Cotierra leadership team. Credit: Cotierra / Paulig press release.
€2.6m · Other round · Cleantech · Zurich, Switzerland
Zurich-based Cotierra has raised €2.6m in an investment round to move its decentralised biochar system from successful pilots into repeatable, multi-year commercial deployments. PINC, the venture arm of food and beverage group Paulig, co-led the round with Carbon Removal Partners. Zürcher Kantonalbank, Carbon Drawdown Initiative, better ventures, GOTA Ventures, Hungry4Impact and Triple Impact Ventures also participated alongside climate and impact-focused angel investors. The company will initially scale in coffee before expanding across other tropical crops. Paulig/PINC press release
Moving the reactor to the residue
Biochar is made by heating biomass with little oxygen, stabilising carbon that would otherwise return to the atmosphere as the material decomposes. Cotierra's model places transportable reactors near farms, where coffee prunings and other residues are generated, then returns the resulting biochar to the soil. That avoids hauling bulky feedstock to a central plant and gives farmers a soil amendment that the company says can improve fertility and resilience. Cotierra · EUVC carbon-removal analysis
Local production solves only part of the operating problem. Cotierra combines the reactor with an IoT-enabled platform that records production and application data, while agronomic partners help farmers use the material correctly. For food companies and commodity traders, that traceability is central: climate claims need evidence that biomass was converted, applied and stored as intended across a distributed farm network. Cotierra says its verification process is being validated by Carbon Standards International, so repeatable monitoring remains an execution milestone rather than a completed certification. Cotierra
A strategic investor tests the route to market
PINC's participation links the technology to a coffee company with a direct interest in crop resilience and supply-chain emissions. Paulig says Cotierra has gained traction with coffee traders and that the funding will support the shift from pilots to commercial deployments. The strategic value is not simply carbon-credit production: a system that improves soil, reduces waste and creates auditable removal data can serve farmers, traders and brands through one deployment. Paulig/PINC press release
The commercial test is whether Cotierra can reproduce that bundle across dispersed farms without losing data quality or operating consistency. Coffee is the starting point; cocoa, cotton and citrus are next targets. Different residues, agronomic practices and supply-chain partners will make each expansion a deployment problem as much as a hardware sale. Tech.eu reports that Cotierra has now raised $4.75m in total, giving the company more capital to turn field evidence into a standardised product while leaving scale and economics to be demonstrated. Tech.eu
