Khosla Ventures backs effort to build ‘orchards’ of ‘fruit’ with lung-like material to remove CO2 from the air
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.
Previously, Cadieu co-founded Caption Health, a health care startup that uses artificial intelligence to assist in ultrasound scans. Caption Health received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in September 2020 for its capacity to enable non-experts to perform lung ultrasounds and was sold to GE Healthcare in February 2023. Also, Cadieu was a founding team member of IQ Engines, an image recognition software company which Yahoo acquired in 2013.
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 alveoli make 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.
Jeff Williams, chief operating officer of Apple Inc., during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, US, on Monday, June 9, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Apple said on Tuesday that Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, a 27-year company veteran, will be retiring later this year.
Current operations leader Sabih Khan will take over much of the COO role later this month, Apple said in a press release. For his remaining time with the comapny, Williams will continue to head up Apple’s design team, Apple Watch, and health initiatives, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.
Williams becomes the latest longtime Apple executive to step down as key employees, who were active in the company’s hyper-growth years, reach retirement age. Williams, 62, previously headed Apple’s formidable operations division, which is in charge of manufacturing millions of complicated devices like iPhones, while keeping costs down.
He also led important teams inside Apple, including the company’s fabled industrial design team, after longtime leader Jony Ive retired in 2019. When Williams retires, Apple’s design team will report to CEO Tim Cook, Apple said.
“He’s helped to create one of the most respected global supply chains in the world; launched Apple Watch and overseen its development; architected Apple’s health strategy; and led our world class team of designers with great wisdom, heart, and dedication,” Cook said in the statement.
Williams said he plans to spend more time with friends and family.
“June marked my 27th anniversary with Apple, and my 40th in the industry,” Williams said in the release.
Williams is leaving Apple at a time when its famous supply chain is under significant pressure, as the U.S. imposes tariffs on many of the countries where Apple sources its devices, and White House officials publicly pressure Apple to move more production to the U.S.
Khan was added to Apple’s executive team in 2019, taking an executive vice president title. Apple said on Tuesday that he will lead supply chain, product quality, planning, procurement, and fulfillment at Apple.
The operations leader joined Apple’s procurement group in 1995, and before that worked as an engineer and technical leader at GE Plastics. He has a bachelor’s degree from Tufts University and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York.
Khan has worked closely with Cook. Once, during a meeting when Cook said that a manufacturing problem was “really bad,” Khan stood up and drove to the airport, and immediately booked a flight to China to fix it, according to an anecdote published in Fortune.
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Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, June 16, 2023.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives to “Shut up” on Tuesday after the analyst offered three recommendations to the electric vehicle company’s board in a post on X.
Ives has been one of the most bullish Tesla observers on Wall Street. With a $500 price target on the stock, he has the highest projection of any analyst tracked by FactSet.
But on Tuesday, Ives took to X with critical remarks about Musk’s political activity after the world’s richest person said over the weekend that he was creating a new political party called the America Party to challenge Republican candidates who voted for the spending bill that was backed by President Donald Trump.
Ives’ post followed a nearly 7% slide in Tesla’s stock Monday, which wiped out $68 billion in market cap. Ives called for Tesla’s board to create a new pay package for Musk that would get him 25% voting control and clear a path to merge with xAI, establish “guardrails” for how much time Musk has to spend at Tesla, and provide “oversight on political endeavors.”
Ives published a lengthier note with other analysts from his firm headlined, “The Tesla board MUST Act and Create Ground Rules For Musk; Soap Opera Must End.” The analysts said that Musk’s launching of a new political party created a “tipping point in the Tesla story,” necessitating action by the company’s board to rein in the CEO.
Still, Wedbush maintained its price target and its buy recommendation on the stock.
“Shut up, Dan,” Musk wrote in response on X, even though the first suggestion would hand the CEO the voting control he has long sought at Tesla.
In an email to CNBC, Ives wrote, “Elon has his opinion and I get it, but we stand by what the right course of action is for the Board.”
Musk’s historic 2018 CEO pay package, which had been worth around $56 billion and has since gone up in value, was voided last year by the Delaware Court of Chancery. Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled that Tesla’s board members had lacked independence from Musk and failed to properly negotiate at arm’s length with the CEO.
Tesla has appealed that case to the Delaware state Supreme Court and is trying to determine what Musk’s next pay package should entail.
Ives isn’t the only Tesla bull to criticize Musk’s continued political activism.
Analysts at William Blair downgraded the stock to the equivalent of a hold from a buy on Monday, because of Musk’s political plans and rhetoric as well as the negative impacts that the spending bill passed by Congress could have on Tesla’s margins and EV sales.
“We expect that investors are growing tired of the distraction at a point when the business needs Musk’s attention the most and only see downside from his dip back into politics,” the analysts wrote. “We would prefer this effort to be channeled towards the robotaxi rollout at this critical juncture.”
Trump supporter James Fishback, CEO of hedge fund Azoria Partners, said Saturday that his firm postponed the listing of an exchange-traded fund, the Azoria Tesla Convexity ETF, that would invest in the EV company’s shares and options. He began his post on X saying, “Elon has gone too far.”
“I encourage the Board to meet immediately and ask Elon to clarify his political ambitions and evaluate whether they are compatible with his full-time obligations to Tesla as CEO,” Fishback wrote.
Musk said Saturday that he has formed the America Party, which he claimed will give Americans “back your freedom.” He hasn’t shared formal details, including where the party may be registered, how much funding he will provide for it and which candidates he will back.
Tesla’s stock is now down about 25% this year, badly underperforming U.S. indexes and by far the worst performance among tech’s megacaps.
Musk spent much of the first half of the year working with the Trump administration and leading an effort to massively downsize the federal government. His official work with the administration wrapped up at the end of May, and his exit preceded a public spat between Musk and Trump over the spending bill and other matters.
Musk, Tesla’s board chair Robyn Denholm and investor relations representative Travis Axelrod didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Waymo announced it is now offering teen accounts for its self-driving car service Waymo One, beginning in Phoenix, Arizona.
Courtesy of Waymo
Waymo announced Tuesday that it is offering accounts for teens ages 14 to 17, starting in Phoenix.
The Alphabet-owned company said that, beginning Tuesday, parents in Phoenix can use their Waymo accounts “to invite their teen into the program, pairing them together.” Once their account is activated, teens can hail fully autonomous rides.
Previously, users were required to be at least 18 years old to sign up for a Waymo account, but the age range expansion comes as the company seeks to increase ridership amid a broader expansion of its ride-hailing service across U.S. cities. Alphabet has also been under pressure to monetize AI products amid increased competition and economic headwinds.
Waymo said it will offer “specially-trained Rider Support agents” during rides hailed by teens and loop in parents if needed. Teens can also share their trip status with their parents for real-time updates on their progress, and parents receive all ride receipts.
Teen accounts are initially only being offered to riders in the metro Phoenix area. Teen accounts will expand to more markets outside California where the Waymo app is available in the future, a spokesperson said.
Waymo’s expansion to teens follows a similar move by Uber, which launched teen accounts in 2023. Waymo, which has partnerships with Uber in multiple markets, said it “may consider enabling access for teens through our network partners in the future.”
Already, Waymo provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Austin, Texas, and the company is preparing to bring autonomous rides to Miami and Washington, D.C., in 2026.
In June, Waymo announced that it plans to manually drive vehicles in New York, marking the first step toward potentially cracking the largest U.S. city. Waymo said it applied for a permit with the New York City Department of Transportation to operate autonomously with a trained specialist behind the wheel in Manhattan.
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