Zurich-based Cotierra has closed a $3 million funding round, bringing total capital raised to approximately $4.75 million, as the company works to convert field-proven biochar deployments into repeatable commercial-scale operations.

Carbon Removal Partners and PINC — the venture arm of Finnish-headquartered food and beverage group Paulig — co-led the round. Participants included Zürcher Kantonalbank, Carbon Drawdown Initiative, better ventures, GOTA Ventures, Hungry4Impact and Triple Impact Ventures, alongside climate-oriented angel investors.

The capital target is specific: optimization of Cotierra's technology from scattered field deployments to a standardized, repeatable commercial offering. That distinction matters for a company whose value proposition rests on converting agricultural biomass streams into a verifiable soil carbon product at scale.

The hardware-plus-software model

Cotierra operates decentralized biochar systems for agricultural value chains. Its platform pairs a transportable reactor technology with a digital layer for operating, monitoring and verifying production. The configuration lets agricultural businesses produce biochar close to the biomass source rather than hauling feedstock to centralized processing sites, while returning CO2 to the soil in the form of stabilized char.

The software component handles monitoring, traceability and reporting — functions that determine whether biochar carbon removal can be measured, verified and ultimately monetized through carbon markets or corporate supply chain programs. For buyers in agricultural commodities, verifiable deployment data is the difference between a sustainability claim and an auditable tonne of carbon returned to soil.

From coffee to cocoa, cotton and citrus

Co-founders Thomas Käslin and Lorenz Buser built the business model first in the coffee sector, where Cotierra positioned its systems as a decarbonization tool for farming operations. The company raised an earlier $1 million round specifically tied to decarbonizing coffee farming. The team is now extending the model to other tropical agricultural commodities: cocoa, cotton and citrus.

"Starting from our work in coffee, we're expanding into cocoa, cotton and citrus, with a clear ambition: to make decentralised biochar a cornerstone of regenerative agriculture across the tropics," Käslin said in a publication.

"We've proven our approach in the field. Now we're turning that work into an integrated product our clients can deploy reliably across their operations," he added.

Scaling questions ahead

The jump from proven field pilots to reliable multi-site deployment is the standard proving ground for decentralized biochar ventures. Cotierra's answer is the integrated product Käslin describes — reactors plus the digital infrastructure to run and verify them — sold to agricultural enterprises that own the biomass stream.

The involvement of PINC, the venture arm of a major food and beverage company, signals potential demand-side alignment: Paulig sits downstream of exactly the tropical commodity chains — coffee and cocoa among them — where Cotierra's systems operate. A corporate venture investor in this position can open procurement channels as well as provide capital.

Cotierra's expansion across four tropical commodity crops also diversifies its feedstock exposure, spreading risk across different biomass streams, farm structures and geographies rather than concentrating on a single crop's economics.

What to watch

The near-term marker is execution: whether Cotierra converts the $3 million into a commercial-scale integrated offering that agricultural clients deploy across their operations — not just in pilot configurations. The company has set the ambition itself, in public, with Käslin framing field proof as complete and productization as the task at hand.

The milestone that decides what happens next is the first wave of client deployments running on the integrated product across cocoa, cotton and citrus operations — the point at which Cotierra's decentralized model either demonstrates repeatable throughput or remains a promising pilot-stage technology.