In September 2024, Phlair raised a EUR 14.5 million Seed round led by Extantia, in which Verve Ventures participated. In February 2025, Phlair signed an offtake agreement with Frontier. Frontier buyers will pay Phlair $30.6 million to remove 47,000 tons of CO₂ between 2027 and 2030.

Phlair is developing a pioneering electrochemical direct air capture (DAC) system. It removes CO2 from ambient air. Using standard components and patented technology, the system uses less energy than competing DAC technologies. The process is also ideally suited to be combined with intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Since its closed-loop mechanism splits a liquid into strong acids and basic solvents, these liquids can store chemical energy. This means the process can be powered when renewable electricity is available and cheap, unlike other DAC systems, which need constant electricity input. The basic solvent binds CO2 through a chemical reaction. Then, the CO2-rich liquid is combined with the acid. CO2 is released and stored underground or used for industrial purposes. The resulting solvent is reintroduced in the hydrolyzer and split into base and acid to start the next cycle.

Before founding Phlair, you and your co-founder, Paul, had nothing to do with climate. How did you decide to enter this industry?

Paul and I met during our Master’s studies and worked as co-CTOs at the AI startup Doctos. We were indeed outsiders to the topic of climate change. However, we were interested in it, even if it concerns atoms, not bytes. We started familiarizing ourselves with it. The pH-swing mechanism that is the basis for our direct air capture system is nothing new, but had not yet been adapted to Direct Air Capture. Our third co-founder, Steffen, did his Ph.D. at the Paul Scherrer Institute; he is an expert in electrolysis. We developed a process innovation that combines existing technologies into a novel electrolyzer, our patented Hydrolyzer.

Where does your entrepreneurial spirit come from?

I went to a Waldorf school and was very close to my grandfather, who was an entrepreneur. I like being in nature: When I was 12, I planted pumpkins in a field and sold them. At one point, I even wanted to buy a riding lawnmower but settled on buying a computer instead. Later, I founded a bootstrapped company with a friend during my bachelor’s. We made many mistakes, and it didn’t take off commercially, but we learned a lot. So, in a way, entrepreneurship is part of my DNA. Climate change is an exciting field not only because of the problem’s urgency but also because the time window for entrepreneurial solutions has opened. Not even three years after founding Phlair, we’re among the top 10 DAC companies globally by tons of CO2 sold. It’s a sign that we have built something people want. And maybe that’s the advantage of being an industry outsider: not falling in love with technology but focusing on solving the problem.

There are already established scale-ups in the field of direct air capture. What makes you think you can beat them?

Their technology, especially DAC 1.0 needs a lot of electricity and, hence, has high costs. Most of them also require a constant electricity supply. Our chemical process is compatible with intermittent energy from renewable sources. Our commercial plant, Dawn, will be the world’s first DAC plant powered by a behind-the-meter solar farm. We will use the electricity the solar farm produces during the day to keep the process running 24/7. Splitting the solvent into an acid and basic part, which can be stored in tanks, means that we store process energy. This eliminates the need for extensive battery storage.

Of course, we now need to show that what works on a pilot scale also works on an industrial scale. However, our 10 ton CO2/year pilot, Electra 00, is already running on the commercial-grade equipment that will be used in our larger commercial plant, Dawn. Our technology is scalable because we only use standard parts from established manufacturers.

Finally, what differentiates us from the competition is that we will focus on developing the technology, producing the components, and selling them to project developers. Our competitors are vertically integrated and try to do everything, from technology to building plants, developing projects and even establishing marketplaces. DAC will likely develop along the lines of the solar industry, with different players across the value chain. This is why we want to focus on being a technology provider to project developers once we have proven the technology on a commercial scale.

Phlair won big names such as Google, Stripe, McKinsey, H&M, and Salesforce as clients. How did you do that?

If we look at the market for carbon credits, there are first movers like these companies. They have spelled out their net-zero strategy clearly, are ready to pay a premium, and want to support the most innovative technologies in the market. They are driven by technology and join forces in carbon removal buying clubs, in this case, Frontier Climate. Signing a multi-year, USD 30 million offtake agreement with them is also a strong signal for other buyers. Last year, we also signed an agreement with Deep Sky, a Canadian carbon removal project developer, to which we will deliver a plant already this year.

So your primary market is in the Americas?

Today, despite the political headwinds, US companies, such as Microsoft, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Meta, and Amazon, dominate the voluntary carbon market. The catalytic first clients we gained in the US and Canada will allow us to start the second wave of our go-to-market. We want to serve European and German companies with small first steps, such as compensating the flights of their C-level executives. A critical element of our strategy is to reduce carbon removal credits’ costs drastically while scaling up. In the long term, I think we have a shot at bringing the price below the magic barrier of 100 Dollars per ton of CO2.

How will you deliver the 47,000 tons of CO2 sold to Frontier?

Our first commercial DAC facility, Project Dawn, will produce the credits for the Frontier offtake. The plant will be in Alberta, Canada, and go live in 2027 with an annual capacity of 20,000 tons of CO2. It’s going to be the first large DAC plant in Canada and the first DAC plant deployed with its own behind-the-meter solar farm. We chose Canada because of its advanced CO2 storage availability and substantial CapEx tax credit.

Skeptics say DAC will never become significant enough or that it is just an excuse to continue emitting CO2.

I look optimistically toward the future. If DAC is not to remain a climatic rounding error, we need to show real-world deployment, scale, and bring cost down in the next 3-5 years. The amount of resources thrown at this problem is significant and bound to grow fast. DAC is just one part of the puzzle and a piece of critical infrastructure in a more resilient world. DAC is the solution for emissions that are very hard and costly to reduce. The voluntary carbon market we sell CDR credits to is growing fast and will flip from a demand-constrained market to a supply-constrained market. This is why our forward-thinking customers build up the muscle to buy already today and secure future supply for when it’s needed. In the long term, the compliance markets such as the EU ETS will drive massive demand. It’s like the waste disposal industry – someone needs to do the work and get paid for it, the question is who pays and how much. The good news is that the carbon industry is going to become huge. We can supply CO2 for storage but also to produce any clean hydrocarbon such as eFuels or renewable natural gas. Sooner or later, people will realize that CO2 is the new gold.