Moments that Matter: From Local Waters to Global Impact

Garrett Boudinot is the founder and CEO of Vycarb, a startup developing the tools for scalable, fully-measured carbon capture, removal, and storage.

The company recently announced a $5M seed round led by Twynam, with participation from Shell, MOL Switch, Hatch Blue, Clocktower Ventures, Idemitsu, and SGInnovate, with plans to accelerate commercialization of Vycarb’s promising technology that can capture carbon directly from industrial sources and permanently store it using water.

A few short years ago, Boudinot joined Cohort 2022, becoming a member of Activate New York’s inaugural group of fellows, with just an idea and early validation. With years of experience as a climate scientist, he had come up with a solution he wanted to scale and implement in the real world. Over the course of the Activate Fellowship, he brought on two full-time and one part-time employees, and they developed an early product and pilot tested it as a small team. Today, Vycarb has 11 employees and is rapidly expanding.

The Vycarb team in front of their pilot at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the summer of 2025.

Vycarb is now carrying out its third real-world pilot demonstration, a large-scale system that’s moving on the order of tons of CO2 per year. Vycarb has paying customers and is backed by a strong roster of corporate investors including Rio Tinto, Bluescope Steel, and the aforementioned backers from the startup’s most recent raise.

Boudinot is also now seeing his global vision for Vycarb coming to life. Vycarb’s technology is plugging into sites well beyond the waters of New York City, where the technology was first validated, as Boudinot builds relationships across the United States and internationally. His travel schedule for September 2025 alone, for example, included Norway, Laos, Thailand, Singapore, New York, and Dubai. “And that's one trip,” Boudinot said. That was followed by a trip to another project site in the Midwest.

Garrett Boudinot (Cohort 2022) presenting at Activate Demo Day 2023 in San Francisco, CA.

It’s an exciting moment in Boudinot’s journey. We checked in with him to hear more.

What's been your biggest “pinch me” moment?

My answer would be my first trip to Singapore.

One of our earliest investors was Twynam, an Australian decarbonization VC firm, who has been an ideal early investor—they’ve provided funding, made connections for future funding, and helped us access commercialization opportunities in networks and geographies I didn’t already have experience in. Asia Pacific is one of those new geographies, being a major hub for carbon management.

It was about a year and a half into my journey with Vycarb when they brought me out to Singapore for a week. Every day I was having literally dozens of meetings with all of these major corporations, strategic partners, and investors. 

Coming from a relatively small town in Georgia and being a laboratory scientist for most of my life, to wearing a suit and having business meetings with executives in Singapore—that certainly was a “pinch me” moment for me.

I now go to Singapore at least once a quarter and have built on the relationships that I made there—including SGInnovate investing in our recent round—and that kind of international opportunity and support is  a really exciting part of where I am today.

What did going global teach you about your work and impact?

The policy incentives for decarbonization in the U.S. look very different from those in the E.U., for example, or in Asia Pacific. Singapore has a proper carbon tax, which has a very clear framework and timeline for how the price of CO2 emissions will be increased year over year. And so part of the work that we've been doing in Singapore is specifically because of that policy incentive for decarbonization of a lot of the heavy industry that's there. 

When I'm in Norway and in Europe, it looks very different, because there's the E.U. Emissions Trading System (ETS) and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)—very different  policies that are driving decarbonization efforts there. 

This has been critical to how we think about expansion—considering different geographies and policy incentives and how they roll out over time in different ways—and how that translates to market opportunities, problem-solution fits, business models, and the impact our technology can have. This is critical to refining our strategy as we grow from a small team with several demonstration projects in New York City to more locations across the U.S. and different countries around the world.

Which other international relationships have been particularly impactful?

I'm very excited about our relationship with SGInnovate, an investor in our last funding round, and how the investment and relationship will build on the opportunities we have in Singapore and drive urgent, immediate deployment and solutions.

We work closely with a number of different government entities in Singapore that are focused on developing and implementing climate solutions, and several corporations that either have emissions in Singapore or have a headquarters or an arm in Singapore that have global-scale emissions.

One of the strongest natural resources and assets that Singapore has is its coastline. Given our water-based solution, I see Singapore as one of the greatest catalysts for leading how the type of technology we've developed can be implemented across sectors in a real, tangible way for a strong policy incentive that can then be mimicked, mirrored, accelerated, and scaled around the world.

What’s next for you and Vycarb?

Over the past few years, we've demonstrated that this technology works at a commercially relevant scale. We've brought on partners who want to deploy this technology and want to support this technology scaling. We've identified different incentive mechanisms that can expedite the adoption of this technology. We just closed this $5M seed round with a lot of these new strategic partners.

Everything we're focused on now is commercial execution. And I don't think it's a secret that in 2025, that is the mandate of all startups more than it was in 2023 or 2022, right? Scaling how quickly this can be a solution for a customer is now mission-critical.

What does the world look like in 10 to 20 years with Vycarb having the scaled impact you envision?

I do believe that this technology has the potential to be the largest carbon storage technology in the world.

There are 40 billion tons of CO2 emitted every year at least right now, and more than half of that comes from energy and materials like cement, aluminum, and steel. Many of the facilities emitting that CO2 are already co-located with water because those facilities are using bulk maritime shipping for inputs and outputs, or are using water for cooling processes.

So in 10 to 20 years, I see the Vycarb system deployed across sectors, across geographies on these sources of CO2 emissions, capturing and storing CO2 from those facilities before it enters the atmosphere, having a several-millions-to-billions of tons of CO2 impact per year.