AirMiners Awarded $100,000 in Phase I of Department of Energy DAC EPIC Prize

Entrepreneurs in AirMiners program are leading global innovators in solving the climate crisis

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, AirMiners announced the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) has selected AirMiners as a semifinalist in the Direct Air Capture (DAC) Pre-Commercial Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) Prize. AirMiners will receive a $100,000 cash prize for being selected as a Phase 1: Think It winner and will advance to Phase 2: Move It.

The DAC EPIC Prize is a three-phase competition for incubators to propose new programming to support innovators working on equitable, hard-tech DAC solutions. The awards total up to $3.7 million in cash prizes to incubator teams that submit creative and impactful plans to support entrepreneurs and innovators in the DAC space and create meaningful community engagement.

“The DAC EPIC Prize will help build a strong domestic direct air capture ecosystem by providing clean incubators the funding they need to support DAC entrepreneurs,” said Eli Cain, DAC Prizes Lead at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “We were incredibly impressed with the concepts submitted by our 13 semifinalists, and we are excited to see them begin to implement their programming in Phase 2 of the prize.”

“We applaud both the Department of Energy in recognizing how crucial it is to solve for gigaton-scale carbon removal. In only the first two years of our program our 95 startup graduates secured $93M of venture capital and grants. This includes three teams who won XPRIZE milestone awards. These startups are removing carbon. They’ve made carbon removal credit sales to big names like Frontier, Shopify, and the recent Milkywire Climate Transformation Fund,” said Tito Jankowski, AirMiners CEO.

>> Additional Reading: AirMiners Launches Fund to Close the Financing Gap for Carbon Removal Startups

About AirMiners

AirMiners is on a mission to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide cumulatively by 2030. To learn more visit http://airminers.org, or follow on Twitter @airminers or LinkedIn.