Stripe, Shopify, H&M spend $7 million on carbon removal from a dozen new companies
Airhive is one of the dozen companies Frontier has facilitated carbon removal purchases from on behalf of Stripe, Shopify and H&M. Airhive is developing a geochemical direct air capture system.
Photo courtesy Airhive.
Stripe, Shopify and H&M Group announced Thursday they are spending $7 million on carbon removal from a dozen new startups.
The deal was facilitated by Frontier, a public benefit company owned by payment processing company Stripe, which launched in April 2022 to accelerate the development of carbon removal technologies and make sure there is future demand to support the growth of the nascent industry.
Stripe, Shopify and H&M are three of the member companies of Frontier, and together, they spent $7 million on carbon removal purchases from 12 companies: Airhive, Alkali Earth, Banyu Carbon, Carbon Atlantis, CarbonBlue, CarbonRun, EDAC Labs, Holocene, Mati, Planetary Technologies, Spiritus Technologies and Vaulted Deep.
The techniques for removing carbon dioxide vary significantly: Alkali Earth applies alkaline byproducts from industrial processes to gravel on roads which acts as a carbon sink. CarbonBlue uses calcium to mineralize and remove dissolved carbon dioxide in freshwater or ocean water. Mati applies silicate rock powder to agricultural fields, where it reacts with water and carbon dioxide to produce dissolved carbon, and is starting to test its product on the rice paddy farms in India — and the list goes on.
Frontier facilitates carbon removal purchases for its member companies via multiple pathways, including pre-purchase agreements and offtake agreements. Pre-purchase agreements are generally smaller purchases where payment is made upfront and is not conditional on delivery, and the goal is to support early stage carbon removal companies.
The $7 million announced Thursday are pre-purchase agreements, and the amount of carbon expected to be removed ranges from 58 tons to 1,666 tons, depending on the startup.
Mati is one of the dozen companies Frontier has facilitated carbon removal purchases from on behalf of Stripe, Shopify and H&M. Mati applies silicate rock powders to agricultural fields where it reacts with water and carbon dioxide to produce dissolved carbon and is starting to test its product on the rice paddy farms in India.
Photo courtesy Mati
Offtake agreements are significantly larger purchases intended for later-stage companies and get paid out as the tons of carbon are removed and sequestered.
So far, Frontier has made one $53 million offtake agreement announcement with Charm Industrials to remove 112,000 tons of CO2 between 2024 and 2030. Charm sequesters carbon dioxide underground by gathering excess organic material — like corn stover — and converting that into a bio-oil, which it then pumps into abandoned oil and gas wells.
Offtake agreements with larger carbon removal companies will comprise most of the $1 billion-plus that Frontier has secured from its member companies, which also include Alphabet, Autodesk, JPMorgan Chase, McKinsey, Meta and Workday. Participation in the pre-purchase program for member companies is optional, but all Frontier members participate in the offtake purchases.
“But we still have the pre-purchase program to support the early stage companies, and really to make sure that we can get to the portfolio of gigaton scale removal that we need eventually, by starting today,” Joanna Klitzke, Frontier’s procurement and ecosystem strategy lead, told CNBC on Tuesday.
CarbonBlue is one of the dozen companies Frontier has facilitated carbon removal purchases from on behalf of Stripe, Shopify and H&M. CarbonBlue uses calcium to mineralize and remove dissolved carbon dioxide in freshwater or ocean water.
Photo courtesy CarbonBlue.
In addition to the pre-purchase agreements, Stripe is announcing on Thursday it has provided $250,000 in a research and development grant to both carbon removal startups, Carboniferous and Rewind, for a total of $500,000. Also, Stripe has provided $100,000 in funding to carbon removal start-ups Arbon and Vycarb, for a total of $200,000, in a partnership with the climate tech accelerator, Activate.
All of these efforts today are capturing minuscule amounts of carbon emissions compared with the quantity of emissions being released — humanity emitted 36.8 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2022 just to produce energy, according to the IEA. But the thought behind Frontier is that these techniques will be tested and built out over time.
