Biochar Industrial Group has closed a fresh pre-seed round to scale a business built around an unusual but genuinely promising premise: that Nigeria's agricultural waste problem and the global carbon removal market can be solved with the same piece of infrastructure. The company announced a 1.5 million dollar pre-seed round led by BREEGA, with participation from The Catalyst Fund, alongside non-dilutive funding from the Mulago Foundation, a funding structure that blends traditional venture capital with philanthropic capital more commonly associated with climate and impact focused ventures.

BIG's core offering operates as what it calls Biochar-as-a-Service, a model built around partnering directly with food processing companies to convert their agricultural waste into biochar, a stable, carbon rich material produced by heating organic matter in the absence of oxygen, while simultaneously generating carbon removal credits from that process. That dual output matters commercially. Rather than asking food processors to pay for waste disposal, BIG's model turns what was previously a cost center into a source of both usable biochar and tradeable carbon credits, aligning the company's incentives with the food processors it partners with rather than positioning itself as simply another vendor.


The industrial credibility behind that pitch is already established rather than purely theoretical. The company's team has been operating Nigeria's first industrial biochar plant since December 2024, using palm kernel shell waste as its primary feedstock, giving BIG nearly two years of real operational data and production experience before this funding round even closed. That head start matters in a category where many climate tech ventures raise substantial capital well before proving their core technology works reliably at industrial scale, whereas BIG enters this raise already running a functioning plant processing genuine agricultural byproducts into a marketable product.

The choice of palm kernel shells as feedstock is a deliberate one given Nigeria's position as a major palm oil producer, where palm processing generates substantial volumes of shell waste that has historically had limited productive use, often burned, landfilled, or left to decompose in ways that release greenhouse gases rather than sequestering carbon. By converting that waste stream into biochar instead, BIG is positioning itself at the intersection of agricultural waste management and carbon removal, a category that has attracted growing global investor interest as companies and governments increasingly seek verified, durable ways to offset emissions.

With industrial operations already running, a funding round that blends venture and philanthropic capital, and a business model designed to align directly with food processing partners' economic interests rather than working against them, Biochar Industrial Group is positioned to test whether Nigeria's abundant agricultural waste streams can become the foundation for a genuine carbon removal industry, one palm kernel shell at a time.