What are the funding trends in CCUS right now?

All funding deals in the CCUS market over the last years

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 really collapsing right now?

CCUS funding is clearly weaker in 2026: fewer companies are raising money, the typical round is smaller, and large financings have almost disappeared.

We tracked 14 qualifying financings through September 21, compared with 20 over the same period in 2025 and 26 in 2024. Those deals represent $110.8 million of capital, down from $401.9 million last year and $552.1 million two years ago.

The 72.4% year-on-year drop in capital looks dramatic, but deal activity shows this goes beyond a bad comparison with a few huge rounds. The number of funded companies is down 30% from last year and 46% from 2024. The median financing has also slipped from $6.90 million in 2024 to $5.49 million in 2025 and $4.25 million now.

Large deals have basically vanished from the current market. The biggest round we found this year is D-CRBN's $20.4 million Series A. Last year's largest was Climeworks at $162 million, while the comparable 2024 period included an $85 million Fortera round.

For now, CCUS venture funding has simply become smaller both in breadth and in check size.

CCUS funding measure	2026 YTD	2025 YTD	2024 YTD
Deals	14	20	26
Unique funded companies	14	20	26
Total capital	$110.8M	$401.9M	$552.1M
Capital excluding >$50M rounds	$110.8M	$158.7M	$318.1M
Median round	$4.25M	$5.49M	$6.90M
Average disclosed round	$7.91M	$22.33M	$22.08M
Largest round	$20.4M	$162M	$85M
Early-stage deal share	85.7%	80.0%	80.8%

Is the CCUS funding crash mostly caused by missing megadeals?

Megadeals make the 2026 decline look much worse, but CCUS funding still falls about 30% once we remove them.

The cleanest test is to exclude every financing above $50 million. That reduces comparable 2025 funding from $401.9 million to $158.7 million. Current funding remains $110.8 million because no 2026 round crosses that threshold.

The underlying decline is therefore 30.2%, almost identical to the 30% fall in deal count.

Last year's headline number was especially distorted by Climeworks and Peak Cluster. Climeworks raised $162 million in additional equity to improve and scale its DAC technology and carbon-removal platform. According to the company's announcement, the financing took cumulative funding above $1 billion.

Peak Cluster was an even more unusual transaction for a venture-funding comparison. The UK's National Wealth Fund described a £59.6 million equity raise for a CO₂ transport pipeline serving cement and lime producers, including £28.6 million from the public fund and £31 million from industrial partners.

Those two transactions account for much of the gap between 2025 and 2026. Strip them out and the market still looks weaker, just nowhere near as catastrophic as the headline 72% fall suggests.

Are fewer CCUS startups getting funded, or are rounds just getting smaller?

Both are happening in CCUS right now: fewer companies are raising capital, and most of the companies that do raise are getting smaller rounds.

We counted 14 funded companies this year, versus 20 last year and 26 two years ago. No company completed multiple qualifying rounds within any of those comparable periods, so deal count and funded-company count tell the same story.

Cheque sizes are sliding at the same time. Eight of the 14 current rounds are below $5 million, giving that bracket 57% of all deals. Its share was only about 30% in each of the previous two comparable periods.

Another five transactions are between $5 million and $20 million. In other words, 13 of the 14 current financings are below $20 million.

Two years ago, the market combined more funded companies with several $25 million, $30 million, $45 million and $80 million rounds. These days, most CCUS financing activity sits much lower down the scale.

Has later-stage CCUS funding basically disappeared?

Later-stage CCUS funding has almost vanished from the current sample, leaving Seed and Series A to carry the market.

We found eight Seed rounds and four Series A financings. The remaining two have no reliable public stage. There are currently no Series B, Series C, Series D+ or Growth Equity deals.

The 85.7% early-stage share can sound healthier than it really is. We counted 12 early-stage financings this year versus 16 last year, so early-stage activity itself has fallen. Its share rises mainly because later-stage activity has fallen even harder.

Series A has become the main place where meaningful capital is still getting deployed. D-CRBN raised $20.4 million, CrewCarbon $19 million in equity, Carbonology about $18.45 million and Mantel roughly $18.34 million. Those four rounds absorb 68.8% of all the capital we tracked.

Within a much smaller funding market, Series A is currently the point where investors are still willing to fund serious industrial scale-up.

