Frontier, the carbon removal initiative backed by some of the biggest names in tech, just nearly doubled its war chest. The coalition announced $915 million in new funding commitments, bringing total pledges to $1.8 billion and adding Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude chatbot, to its growing list of corporate backers.
How Frontier actually works
Frontier was launched in 2022 with Stripe and Google’s parent company Alphabet as founding backers, alongside Salesforce. The structure is straightforward: pool corporate money, then deploy it through offtake contracts that guarantee demand for carbon removal companies. Those contracts run 8 to 10 years, extending through 2040.
The initiative operates as a public benefit LLC wholly owned by Stripe. It plans to make roughly 10 to 15 targeted investments through those long-duration offtake agreements, focusing the money on technologies that could theoretically reach gigaton scale.
The technologies in Frontier’s crosshairs include ocean alkalinity enhancement, which speeds up the ocean’s natural ability to absorb CO2. There’s also biomass-based carbon removal, enhanced rock weathering, and direct air capture, which uses industrial fans and chemical processes to pull carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere.
