAC startups and enormous scale-up rounds. Today, money is concentrated on a smaller existing cohort, with particularly strong interest in companies that can connect carbon technology to an industrial product, customer or deployment.

That makes the market weaker in breadth, more demanding in practice and further along operationally among the companies that continue to attract capital.

What really changed over the last 12 months?

The biggest change is access. Far fewer CCUS companies are raising money, and first-time financings have become especially scarce. The current market gives existing companies a much larger advantage.

The second change is the disappearance of large growth rounds. Mid-sized financings are still getting done, while the $50 million-plus part of the market has effectively gone quiet.

The third change is the rotation toward CO₂ utilization. Utilization gained deal count, capital and round size at the same time that DAC and conventional carbon capture lost substantial breadth.

Investor participation has also narrowed. Fewer investor names are active and repeat investing is less common, even though disclosure in our research is better than it was in the previous period.

Finally, the companies winning larger rounds increasingly arrive with industrial proof and a specific scale-up plan. OXCCU, D-CRBN, Carbonology and Mantel all show different versions of that pattern.

The 86.5% decline in recorded funding is the easiest headline and also the most misleading one to stop at. As pointed out above, megadeals make that number look especially brutal. The deeper change is a smaller, more selective CCUS financing market that still supports serious rounds for companies capable of showing where the technology goes next.