CEO Charles Cadieu (L) and CTO Matt Lee standing in front of the future home of the Spiritus Orchard facility, located in the Western U.S. (The exact location is not yet public.)
Photo courtesy Spiritus
A successful serial entrepreneur and a seasoned chemical engineer with a decade of experience at one of the nation’s premier national labs have come together to develop and scale a new direct air capture technology that mimics the architecture of a human lung.
The founders of the startup, named Spiritus after the Latin word for “breath,” began work in December 2021, and the company is officially coming out of stealth on Wednesday, with the announcement of an $11 million funding raise led by prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, with other investors including Page One Ventures.
Spiritus has built a novel approach to direct air carbon capture that relies on a material that absorbs carbon dioxide passively. Critically, Spiritus has developed a particular architecture that mimics the alveoli in the lungs in order to maximize the surface area for carbon dioxide to make contact with the material.
This lung-like material, technically called a “sorbent,” will be shaped in round balls and laid out like artificial fruits in a carbon-capture orchard, CEO Charles Cadieu and CTO Matt Lee told CNBC in a phone interview on Tuesday.
When the lung-like “fruit” have been collected from the carbon “orchard,” they will be put in a container, where low heat will be applied to remove the carbon dioxide. The desorption process will be powered by clean energy to ensure the process is a not adding emissions to the atmosphere. Once the CO2 has been removed from the lung-like fruit, the sorbent can then be returned to the carbon orchard and reused.
The sorbent developed by Spiritus, made to mimick the human lung.
Photo courtesy Spiritus
‘Mother nature’s the true artist’
Lee worked at Los Alamos National Lab from September 2012 to June 2022 on a variety of chemical engineering advanced material projects, including some with national security and defense applications, as well as heat shields and laser fusion fuel target pellets similar to those used at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to achieve a key milestone in nuclear fusion. He is a specialist in colloid science, which is the study of materials where particles of one substance are suspended in another.
Lee hadn’t worked on carbon capture technology applications until Cadieu inspired him to consider the problem. The pair had known each other for about 15 years through a family friend and had enjoyed keeping tabs on each other’s projects.
When Cadieu approached Lee to consider carbon capture, Lee approached the problem with a philosophy he has carried through much of his career: “Mother nature’s the true artist and she’s had a lot more practice than we have had,” Lee told CNBC. The other prong of his philosophy is summarized by a Leonardo da Vinci quote Lee recounted: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
That’s why they looked at lungs.
Matt Lee, the chief technical founder, is a chemical engineer with an expertise in colloid science, which is the study of materials where particles of one material are suspended in another.
Photo courtesy Matt Lee
“Lungs are very well rehearsed at doing this — taking a large volume of air and then dispersing it or spreading it out over an extraordinary high amount of interface that the alveolimake with other parts of the body,” Lee told CNBC. That’s important because while carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at record high levels, carbon dioxide is still diluted and makes up a relatively small percentage of the air.
“In order to capture some significant quantities of carbon dioxide on your sorbent, you simply have to expose it to a lot of air — a massive amount — and so finding the structure that can simultaneously give you that highly efficient contact with a large amount of active surface per unit volume enables you to have a process that is viable, feasible, economical,” Lee told CNBC.
That third component — economical — is critical in the direct air carbon capture field, and is part of what drew Khosla Ventures to make its first direct air capture investment in Spiritus.
“We’ve been watching on the sidelines evaluating all the technologies,” Rajesh Swaminathan, partner at Khosla Ventures, told CNBC in a phone conversation on Tuesday. Direct air capture is still a nascent industry and therefore very expensive right now, but Spiritus uses less energy than most of the other competitors in the space, Swaminathan said.
The absorption of carbon dioxide is passive, and the desorption process, where the carbon dioxide is removed from the “fruit” made with the lung-like material, takes a comparatively low amount of energy, Swaminathan said.
This is a model of the Spiritus equipment used to remove carbon dioxide from the sorbent.
Image courtesy Spiritus
“A lot of direct air capture processes, they require either a lot of high heat — and ours requires low heat — or they require a lot of energy, even if low heat, and ours is less than half of what’s been previously achieved by other solutions,” Cadieu told CNBC. “So this is another part of this overall equation that drives down low costs.”