And the carbon removal industry will need to grow dramatically in order for humanity to achieve its climate goals, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Carbon dioxide removal cannot be a “substitute for immediate and deep emissions reductions, but it is part of all modelled scenarios that limit global warming to 2 degrees (Celsius) or lower by 2100,” the IPCC says.
Stripe Climate began carbon removal purchases in 2020 and Frontier launched a couple years later. Since then, there has been an increase in both the quantity and quality of applications, Klitzke told CNBC.
Carboniferous is one of two companies that stripe is announced Thursday that it has provided $250,000 in a research and development grant to. Carboniferous is developing a process to sink leftover surgar cane fiber and corn stover into the deep oxygenless parts of the Gulf of Mexico.
Photo courtesy Carboniferous
“In my mind, that’s a really encouraging sign that the field is growing and maturing,” Klitzke told CNBC. Frontier is seeing new approaches to carbon removal coming from a more diverse range of geographies in the applicant pool, which is also encouraging, Klitzke said.
For Frontier, the idea of carbon removal is not isolated from a primary climate goal of “really, really deep, deep emission reductions and fossil fuel phase out,” Klitzke told CNBC. “The role of carbon removal is fully to address legacy emissions and is not to be an offset or an excuse for the fossil industry.”
Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, May 21, 2025.
Jim Lo Scalzo | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla shares have dropped 7% from Friday’s closing price of $323.63 to the $300.71 close on Tuesday ahead of the company’s second-quarter deliveries report.
Wall Street analysts are expecting Tesla to report deliveries of around 387,000 — a 13% decline compared to deliveries of nearly 444,000 a year ago, according to a consensus compiled by FactSet. Prediction market Kalshi told CNBC on Tuesday that its traders forecast deliveries of around 364,000.
Shares in the electric vehicle maker had been rising after Tesla started a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, in late June and CEO Elon Musk boasted of its first “driverless delivery” of a car to a customer there.
The stock price took a turn after Musk on Saturday reignited a feud with President Donald Trump over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the massive spending bill that the commander-in-chief endorsed. The bill is now heading for a final vote in the House.
That legislation would benefit higher-income households in the U.S. while slashing spending on programs such as Medicaid and food assistance.
Musk did not object to cuts to those specific programs. However, Musk on X said the bill would worsen the U.S. deficit and raise the debt ceiling. The bill includes tax cuts that would add around $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
The Tesla CEO has also criticized aspects of the bill that would cut hundreds of billions of dollars in support for renewable energy development in the U.S. and phase out tax credits for electric vehicles.
Such changes could hurt Tesla as they are expected to lower EV sales by roughly 100,000 vehicles per year by 2035, according to think tank Energy Innovation.
The bill is also expected to reduce renewable energy development by more than 350 cumulative gigawatts in that same time period, according to Energy Innovation. That could pressure Tesla’s Energy division, which sells solar and battery energy storage systems to utilities and other clean energy project developers.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that Musk was, “upset that he’s losing his EV mandate,” but that the tech CEO could “lose a lot more than that.” Trump was alluding to the subsidies, incentives and contracts that Musk’s many businesses have relied on.
SpaceX has received over $22 billion from work with the federal government since 2008, according to FedScout, which does federal spending and government contract research. That includes contracts from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, among others.
Tesla has reported $11.8 billion in sales of “automotive regulatory credits,” or environmental credits, since 2015, according to an evaluation of the EV maker’s financial filings by Geoff Orazem, CEO of FedScout.
These incentives are largely derived from federal and state regulations in the U.S. that require automakers to sell some number of low-emission vehicles or buy credits from companies like Tesla, which often have an excess.
Regulatory credit sales go straight to Tesla’s bottom line. Credit revenue amounted to approximately 60% of Tesla’s net income in the second quarter of 2024.
WATCH: Threats to SpaceX & Tesla as Musk, Trump feud heats up
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.
Yara Nardi | Reuters
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.
The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.
Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.
The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.
Bezos is ranked third in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index with a net worth of about $240 billion. He’s behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk at $363 billion and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at $260 billion.
WATCH: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ wedding sparks Venice protests
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
WATCH: Google buyouts highlight tech’s cost-cutting amid AI CapEx boom
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