$2.3 billion. That’s how much private capital has poured into direct air capture over the past decade, spread across more than 165 companies racing to build machines that pull carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere.
Yet the industry’s journey has been defined as much by setbacks as breakthroughs. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy cancelled close to $1 billion in funding for flagship DAC hubs, including Project Cypress in Louisiana. Years earlier, Global Thermostat’s highly anticipated Alabama demonstration plant was shut down after failing to achieve its promised 4,000-tonne annual capture target.
Today, removing a tonne of CO₂ from the atmosphere still costs between $400 and $1,500. After a decade of innovation and billions invested, the economics have stubbornly refused to break through.
According to Cory Sanderson, co-founder of Sustaera, the industry’s failure was not that direct air capture was impossible – it was that the industry pursued the wrong blueprint: “the potential and promise are still true, but the approach has been wrong.”
That conviction comes from experience. Cory spent 17 years at Air Products working on CO₂ sorbent technologies, where he repeatedly saw a familiar challenge: promising chemistry alone was not enough. Many systems became too complex, too energy-intensive, or too expensive to scale.
The broader DAC industry followed a similar pattern – taking promising sorbents and solvents from the lab and integrating them into chemical engineering architectures borrowed from oil and gas, treating capture and release as separate systems and chasing incremental improvements in material performance rather than fundamentally rethinking how energy was applied to the process. Many also built projects far from where captured CO₂ could be permanently stored, creating additional infrastructure and permitting challenges.
For Cory, the answer was not another small improvement. It was a complete redesign.
Sustaera has developed a fundamentally simpler DAC system that integrates capture and regeneration into a single process, aiming to dramatically reduce equipment complexity and cost.
The company says its technology can deliver equipment costs 3–5× lower per tonne of CO₂ captured than the best-quoted alternatives – figures independently assessed by a third party.
Against the odds, Cory is pushing direct air capture innovation forwards: “I focus on my kids and my strong desire for them to have a healthy, habitable environment for them to have the same or better experiences that I’ve been able to have.”
Sustaera has a lower-capital, more scalable business model: it’s not planning to own and operate carbon removal plants itself. Instead, it sells the equipment to developers building those facilities. The company already has commercial relationships with Deep Sky and Return Carbon, representing a $59 million near-term pipeline, with first revenue expected in Q2 2027.
The stakes could not be higher. The world is expected to require billions of tonnes of carbon removal each year by the second half of the century, and many climate experts believe direct air capture will need to play a role.
The question is no longer whether the world needs DAC, it is whether someone can finally make it work.
We asked Cory to explain why previous generations of DAC struggled, what Sustaera is doing differently, and whether the industry can still deliver on its original promise.
♻️ Sustaera is Raising:
Direct Air Capture | Carbon Removal | Climate Hardware
📍 United States | 💰 Series A Extension, €5.3M
The opportunity:
A next-generation DAC system targeting 3–5× lower costs by eliminating steam infrastructure. Backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Grantham with $6.46M raised, 7 patents filed, and a $700M commercial pathway by 2032. A validation unit is set to deploy with Deep Sky in Q4 2026.
👉 View Sustaera’s investment opportunity and contact the founders on Climate Marketplace, or get in touch for a direct intro.
You spent 17 years deep inside CO₂ sorbent projects at air products. what did you see from that vantage point that most people on the outside couldn’t?
The technology to capture CO₂ from point sources has worked for years. The problem was never simply the chemistry; it was the economics and infrastructure. Most CO₂ sources – power plants, refineries, and chemical facilities – were built where their products were needed, not where CO₂ could be used or permanently stored. Transportation infrastructure such as pipelines or trucking often became too costly or difficult to permit.
I learned that small improvements of 5–25% to existing approaches would never bridge that gap. I knew CO₂ would become a critical commodity in the future, but the existing approaches to capture weren’t going to deliver at the scale or cost the world needed.
When we were developing dual-functional materials with Columbia University to capture and convert CO₂ in situ, the economics simply didn’t work. That forced us to ask a different question: what if we focused solely on direct air capture and designed backwards from the cost target needed to make it viable?
Once we identified a realistic path to achieve those economics, we knew we had something worth building.
Help us understand the core problem in plain language. Why has DAC been so expensive and difficult to scale?