The U.S. Department of Energy has a public initiative called the “Carbon Negative Shot,” which is its name for the push to drive innovation that can capture carbon dioxide, remove it from the atmosphere and store it for less than $100 per metric ton. Spiritus is driving towards this $100 per metric ton goal.
Spiritus will partner with companies specializing in carbon sequestration to take that removed carbon and put it away.
Cadieu says the artificial carbon orchards that Spiritus plans to build are more efficient than biologic trees and so take a smaller land footprint to absorb carbon dioxide than biologic forests. When the carbon captured with artificial trees is stored, it also has the advantage of sequestering carbon permanently. When biologic trees decompose after they die or burn in a fire, carbon they contain is released back into the atmosphere.
“We’re able to remove about 1,000 times more carbon dioxide than a forest can. And so this solution is actually far more efficient than forestry for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per acre,” Cadieu said.
CrowdStrike logo is seen in this illustration taken July 29, 2024.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
CrowdStrike shares popped about 13%, a day after the cybersecurity firm issued better-than-expected long-term guidance at its investor day.
The company on Wednesday said it expects net new annual recurring revenues to grow at least 20% in 2027, ahead of analysts’ expectations. CrowdStrike plans for ARR to hit $10 billion by 2031, and then double to $20 billion by 2036.
“CrowdStrike is by far the most advanced security platform in the industry, and the plethora of AI-based solutions announced today will further separate CrowdStrike from the competition,” wrote Wells Fargo analyst Andrew Nowinski in a note following the event.
Some Wall Street firms also boosted their price targets.
Read more CNBC tech news
Cybersecurity has taken center stage this year as businesses beef up security in the age of artificial intelligence. Many companies have harnessed AI tools to strengthen their offering as threats rise in sophistication.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the company’s $5 billion investment and technology collaboration with Intel comes after the two companies held discussions for nearly a year.
Huang said that he communicated personally with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan about the partnership. He called Tan a “longtime friend” on a Thursday call with reporters after the companies announced that Nvidia would co-develop data center and PC chips with Intel as part of the investment deal. On the call, Tan said he and Huang have known each other for 30 years.
“We thought it was going to be such an incredible investment,” Huang said.
Nvidia said it will collaborate with the chipmaker to create artificial intelligence systems for data centers that combine Intel’s x86-based central processors with Nvidia’s graphics processors and networking.
Intel will also sell CPUs for PCs and notebooks that integrate Nvidia graphics processors, or GPUs.
The transaction itself took a few months to come together, Intel’s revenue chief Greg Ernst wrote in a LinkedIn post, adding that the agreement was reached on Saturday.
The investment highlights how the fortunes of the two companies have switched atop Silicon Valley’s pecking order as a result of the AI explosion ushered in by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Intel shares are down 31.78% in the last five years, while Nvidia shares are up 1,348% as of opening prices on Thursday. Nvidia is worth over $4.25 trillion, while Intel is only worth $143 billion.
How Intel and Nvidia will collaborate
For decades, the most important part in a PC or server was the central processor, and Intel dominated the market for those chips. But AI infrastructure, like the machines in the $4 billion data center Microsoft announced on Thursday, often needs two or more Nvidia GPUs for every one CPU.
Nvidia AI systems, like the NVL72 used by Microsoft, come with Arm-based CPUs, instead of Intel x86-based CPUs. On the call, Huang said Nvidia will soon support Intel’s CPUs in its NVLink racks for AI.
“We’ll buy those CPUs from from Intel, and then we’ll connect it into super chips that then becomes our compute node, that then gets integrated into a rack scale AI supercomputer,” Huang said.
Nvidia will also contribute GPU technology to Intel chips that ship in laptops and PCs, which is an underserved market, Huang said. In total, the addressable markets for the two product collaborations are worth $50 billion, Huang said.
“We’re going to become a very large customer of Intel CPUs, and we’re going to be a large supplier of GPU chiplets into Intel” chips, he said.
Huang said the deal with Intel will have “no” impact on Nvidia’s business relationship with Arm.
Thursday’s investment deal is focused on the relationship between Nvidia and Intel’s product division, not its foundry. The two companies, however, did not rule out future foundry partnerships.
“We’ve always evaluated Intel’s foundry technology, and we’re going to continue to do it, but today, this announcement, is squarely focused on these custom CPUs,” Huang said. Nvidia currently uses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to manufacture its chips.
