Cotierra raises €2.6M for on-farm biochar in coffee supply chains

Cotierra, the Zurich startup turning coffee residues into biochar on the farms where they pile up, has raised a €2.6M round co-led by PINC, Paulig’s venture arm, and Carbon Removal Partners to move from Colombian pilots to multi-year commercial deployments.

Carbon removal has a delivery problem – plenty contracted, far less shipped. The good news is that the part which does get delivered is the least glamorous corner of the field, and this round sits right in it. Below, I lay out the round, the machine behind it, and why a coffee roaster is writing the cheque.

A €2.6M round co-led from inside the coffee trade

Cotierra announced the €2.6M equity round on 29 September 2026. It is co-led by PINC, the venture arm of Finnish coffee and food group Paulig, and Carbon Removal Partners, joined by Zürcher Kantonalbank, the Carbon Drawdown Initiative, better ventures, GOTA Ventures, Hungry4Impact, Triple Impact Ventures and a group of climate and impact angels. No stage label was attached to the round; some international coverage rounds the figure to $3M, but the announcement leads with euros.

The money moves Cotierra from pilots to what it calls repeatable, multi-year commercial deployments – starting with coffee, then extending the same system into cocoa, cotton and citrus. “Now we are making it simple, reliable, and scalable, starting with coffee where we already have strong traction,” said co-founder and CEO Thomas Käslin in the announcement.

A reactor next to the drying beds

Cotierra builds a mobile reactor paired with a digital monitoring layer. The reactor converts coffee residues – the husks and pulp that would otherwise rot in heaps or be burned – into biochar directly on the farm. The biochar goes back into the soil, where it locks away carbon and improves soil health, while IoT sensors track the process in the field, feeding a verification chain the company says is being validated by Carbon Standards International.

The team runs out of Zurich and Bogotá, and its pilots are Colombian – among them a deployment with ASMUER, a women’s coffee cooperative in the Huila region. The round follows a $1M pre-seed announced in March 2024, backed by Partners in Clime, Carbon Removal Partners and the Carbon Drawdown Initiative – the latter two now returning, which is the quiet vote of confidence early-stage climate hardware rarely gets.

The corner of carbon removal that actually delivers

The global biochar market was worth $2.5bn in 2025 and is projected to reach $6.3bn by 2034, a 10.95% CAGR (IMARC Group, April 2026). The sharper number is operational: biochar accounts for 86% of all durable carbon removal credits actually delivered since Q1 2022 – 683,000 tonnes through Q2 2025, against 3.04 million contracted (CDR.fyi, 2025). While direct air capture collects the headlines, biochar collects the deliveries.

For scale, in our fundraising data this cheque sits alongside Tellia’s €4.3M pre-seed led by Revent (September 2026) and Adaptavate’s €4.65M round from the EIC and Innovate UK (September 2026): European climate rounds in the same weight class, all funding physical processes rather than dashboards. €2.6M does not buy a fleet of reactors. It buys the proof that commercial contracts, not pilots, can carry the model.

When the coffee buyer funds the carbon

What we are seeing here is insetting: a corporate removing carbon inside its own supply chain instead of buying offsets outside it. “We believe decentralised biochar can play an important role in reducing emissions and improving resilience in coffee-growing regions,” said Karl Swensson, investment director at PINC – which is another way of saying Paulig wants its supply chain decarbonised where the beans grow, not on a certificate somewhere else.

It is the same pattern that put Allianz and KfW Capital into Reverion’s €154.2M Series B this week – strategic and institutional money attaching itself to climate hardware with a visible offtake – scaled down here to seed-stage agriculture. The Swiss-Latin American pairing matters too: engineering from Zurich, deployment in Huila, and a value chain that pays for both.

So what do we watch? Whether the Carbon Standards International validation lands, whether cocoa and cotton repeat the coffee playbook, and whether other roasters follow Paulig into their own supply chains. Europe’s carbon removal story will not be decided in white papers; it is being decided next to the drying beds. Watch where the reactors land next.