Stage	2026 deals	2025 deals	2024 deals	2026 capital
Seed	8	9	12	$22.8M
Series A	4	7	9	$76.2M
Series B	0	0	1	-
Series C	0	0	1	-
Series D+	0	1	0	-
Growth Equity	0	0	1	-
Unknown	2	3	2	$11.8M

Is CO₂ utilization suddenly the hottest part of CCUS?

Yes, CO₂ utilization has become the biggest funding story in CCUS this year, with nine of 14 deals going to companies that turn captured carbon into products or industrial inputs.

That is a huge change. Utilization represented only two of 20 deals in the comparable 2025 period and four of 26 in 2024. Its deal share has jumped from 10% last year to 64% now.

Absolute capital also rises sharply, from only $1.7 million last year to $47.8 million this year, so the shift cannot be explained only by DAC and capture companies disappearing.

The companies themselves cover very different end markets. D-CRBN converts industrial CO₂ into carbon monoxide and syngas. Co-Reactive mineralizes CO₂ into supplementary cementitious materials. Reduciner produces carbon monoxide and activated carbon. Rubi Laboratories is developing cellulose and other materials from waste CO₂. Intrinsic Foundries is working on CO₂-based biochemicals.

The round size is interesting too. The median utilization financing is just $3.45 million. This is a genuine cluster of funded companies, not one giant utilization round doing all the work.

Utilization shift	2026	2025	2024
Utilization deals	9	2	4
Utilization deal share	64.3%	10.0%	15.4%
Utilization capital	$47.8M	$1.7M	$36.8M
2026 median utilization round	$3.45M	-	-
DAC deals	1	7	14
Capture-system deals	2	7	6
Storage deals	2	3	2
Transport deals	0	1	0

Why is CO₂ utilization getting so much attention now?

CO₂ utilization is getting more funding because a new set of companies is trying to make captured carbon valuable inside existing industrial markets rather than relying on carbon removal alone.

D-CRBN is a good example. Its €17.5 million Series A is funding industrial demonstration units and the move from pilot validation toward first commercial deployments. The company is already positioning its plasma reactors around on-site production of CO and syngas, two familiar industrial feedstocks.

Co-Reactive is taking a similar route through construction materials. HTGF said the company is moving from prototype operations toward a 1,000-ton demonstration plant and preparing much larger industrial installations with cement and steel partners.

Rubi Laboratories is approaching the problem from materials. Alongside its $7.5 million financing, the company announced more than $60 million of offtake term sheets for its CO₂-derived materials.

This product angle also fits the broader European policy direction. The European Commission's industrial carbon management framework explicitly includes using captured CO₂ in construction materials, chemicals and synthetic fuels, and the Commission is working toward a larger European CO₂ market.

Policy alone cannot explain a nine-deal funding cluster. More visibly, a group of startups is giving investors a commercial story that extends beyond the price of a carbon credit.

Is Direct Air Capture funding dying?

Direct Air Capture funding has fallen brutally in our dataset, from 14 deals in 2024 to seven last year and just one so far this year.

Capital shows the same break. DAC attracted roughly $263 million in each of the first two comparable periods, then fell to about $18.45 million now.

Climeworks made last year's capital total unusually large with its $162 million financing, but the deal-count decline started earlier. Going from 14 funded DAC companies to seven and then one points to a much broader cooling in startup financing.

DAC itself is still moving forward technologically. Climeworks has opened a major innovation center in Zurich focused on lowering capture costs and improving system efficiency. Carbonology, the one DAC company funded in our 2026 window, has already moved from a 100-ton demonstration line to construction of a 1,000-ton DAC-to-e-SAF pilot.

Carbonology is especially interesting because the company connects DAC directly to synthetic aviation fuel. Its integrated model uses atmospheric CO₂, renewable hydrogen and fuel synthesis, giving investors a different commercial proposition from a pure carbon-removal project.

So DAC has not disappeared as a technology. Funding breadth, though, has collapsed for now.

Are carbon capture and storage holding up better than DAC?

Carbon capture and storage have fewer funded companies this year, but the surviving rounds are much healthier in size than the deal counts alone suggest.

CO₂ Storage Services has two current financings worth $23.3 million, with a median of $11.65 million. CrewCarbon accounts for $19 million of that equity capital.

