Vaulted Deep has secured $35 million in debt financing to expand its injection well carbon removal operations across the U.S., with the facility backed by long-term carbon removal purchase contracts and waste servicing agreements. Mediobanca Group, the Italian investment bank, is providing the debt, arranged by UK-based investment and trading firm CFP Energy, the company announced Monday.

The company says the deal is "the largest publicly disclosed U.S. commercial debt deal in durable carbon removal to be secured by long-term purchase contracts." The collateral matters as much as the size: carbon removal contracts with Frontier Climate buyers — including Google and Stripe — were used to help secure the financing, offering a template for how offtake agreements can unlock mainstream lending for physical waste infrastructure.

The debt adds to $56 million Vaulted Deep has previously received in equity funding and awards — $48 million in equity plus $8 million as second-runner-up in the 2025 XPrize Carbon Removal competition.

What is the material stream?

Vaulted Deep, which spun out of industrial waste management company Advantek, converts organic waste and biomass into a carbon-dense slurry and injects it deep into disposal wells for permanent storage. Its feedstocks include:

• food waste
• paper sludge
• manure
• agricultural byproducts
• biosolids

All of these streams would otherwise end up in landfills, wastewater treatment plants and manure management facilities, where they contribute to methane emissions. The company uses a proprietary AI-powered tool to discover sites and work through permitting, and says the new funding will push more projects through that platform.

"Waste operators across the country need new options as traditional disposal options become limited," Co-founder and CEO Julia Reichelstein said in the release. "This financing lets us take on more projects and invest in the tools that help us evaluate and develop new sites faster."

Reichelstein called the debt facility "a meaningful milestone" for the company.

How big is the contracted offtake?

Frontier Climate — whose members also include Shopify, Meta, JPMorgan Chase and, most recently, Anthropic — signed a $58.3 million deal with Vaulted Deep in 2024 covering 152,480 tons of CO2 removal for its buyers between 2024 and 2027.

Delivery is accelerating. Vaulted Deep says it delivered 20,000 tons of carbon removals to Frontier buyers in the first half of 2026 alone — more than the total amount delivered in all of 2025.

Beyond Frontier, the company announced deals last year with Google to remove 50,000 metric tons of CO2 by 2030 and with Microsoft to remove 4.9 million metric tons by 2038. Reichelstein previously told Waste Dive that those agreements with the tech giants enabled the business to expand.

What capacity is built versus announced?

The built footprint remains two sites: an injection well operation in California, running since 2008, and a Kansas site that opened in 2023. A third facility in Weld County, Colorado, is announced to come online in 2027.

The financing question behind the model is whether demand-side commitments can substitute for speculative capital. Vaulted Deep argues its use of Frontier contracts to secure bank debt "demonstrates how such contracts can help companies borrow from mainstream lenders to build physical infrastructure."

Frontier operates on exactly that theory — that market commitments showing robust demand for carbon removal help companies raise the financing needed to scale. The Vaulted Deep deal "is a great example of this theory in practice," Frontier spokesperson Hannah Bebbington Valori said in the release.

What happens next?

The near-term milestone is the Weld County, Colorado facility reaching operation in 2027, which would add a third injection site to the two now running. Just as important is the delivery curve against the Frontier contract: 152,480 tons must be removed by the end of 2027, and whether the 2026 pace holds will determine if debt-against-offtake becomes a repeatable financing route for the durable carbon removal sector — or a single data point.