Silicon Valley is enamored with a company that pumps poop underground

Big brands are paying startup Vaulted Deep $58.3 million to shoot poop and other organic waste products into underground wells as a way to fight climate change.

The deal was brokered by a group called Frontier Climate, which Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability launched in 2022 to support emerging climate tech. Specifically, Frontier is interested in trying to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They connect buyers with startups like Vaulted Deep that are developing ways to capture CO2 and sequester it underground so that it doesn’t heat up the planet.

Vaulted Deep’s strategy is to gather sewage, manure, and agricultural and paper mill waste and inject it deep underground to keep carbon in the waste from rising into the atmosphere as it decomposes. On top of Frontier’s founding companies, Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase, Workday, and other brands are also part of the deal Frontier announced today. Vaulted Deep agreed to sequester 152,480 tons of carbon dioxide by 2027 as part of the deal. That’s equivalent to taking around 36,000 gas-guzzling cars off the road for a year.

It’s Frontier’s biggest agreement yet and a big endorsement of Vaulted Deep’s technology that the startup says will allow it to scale up a lot faster than its competitors in the growing carbon removal industry.

Vaulted Deep says its advantage is that it is built on technology that’s already been used for decades to get rid of sludge from oil and gas fracking. Hydraulic fracturing — aka fracking — is a particularly messy way to extract fossil fuels. Companies needed to find a way to dispose of all the rock and fluids leftover from drilling that might carry heavy metals like arsenic and radioactive materials like uranium.

Omar Abou-Sayed, Vaulted Deep’s executive chai