Crew is also one of the clearest examples of a company linking carbon removal to an existing customer's operating problem. Its technology works inside wastewater plants, where it can improve treatment while permanently removing CO₂. The company said its Series A included $19 million in equity plus another $6 million in grants and non-dilutive capital, so we count only the equity component.

Since that financing, Crew has kept adding commercial validation. The company has announced a Microsoft carbon-removal offtake and, more recently, participation in a portfolio structured for Whirlpool. That does not guarantee the business model will scale economically, but investors can point to both operating deployments and named buyers.

Capture systems show a comparable pattern. Only two financings appear this year, but Mantel raised more than $18 million to advance commercial carbon capture deployment.

These categories are much narrower than utilization in deal count, yet the average funded company is receiving a meaningfully larger check.

Are investors giving up on new CCUS startups?

New CCUS startups are having a harder time getting into the funded cohort this year, while previously financed companies account for most current deals.

We classify only three 2026 transactions as first financings, compared with eight last year. Their share has fallen from 40% to 21.4%.

Follow-on deal count, meanwhile, is exactly the same as last year at eleven. That detail says a lot: the existing funded cohort has held up, while much of the missing activity comes from fewer companies entering the financing market for the first time.

The money is tilted even further toward companies with previous funding. Follow-ons account for $97.4 million, or about 88% of current capital.

Investors are not simply showering those existing companies with bigger and bigger rounds, though. The median follow-on has fallen from $16.9 million in 2024 to $8.74 million last year and $4.3 million now.

This looks more like selectivity than winner-take-all financing. Existing companies are getting funded more reliably than newcomers, but even they are generally raising smaller checks.

Financing-status measure	2026 YTD	2025 YTD	2024 YTD
First financings	3	8	6
First-financing share	21.4%	40.0%	23.1%
Capital in first financings	$13.4M	$94.2M	$17.5M
Median first financing	$4.20M	$2.38M	$2.30M
Follow-ons	11	11	20
Follow-on share	78.6%	55.0%	76.9%
Follow-on capital	$97.4M	$257.7M	$534.6M
Median follow-on	$4.30M	$8.74M	$16.90M

Is Europe losing CCUS funding to Asia?

Europe still produces half of the CCUS deals we track, while Asia-Pacific's apparent funding surge currently rests on only two companies.

Seven of the 14 current financings are European. That is exactly the same 50% deal share Europe had last year.

The big change is the size of those rounds. Europe's capital share falls from 70% in 2025 to 38.2% now, largely because nothing comparable to Climeworks' $162 million financing or Peak Cluster's roughly $81 million equity raise has appeared this year.

Asia-Pacific moves in the opposite direction. Its capital share rises to 17.9%, but almost all of that comes from Carbonology's approximately $18.45 million financing in China. The region's only other current deal is Intrinsic Foundries' $1.4 million Seed round in India.

North America sits between those two stories. Its deal share slips slightly, while its capital share rises from about 26% to 44% because several current North American rounds are relatively large.

The geography has therefore changed more in check size than in company count. Europe remains the largest source of funded companies, and Asia's current jump is still too concentrated to call a broad regional shift.

Are corporate investors piling into CCUS now?

Corporate investors remain important in CCUS, but strategic participation is actually less common this year than it was last year.

We identify a strategic investor in six of 14 current transactions, or 42.9% of deals. The comparable share was 55% in 2025 and 50% in 2024.

The industrial links are often very logical. Idemitsu Ventures participated in CrewCarbon. Equinor Ventures backed Inherit Carbon Solutions. Carmeuse Ventures invested in Phathom Technologies. H&M Group and CMPC Ventures appear in Rubi Laboratories. Constellation Technology Ventures invested in Mantel.

What makes the utilization wave more interesting is that corporate capital does not dominate it. Only one of the nine utilization deals in our classification has a disclosed strategic investor.

Lead investors are fragmented too. We found 17 different disclosed lead investors across 12 current deals with a named lead, and none appears as lead on more than one transaction.

Investors are clearly still interested in CCUS, but there is no sign of one group of industrial giants or one small circle of venture firms taking control of the market.

Does weaker startup funding mean CCUS deployment has stalled too?

No. CCUS startup funding is weak right now, while large industrial projects are still moving into operation outside the venture-financing market.