Most DAC approaches took promising laboratory materials and applied conventional chemical engineering designs borrowed from oil and gas. The result was systems that were too complex, separated CO₂ capture and release into different pieces of equipment, and relied on incremental improvements in sorbent performance rather than fundamentally rethinking how energy was applied to the process.
That approach has not produced costs low enough for a mass market.
Walk us through what Sustaera does differently. Not the technical specification – the “why does this change the equation?” version.
We built the solution from the inside out. By placing the energy for CO₂ release directly next to the sorbent, we can heat the system faster and more efficiently using direct electricity.
Our technology combines adsorption and desorption into a single, electrically conductive structured sorbent. That reduces the complexity of the system and lowers the cost of construction and operation.
The result is a DAC system designed to operate with low-cost renewable electricity, including intermittent excess generation from solar and wind, with the potential to deliver carbon removal at dramatically lower costs. Independent third-party analysis validated the potential for our system to achieve 3–5× lower unit costs than leading DAC approaches.
You chose to sell equipment to carbon removal developers rather than build and operate plants yourself. Why?
One of the biggest lessons we learned from previous technology transitions is that trying to develop a breakthrough technology while simultaneously developing large infrastructure projects can cause companies to lose focus.
As the market matured, independent developers with expertise in building and operating sequestration projects emerged as natural customers for our technology. This allows us to focus on what we do best – advancing the technology and engineering – while serving multiple projects and markets with a lower-risk business model.
You already have commercial relationships with Deep Sky and Return carbon. what have they taught you about what the market actually needs?
They confirmed that there is still significant demand for DAC credits, but only if the technology can actually deliver.
That means getting costs below roughly $500 per tonne in the near term, with a long-term pathway below $200 per tonne. It also means building systems that can be financed, deployed, and operated reliably in real-world conditions.
What needs to happen between now and first revenue?
Fundraising is our immediate priority to maintain our commercialization timeline. We are also focused on scaling manufacturing of our conductive structured sorbent and developing strategic partnerships.
Once we deliver our first commercial equipment systems, we expect Sustaera to become profitable and self-sustaining, allowing us to grow without requiring significant additional equity financing.
Every early-stage company reaches a point where it has to make a difficult decision. what was that moment for Sustaera?
In 2024, we realized the first-generation product we had spent years developing was not good enough to meet the market requirements.
We made the difficult decision to pivot toward our current nano-structured generation, which we believed was necessary to remain competitive.
What has been the hardest call you have had to make as a founder?
Laying off key contributors and early employees when funding was insufficient to support the full team.
Every person who has worked at Sustaera has contributed to where the company is today, so letting talented and passionate people go has been one of the hardest parts of the journey.
DAC as a sector has taken significant credibility hits. What do investors and the market still get wrong?
Many assume that our technology is just an incremental improvement on previous DAC attempts or that the market for DAC credits will never grow enough to justify the investment.
But the future of DAC requires a genuine breakthrough in cost and performance. The sector will regain credibility when technologies prove they can deliver real carbon removal at the costs and reliability the market demands.
There are over 100 DAC companies today, but there will not be 100 winners. Consolidation is necessary and healthy for the industry to mature.
If Sustaera succeeds at the scale you envision, what does that future look like?
I believe Sustaera could enable 1–2 gigatonnes of carbon removal per year. That is the long-term vision I keep in the back of my mind, but day-to-day I focus only on the next few steps in front of us.
You could have done many things with your career. Why is this mission worth the sacrifice?
We have built a society that extracts enormous value from fossil fuels and releases the consequences into a place where it becomes harmful to humanity.
We need to change that system if we want to continue thriving within our planet’s boundaries. I believe I have the skills to contribute to that change, and when I think about my children and wanting them to experience the same or better world than I have, it makes the sacrifice of my time and energy worth it.
Rapid-fire
A mantra you keep coming back to?
If you want something done right, do it yourself.
Where does your optimism still come from?
The nerdy stuff – the data we have generated, the engineering studies we have completed, the progress with our commercial partners, and the conversations with investors and mentors who understand our differentiation and believe in the future we are trying to build.
Is there a book you recommend other climate founders read?
For climate action: Cheaper, Faster, Better by Tom Steyer.
For climate fiction: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
And for founders: Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance On You by Suneel Gupta.
If you could teleport yourself into the future and be anywhere, doing anything – where would you be, and why?
“Surfing in Hawaii with my family (current and future) on the beach or in the water with me in 2050 when we’ve transitioned to a sustainable economy and balanced emissions with removals.”
