Intrinsic Foundries raises US$1.63M seed to turn factory CO2 into biochemicals
What's the deal? Intrinsic FoundriesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Jharkhand-based deeptech startup, has raised US$1.63M in a seed round led by Transition VCDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The company uses microalgae to capture carbon from factory chimneys and convert it into premium biochemicals — turning pollution into products for health, food, and pharma industries.
Founded in 2023, Intrinsic Foundries feeds captured industrial emissions to microalgae grown inside modular photobioreactors. The microbes consume the carbon and produce compounds that can be sold across nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, and food systems.
Founder Shreyansh Jain, a BITS Pilani and Cornell alumnus, puts it simply: "Carbon is not waste. It is a resource waiting to be transformed."
Why now? India has committed to net zero by 2070, and the hardest emissions to cut sit in steel, cement, refineries, and chemicals — sectors where carbon capture is widely seen as the only realistic lever. The government committed US$2.72B over five years to scale Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) in its most recent Budget.
Traditional carbon capture treats emissions as waste to be buried underground — a capital-heavy approach that rarely pays for itself. Intrinsic Foundries bets on the opposite: making carbon capture profitable by creating sellable end-products.
What could go wrong? The company completed a proof of concept at a thermal power plant in 2025, but the leap from pilot to commercial scale is steep. It plans to commission multiple industrial pilots and operationalise its first one-tonne-per-day commercial plant within 12 to 24 months — an ambitious timeline for biology-based systems that must perform reliably in harsh industrial settings.
Part of the fresh capital will go towards filing intellectual property, expanding research, and establishing a US entity for global market development — spreading resources across several fronts at once.
The signal: Transition VC, the fund that led this round, is a dedicated climate-tech investor, and its bet here underscores growing conviction that carbon capture's commercial future lies in utilisation, not just storage. With India committing US$2.72B to CCUS and hard-to-abate sectors under mounting decarbonisation pressure, early-stage startups that can demonstrate a revenue-generating model — rather than a cost centre — are likely to attract disproportionate investor attention in the rounds ahead.
Read more: YourStory
Image: tubular photobioreactors by AlgaEnergy via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
