Meet Maddie Hall & Patrick Mellor, Founders of Living Carbon

Invest in startups like Living Carbon alongside Climate Capital here.

Founders: Maddie Hall CEO, Patrick Mellor CTO

Motto: Living Carbon is engineering plants to capture and store more carbon, and developing next-generation carbon projects on underperforming, marginal, and idle land in the US. Our mission is to responsibly rebalance the planet's carbon cycle using the power of plants. 

Year Founded: 2019

Stage: Series A

Location: Hayward, CA and Charleston, SC 

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Climate Capital: What made you want to solve this problem?

Maddie:  There had already been years of academic research and many companies started in the plant biotechnology space, and I thought “let’s apply plant biotechnology to help solve climate change. We started by engineering a photosynthesis-enhanced tree that grows up to 30-50% faster than control plants and captures up to 27% more carbon. Our goal was to plant these trees in partnership with private landowners and make carbon credits available from high-quality, US-based projects. 

Currently, there is overwhelmingly more demand than supply for high-quality carbon credits. The carbon offset market is on track to exceed $50 billion by 2030, but there is a divide between high-volume, low-cost nature-based solutions and high-cost, low-volume engineered solutions. “Engineered nature” solutions can fill the gap between supply and demand using the self-replicating, low-maintenance nature of plants, while applying biotechnology to develop traits that optimize for high-quality carbon removal. 

Climate Capital: What are you building?

Maddie: Muddy Machines is solving the labour shortage problem with an electrically powered, light-weight, autonomous field robot platform called SPROUT that can carry a variety of harvest tools that can harvest a variety of field vegetables more accurately and more quickly than humans.

Expanding domestic production in consumer markets can save millions of tonnes of CO2 in food miles and also increases the resilience of the food system by making fresher, more nutritious food more readily available.

Climate Capital: What is next?

Maddie:  We are launching 5 harvest robots in 2023 with the largest British asparagus grower and are going to generate our first revenue. Over the summer we aim to raise our Series A to collect funds to build additional robots and grow revenues further.

Climate Capital: What are the core elements of the culture you are building at your company?

Maddie: the culture we are building at Living Carbon. We aim to move quickly and with a sense of urgency, which involves recognizing the interdependence of our team members and departments as part of a greater whole. Even with our emphasis on a rapid pace of execution, we take the time to understand and communicate how each part of the company fits into the long-term vision. We allocate time to educate ourselves about the role of plants in drawing down carbon and rebalancing the atmosphere over the course of geologic time. This complements other practices geared toward openness and cohesiveness, such as giving feedback and celebrating each other’s wins.
Climate Capital: What are the key challenges as you scale your company?

Maddie: When we started working with trees in the lab, we did not realize the extent of the complexity or the collective action challenges involved in developing carbon projects.

As one example, it took us a long time to scale the learning curve of working with the third-party registries that verify carbon credits. The voluntary carbon markets are a rapidly growing industry with a vital role in scaling carbon removal, and at the heart of this ecosystem are the third-party verifiers who act as a clearinghouse for the exchange of verified carbon credits. However, our experience has been that innovation in carbon removal technologies and project development sometimes moves faster than the third-party verification standards, and deployment is slowed down as a result. 

The solution here isn’t to blame anyone, but these types of challenges are a microcosm of the climate crisis as a whole. This is a problem that requires coordination across stakeholders with different incentives, organizational cultures, and execution timelines - which has no easy solution. 

Climate Capital: What have you learned that you want to share with other founders?

Maddie: Succeeding as a founder is first about execution and drive, but it’s also about knowing how to keep that execution going at a sustainable pace. This involves maintaining your own mental wellbeing, hiring people who are smarter than you are, and learning to delegate over time. As the company grows, you should first be willing to do everything for your company, and then move toward only dealing with the most complex/difficult challenges or the most important strategic questions. 

Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?

Maddie: We are looking for partners who can help us scale commercially - both landowners and team members! Our top priority is finding landowners throughout the South and Appalachia, especially with more than 1,000 acres of land, who might be interested in participating in the carbon markets. We’ll take care of the planting and project development, while the landowner receives annual payments and keeps the trees at the end of the project.

We’re also hiring for our commercial team: if you have experience with the voluntary carbon markets and want to contribute to frontier, large-scale, nature-based carbon removal, apply to work with us!