Biochar Industrial Group (BIG), a climate-tech startup founded by former executives of Nigerian agro-processing company Releaf, has closed a $1.5 million pre-seed round to expand a business that converts agricultural waste into carbon-removal credits.
The round was led by venture capital firm BREEGA, with participation from Catalyst Fund. Mulago Foundation also contributed non-dilutive funding.
What BIG actually does
BIG runs what it calls a Biochar-as-a-Service model. Rather than asking food processors to buy their own equipment, the company installs and finances pyrolysis machines directly at partner factories. These machines heat agricultural residue, such as nut shells, husks, cobs, and palm kernel shells, in a controlled, low-oxygen process that converts it into biochar instead of letting it decompose or burn openly.
Biochar is a stable, carbon-rich material that locks in carbon that would otherwise be released back into the atmosphere as the waste breaks down. BIG measures and verifies the carbon removed through this process, then sells the resulting credits to buyers in the voluntary carbon market. Processing partners get a share of that revenue without having to fund or operate any of the equipment themselves.
The company says it is targeting processors that generate at least 2,500 tonnes of qualifying waste annually, since a pyrolysis operation needs a steady, sizeable feedstock supply to run efficiently at industrial scale.
A large and largely untapped waste stream
Africa generates well over a billion tonnes of non-edible agricultural biomass every year, much of it currently burned or dumped. That volume is expected to grow as the continent’s population rises. At the same time, African farmland is losing significant nutrients annually due to overuse and reliance on synthetic fertiliser, a gap that biochar’s soil-improvement properties can help address when applied back to fields.
BIG is not the only company targeting this opportunity. Other biochar-focused ventures have raised larger rounds recently to scale similar carbon-removal models in emerging markets, and separate industrial-scale biochar facilities have also launched elsewhere on the continent using cashew and other crop residues. Analysts project the wider Middle East and Africa biochar market could exceed $450 million by 2032 as demand grows for durable, verifiable carbon-removal credits.
The bigger opportunity
BIG’s pitch is that Africa’s scale of agricultural waste, combined with relatively low-cost feedstock and rising global demand for carbon removal, gives the continent a natural advantage in this segment of the climate economy. If the model works as designed, food processors get a new revenue stream from material they would otherwise have to dispose of, while BIG builds a verified supply of carbon credits for international buyers.
Whether the model scales profitably will depend on how consistently BIG can secure large, steady waste supplies from partner factories and how efficiently it can run verification at multiple sites simultaneously. Those are the practical questions the new funding is meant to help the company start answering.
