Equatic, a Santa Monica-based carbon removal startup, is using the world’s largest and most abundant carbon capture technology: the ocean.
Equatic, the brainchild of Gaurav Sant and Erika La Plante, was born out of the Institute for Carbon Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. The company raised $11.6 million in series A funding in August – led by Catalytic Capital for Climate and Health, a division of Singapore-based Temasek Trust, and climate-focused private investment firm Kibo Invest.
At its core, Equatic is creating a 100-kiloton commercial-grade carbon dioxide removal facility. The goal is to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to produce carbon-negative green hydrogen in one process.
The platform feeds seawater into its facility and, using renewable energy, dissects that seawater into hydrogen, oxygen, base and acid components. The acid is neutralized and returned to the ocean, while the base helps remove carbon dioxide from the air.
Equatic’s platform is designed to solve two problems. One is sourcing and collecting valuable green energy, which is meant to help the world wean off fossil fuels; and the other is neutralizing existing carbon emissions from the atmosphere.
While the ocean is indeed a free carbon sink, it doesn’t help companies capture the carbon data insights they need to meet different environmental regulations from various countries. Equatic’s onshore plants do, according to Sant, who serves as the company’s chief technology officer.
Sant sat down with the Business Journal to discuss how a renowned interest in energy has allowed his company to experiment with renewable resources.
What was the genesis of your company? How did it come to be?
Equatic is a spinoff company of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management. It was created to activate the size and scale of the oceans to effect affordable and globally accessible carbon management solutions.
The oceans are the world’s largest carbon removal machine. Year after year, they remove about 30% of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities into the atmosphere.
At ICM, we have been driven by two strategic considerations. First, the traditional paradigm of sequestering carbon dioxide in geological reservoirs using Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS, will not mature quickly enough, or sufficiently, to affect the trajectory of climate change. Second, we must focus on catalyzing affordable climate change mitigation because existing carbon management solutions remain far too expensive for widespread adoption.
To address these two concerns, Equatic’s technology platform was designed to leverage the oceans to both remove and store carbon dioxide while producing green hydrogen, a clean fuel, as a co-product.
Alternative energy received record-breaking venture funding in 2025. Why do you think that is?
Thanks to improvements in manufacturing (e.g., solar panels), project delivery (e.g., renewable energy plants), and technology adoption, the costs of renewable energy production – particularly solar and wind power – have plummeted over the past decade(s).
This has led to the abundance of clean power at low cost around the world. While power generation of this nature is constrained because it can occur only when the sun shines and the wind blows, renewable energy is a rapidly growing component of our overall electricity mix.
Given that demand for electrification is a major theme across sectors, including compute, manufacturing and mobility, there is an ever-growing need for electricity. With the ability to rapidly bring renewable energy projects online and produce renewable electricity at low cost, there is increasing interest (in venture and beyond) in scaling this cost-effective, virtually limitless approach to clean electricity generation.
Your company started a little before the AI data center craze. What was your goal back then? Has it changed much from now?
Equatic was created to mitigate the accelerating trajectory of climate change in a scalable and affordable way. That mission of ours remains unchanged.
In fact, we have doubled down on it because, as other approaches to climate change mitigation have either stalled or fallen short of their promise, we have become even more convinced that leveraging the size and scale of the oceans, in combination with transformational engineering, remains our best path to affordable climate change mitigation.
A lot of people associate the energy hype with AI and data centers. Beyond that, what are some overlooked use cases for a company like yours?
It is indeed true that AI and data centers are driving accelerating electricity demand. But electricity demand is growing across the economy in many different ways.
For example, while the last 100 years were the century of “industrial heat” across many sectors, there is now interest in electrifying industrial processes to transition from heat to electricity, either to improve process efficiency or to move away from fossil fuels, our traditional source of heat. This demand growth, which has not received the same attention as AI and data centers, is substantial, with (electric vehicles) serving as a clear example, since they require electricity to charge.
Beyond mobility, it is expected that the vast majority of technological climate change mitigation solutions will also (need to be) be powered by renewable electricity. All this is to say that while AI and data centers are the most prominent examples of rising electricity demand, there are many others to consider as well.
What are some bottlenecks facing energy startups like yours? Could be related to logistics, supply chain or another part of the ecosystem that hasn’t updated to meet demand.
Unquestionably, extending human life with improved quality and mitigating climate change will be defining challenges of the coming centuries.
More than anything else, climate change mitigation – both as a call to action and as an industrial sector – demands science-based consistency and a central focus on the affordability of solutions. This requires close alignment within, across, and between governments and corporations, along with clarity of message and desired outcomes.
Such consistency and partnership in mission conveys attention, importance, and purpose to the public and industry. Such coordinated and consistent messaging and outcome planning create demand for technological solutions, which in turn leads to ever improving and increasingly affordable and scalable solutions that emerge and proliferate in a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle. This is the central unlock needed to ensure affordable and accessible climate change mitigation.
