Biochar Industrial Group (BIG) has raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round to scale its biochar-as-a-service model, the climate technology company said. The round was led by BREEGA, with participation from The Catalyst Fund, and the Mulago Foundation provided non-dilutive funding.
BIG will use the funding to accelerate partnerships with food factories across sub-Saharan Africa to convert agricultural waste into carbon removal solutions and create additional revenue for food processors.
Scaling biochar in food factories
The company partners directly with food processors to convert low- or negative-value waste into biochar via continuous pyrolysis — heating organic matter in a high-temperature environment above 600°C without oxygen. The process permanently traps carbon, generates independently auditable carbon removal credits, and produces a soil amendment intended to restore depleted farmland.
By co-locating pyrolysis units modified for local feedstock and operating conditions inside food factories and staffing them locally, BIG says it turns disposal costs into shared profit.
Africa produces 1 billion tonnes of non-edible agricultural biomass annually, a figure the company says is expected to multiply as the continent’s population triples to 4 billion people over the coming decades. The source material notes that waste such as nut shells, cobs, husks, and stalks decomposes and releases the CO₂ stored by photosynthesis. At the same time, Africa’s cultivated land is being degraded by overuse and synthetic fertilisers, stripping 30–60 kilograms of nutrients from every hectare each year; by 2050, half of Africa’s arable land could be unusable, impacting more than 485 million people.
BIG was founded by Ikenna Nzewi (CEO), Uzoma Ayogu (CTO), and Isaiah Udotong (COO). “Africa has natural advantages to lead the most scalable and cost-effective biomass-based carbon removal globally. By forming true win-win partnerships with agricultural processors to produce biochar, we have the opportunity to turn localised waste liabilities into a transformative global solution,” said Ikenna Nzewi, CEO of BIG.
Tosin Faniro-Dada, partner at BREEGA, said: “BIG is turning a real industrial waste problem into repeatable, audit-grade carbon credits, and doing it with a level of operational discipline that’s rare this early. It’s the product of a founding team – Ikenna, Uzoma, and Isaiah – who spent nearly a decade building and operating industrial infrastructure across Nigeria with Releaf Earth. We’re proud to back them as they scale that same execution discipline into carbon removal at a continental scale.”
Oluwatoyin Emmanuel-Olubake, chief investment officer at The Catalyst Fund, added: “We invested in BIG because it developed an innovative approach to solve multiple problems for agribusinesses critical to African and global economic growth with a single, self-reinforcing model. The company is early, and execution risk is real but the logic is compelling – grounded in how factories and farms actually operate, sharpened by a global rush toward durable carbon removal, and carried by a team that has already assembled the relationships and the technology the model depends on. That is why we are backing BIG, and why we believe the opportunity ahead of them is substantial.”