A very recent European example makes that distinction clear. The Yara Sluiskil CCS project in the Netherlands has now started operating, according to the European Commission. The project is designed to capture and liquefy up to 800,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually and send it by ship for permanent storage through Northern Lights beneath the Norwegian North Sea.

Inherit Carbon Solutions offers a smaller but useful startup-side example. The company is already involved in a Norwegian project capturing biogenic CO₂ from wastewater-derived biogas and sending it to permanent geological storage. Its current financing was only about $4.3 million.

Peak Cluster gives us another version of the same disconnect. Its 2025 financing was infrastructure development equity backed by the National Wealth Fund and major cement and lime producers, rather than a normal venture round.

Venture investment tells us how private startups are being financed. It does not capture every government-backed infrastructure project, industrial consortium, project-finance vehicle or commercial deployment happening across CCUS.

The startup market is currently weak. The physical CCUS buildout is much more mixed.

Could CCUS funding still recover before the end of the year?

CCUS funding could still move sharply with one large deal, but the current weakness is broad enough that a single fourth-quarter financing would not erase the underlying changes.

Funding is lumpy. One $100 million round would almost double the current capital total. A Climeworks-sized deal would more than double it again.

Deal breadth is harder to change so quickly. We currently have 14 funded companies, versus 20 over the comparable 2025 period and 26 in 2024. First financings have dropped to three. No Series B+ round has appeared. More than half of current deals are below $5 million.

Those measures describe the shape of the market, not simply its aggregate dollar value.

Full-year comparisons reinforce the size of the gap without giving us a forecast. Current capital equals only 24.6% of the $449.9 million we recorded for all of 2025 and 13.4% of the $827.4 million recorded in 2024.

There is still time for the headline dollar figure to change. It would take a much broader pickup in company count, later-stage activity and normal round sizes to change our interpretation of the year.

What are CCUS investors actually funding now?

CCUS investors currently seem most comfortable funding companies that can connect carbon management to a specific industrial process, product or customer.

That pattern shows up across several of the larger 2026 rounds.

D-CRBN is moving plasma-based CO₂ conversion toward commercial production of CO and syngas. Crew sells into wastewater infrastructure while generating carbon removals. Co-Reactive targets cement materials. Carbonology connects DAC to synthetic aviation fuel. Mantel is developing capture technology for high-temperature industrial processes.

In each case, the pitch is fairly concrete. There is an existing plant, industrial feedstock, material, fuel or operating problem on the other side of the technology.

The newest commercial updates make the pattern more convincing. Crew has continued to add carbon-removal buyers after its Series A. Co-Reactive is moving toward a 1,000-ton demonstration plant. D-CRBN is preparing industrial demonstrations and first deployments. Carbonology is building a 1,000-ton DAC-to-e-SAF pilot.

We still do not know which of these technologies will work economically at full scale. What has become clearer this year is the kind of story getting financed: smaller companies, earlier rounds and technologies tied closely to something an industrial customer can actually use.

What is actually changing in CCUS funding?

CCUS funding is genuinely weaker. The headline 72% capital decline overstates the deterioration because 2025 had unusually large financings, but the slowdown remains after removing them. Deal count, company count, median round size and outlier-adjusted capital are all down.

The center of gravity has moved toward smaller rounds. The median is now $4.25 million, more than half of current financings are below $5 million, and there is no $50 million-plus deal in the 2026 sample.

The biggest internal shift is the rise of CO₂ utilization. Nine companies in that category have raised money this year, compared with only two over the equivalent period last year. Utilization now accounts for almost two thirds of all current deals.

DAC has moved in the opposite direction. Its deal count has fallen from 14 to seven to one across the three comparable periods. Carbonology shows that DAC scale-up is still happening, but current venture activity around the category has become extremely narrow.

New entrants are also getting squeezed. First financings fall from eight last year to three now, while follow-on deal count stays flat. Existing companies are holding up better, although they too are generally raising smaller rounds.

Finally, weak venture funding should not be confused with a shutdown of CCUS itself. Large storage infrastructure is still being built, projects are entering operation and industrial buyers are signing agreements. What has changed most sharply is the startup financing layer: currently smaller, earlier and much more focused on technologies with an obvious industrial use.