The collaboration will use Intel’s packaging, which is a part chip manufacturing that occurs toward the end of the process and combines several chip components into a single part that can be installed in machines.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan makes a speech on stage in Taipei, Taiwan May 19, 2025.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Tan said he was grateful for Nvidia’s vote of confidence.
“‘I’d like to thank Jensen for the confidence in me, and our team and Intel will work really hard to make sure it’s a good return for you,” Tan said.
Last year, Intel’s board removed previous CEO Pat Gelsinger because of rising costs in its manufacturing business and the company’s failure to gain a foothold in AI chips. In March, Intel named Tan, a well-connected investor who had turned around chip software firm Cadence Design Systems, its new chief executive.
Tan has focused on cutting costs and raising money in his short tenure leading Intel even as the future of the company’s manufacturing business, called Intel Foundry, remains unclear.
In addition to the $5 billion from Nvidia and $8.9 billion from the U.S. government, Intel has taken a $2 billion investment from SoftBank, sold a majority stake in its ASIC subsidiary Altera to Silver Lake for $3.3 billion and sold $1 billion in stock from Mobileye, its self-driving car subsidiary.
Intel has also cut significant staff, saying in July that it would eliminate 15% of its workforce by the end of the year.
The company develops its own chips as well as manufacturing them. It wants to manufacture chips for companies like Nvidia or Apple, but has yet to secure them as customers. Analysts say Intel needs a big foundry client to signal that its technology is stable and ready for volume production.
But cutting-edge chip manufacturing is expensive, and Intel has signaled that if it can’t get enough customers, it may not continue investing in its foundry. That could spark a reaction from Washington, whose politicians and lobbyists consider Intel to be strategically important for the nation because it is the only American company capable of manufacturing the most advanced chips.
The Trump administration took a 10% stake in Intel in August. Intel was previously in line to receive $8.9 billion in grants and loans from the CHIPS Act, but the Trump administration asked and received an equity stake in the chipmaker in exchange for the money.
Huang was with Trump this week in England to attend a State Dinner at Windsor Palace and announce new projects and investments in the U.K. But the Trump administration wasn’t involved in this deal, according to a White House official and Huang.
“Intel’s new partnership with Nvidia is a major milestone for American high-tech manufacturing,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.
Bees are critical for ensuring an abundant food supply year-round, but the bee population is in big trouble.
More than one-third of the crops we eat are pollinated by bees, but 40% of bee colonies are collapsing each year, California-based Beewise said.
One reason is climate change – specifically, stronger hurricanes, more frequent fires and the use of more pesticides.
The wooden beehive was invented around 1850 for commercial pollination, but these basic boxes are not very protective and not at all nurturing.
Startup Beewise is taking on the traditional beehive with AI and robotics. The company invented the BeeHome, a robotic, AI-directed beehive that growers can rent.
“A robotic beehive is essentially like a traditional beehive. It’s completely backwards compatible, so it uses the same frame, same bees. We populate these robotic beehives, and in that robotic beehive, there’s cameras that monitor the bees,” said Saar Safra, CEO of Beewise.
The cameras connect with AI software that monitors each individual bee and identifies its needs. The robotic apparatus can then treat the bees according to their characteristics.
“So if there’s not enough food in the hive, there’s a food container inside this robotic beehive and the robot will take some food supply to the bees. Same thing with medicine, thermoregulation, too cold, too warm, there’s a storm. We can keep the bees comfortable in their home without them being harmed by external weather patterns,” said Safra.
Last year, hurricanes Helene and Milton damaged or destroyed thousands of commercial beehives in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina alone.
The BeeHome costs about the same as the traditional wooden beehive and can robotically manage up to 10 hives each, saving growers on labor costs. Next-gen products could scale that up dramatically — a feature particularly attractive to investors.
“You’ll be looking at a BeeHome in a few years that can not only manage 10, but go up to 40 or more. And that’s where you get a lot of operating margin and operating profit off of the same investment,” said John Caddedu, co-founder and general partner at Corner Ventures.
Safra said the Beehome results in 70% lower bee colony loss and healthier hives. There are already thousands of these operating in the field. Safra said revenue, device and customer growth have been enormous, adding that the devices are seeing gross margins of 40%.
In addition to Corner Ventures, Beewise is backed by Insight Partners, Fortissimo, Lool Ventures, and APG. Its total funding so far is $170 million.
CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.