Biochar Industrial Group (BIG), a climate-tech startup founded by former Releaf Earth executives, has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding. The company plans to turn agricultural waste from African food factories into carbon-removal credits, while helping farmers improve degraded soil along the way.
The round was led by BREEGA, an early-stage venture capital firm, with participation from the Catalyst Fund. The Mulago Foundation also provided non-dilutive funding.
BIG will use the money to deploy pyrolysis equipment at food-processing facilities across Africa. The equipment converts waste such as nut shells, husks and cobs into biochar, a charcoal-like material that locks in the carbon found in the original waste. BIG will finance and operate the equipment itself. In return, factories supply the waste and receive a share of the value created.
Turning A Waste Problem Into A Climate Solution
Africa produces more than 3 billion tonnes of agricultural waste every year, including nut shells, husks, cobs, stalks and sawdust. Much of it has little value to the factories that produce it. Left to decompose, it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
At the same time, over 80% of agricultural land in Africa is degraded, limiting how much food farmers can grow. BIG says its model can tackle both problems at once, turning waste that would otherwise pollute into a material that restores soil and stores carbon for the long term.
“Africa has natural advantages to lead the most scalable and cost-effective biomass-based carbon removal globally,” said Ikenna Nzewi, chief executive officer of Biochar Industrial Group. “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.”
BIG was founded in 2026 by Nzewi, Uzoma Ayogu and Isaiah Udotong. The three spent close to a decade building industrial agricultural infrastructure at Releaf Earth, a Y Combinator-backed agro-processing company and that experience is shaping how BIG runs its operations on the ground.
The company will also use the funding to hire engineering, operations, logistics, and carbon-verification staff, and to build systems that monitor and verify the carbon removed through its process, a step that carbon credit buyers usually require before trusting a project.
How The Biochar-As-A-Service Model Works
At the centre of BIG’s business is what it calls Biochar-as-a-Service, or BaaS. Under this model, a food factory supplies its agricultural waste. BIG finances, deploys and operates the pyrolysis equipment on-site, staffs the units locally and handles processing, carbon measurement, verification, and credit issuance.
The waste is fed into a continuous pyrolysis machine that heats organic material above 600°C in an environment with little to no oxygen. This process, called pyrolysis, turns the biomass into biochar instead of letting it decompose naturally. BIG says the carbon stored in biochar can remain locked in for hundreds to thousands of years, depending on how it is used.
The biochar is used to generate carbon-removal credits that can be independently audited and sold to buyers in international carbon markets. BIG also sells the physical biochar as an agricultural input, which farmers can apply to degraded land to improve soil quality.
BIG is targeting large agricultural processors that generate at least 2,500 tonnes of waste each year and is particularly interested in waste such as nut shells, husks, cobs, and other residues that currently have limited use.
Tosin Faniro-Dada, Partner at BREEGA, said the company’s early progress stood out. “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,” she said. “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.”
BIG also plans to deploy digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems, using continuous monitoring to create data trails that track biomass processing and the resulting carbon removal. The goal is to produce carbon-removal credits that international buyers can independently audit.
BIG says it is not limiting its growth to any single set of African countries. The company has already visited potential sites across West Africa and has received enquiries from other parts of the continent. Rather than choosing markets by geography alone, BIG says it will follow the availability of suitable biomass.
“We have a Pan-African mandate and prioritise sites that have an abundance of biomass with low opportunity cost for biochar production,” the company said in a statement. “We have already visited sites throughout West Africa but have received inquiries from every region of the continent. In a nutshell, BIG goes where the biomass takes us.”
