The Path to Commercialization: A Letter from Windfall Bio
While Windfall Bio launched just over a year ago, the work started well before. Co-founder and CEO, Josh Silverman, began developing what became our solution in 2015, yet it wasn’t until 2022 that he gained enough traction from investors to launch the company. With climate discussions and strategies centered around capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide, Josh spent these years trying to get investors to pay attention to the biggest climate blindspot: methane.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is 86x more warming than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, contributing to 30% of the planet’s warming.
Methane concentrations in the atmosphere have more than doubled since preindustrial times and emissions from manmade and natural sources are accelerating. However, methane occupies a unique position in the environment as a waste product that has actual value in terms of energy, and capturing these emissions presents the opportunity to reduce global emissions quickly and significantly.
Despite methane recently picking up steam in the broader climate change conversation, we have only begun to scratch the surface. Solutions for mitigating methane emissions have remained critically under appreciated and underfunded, not to mention most methane that is emitted today is too dilute and low quality to capture economically.
To make a real dent in solving the methane problem, methane intensive industries need a solution that can enable the capture and utilization of their waste methane— ultimately benefiting their bottom line while also benefiting the climate. At Windfall, we’ve been working to scale our nature-based solution that harnesses methane- eating microbes—referred to as mems—to capture methane from any source while also capturing nitrogen from the air to produce organic fertilizer.
We are proud to announce that Windfall has raised a $28 million Series A to support our path to commercialization.
Led by Prelude Ventures with participation from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund along with other new and existing investors, this capital will enable us to expand pilot deployments across methane intensive industries including agriculture, oil and gas, and waste management. We will also invest resources to continue growing our team and building out our manufacturing capacity and supply chain to meet growing global customer demand for our methane mitigation solution. Read more from Bloomberg’s Michelle Ma.
While producing an agricultural product, Windfall’s solution is being applied beyond the agriculture sector, as methane is everywhere and provides value to any company or source that produces it. As market demand and regulatory pressures mount, we continue to explore new applications to provide more industries with a solution to reduce methane emissions while creating value in the process—no matter what form that value comes in. We are moving full speed ahead to turn the climate and business woe into a windfall for our customers.