Latest / Voices and Visions / Episode 11. Betting on Kenya to Solve Climate Change | Octavia Carbon

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Episode 11. Betting on Kenya to Solve Climate Change | Octavia Carbon · Voices and Visions

0:01
SPEAKER_05: This is voices and visions.
0:07
SPEAKER_05: Africa's business policy with the people should be in it.
0:10
SPEAKER_05: I don't think any of it is enough for this for well.
0:17
SPEAKER_05: This season lets me on some funding comes to understand a couple of trust us bills.
0:22
SPEAKER_02: As much as I can respect the stuff for the coffee.
0:36
SPEAKER_05: Welcome to the Silicon Savannah.
0:42
SPEAKER_05: Today I'm joined by Martin Freimiller.
0:44
SPEAKER_05: Martin is the CEO of Octavia Carbon, the first global sales direct air capture company headquartered in Nairobi.
0:51
SPEAKER_01: Everyone thought that we were crazy wanting to build uh like this pretty uh pretty serious deep tech in Kenya.
0:59
SPEAKER_05: Octavia Carbon is positioning Kenya as a global node in carbon removal and climate infrastructure.
1:04
SPEAKER_02: 10 years I think looks like roughly like um removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
1:09
SPEAKER_05: They turned science into investable carbon removal assets for the international markets.
1:14
SPEAKER_05: Today we are shooting this episode at the manufacturing plants outside of the city with hard hats and safety goggles nearby.
1:21
SPEAKER_05: Good morning, Martin.
1:22
SPEAKER_02: Good morning.
1:23
SPEAKER_05: So today we're sitting at a very special location.
1:25
SPEAKER_05: Um, this is the first time we're shooting an episode outside.
1:28
SPEAKER_05: Um and now inside, can we call it a manufacturing plant?
1:33
SPEAKER_02: Yes, you can.
1:34
SPEAKER_05: Okay, amazing.
1:35
SPEAKER_05: Um, so in this manufacturing plant, I'm joined by you, and you have a bit of a European accent.
1:41
SPEAKER_05: So my first question, of course, is what is an Austrian doing in Kenya?
1:46
SPEAKER_02: That is a great question.
1:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, so I'm originally Austrian by birth.
1:50
SPEAKER_02: Um and I have spent two years of my youth on the African continent, one in South Africa, which is where I get a bit of my accent as well.
1:57
SPEAKER_02: Uh, one in Zambia, and uh then seven in the UK, and then after that, I've now been living in Kenya for four and a half years.
2:03
SPEAKER_05: So why did you decide to move to Kenya?
2:05
SPEAKER_02: Because it is the world's best place for direct air capture, which is what we're building right here.
2:11
SPEAKER_05: Okay, so you you moved here for work.
2:13
unknown: Okay.
2:14
SPEAKER_02: You said, okay, this is the place I'm gonna I moved here out of the conviction that Kenya has a big role to play in the global fight to hit net zero.
2:24
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
2:25
SPEAKER_05: What does that mean?
2:26
SPEAKER_02: It means that we need to remove a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere.
2:30
SPEAKER_02: And there's various ways of doing that, one of which is called direct air carbon capture, where we suck CO2 directly from the atmosphere and store it deep underground in geological layers as a means of removing it permanently from the atmosphere.
2:45
SPEAKER_02: Um and Kenya is the world's best place to do just that.
2:49
SPEAKER_02: That's something I realized while living in the UK in my previous consulting job, um, that Kenya has the world's best energy, geology, and talent to make that happen at very large scale.
3:00
SPEAKER_02: And so I did the logical thing and moved my life to Kenya to start a company.
3:04
SPEAKER_05: It was easy.
3:05
SPEAKER_05: I like that.
3:06
SPEAKER_05: So wait, you were just saying the it has perfect conditions for direct air capture.
3:11
SPEAKER_05: So the first one you mentioned was geography.
3:14
SPEAKER_05: What uh why?
3:15
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, energy is the energy and geology are the two uh that are most important.
3:20
SPEAKER_02: So essentially the way that direct air capture works is you just have a filter that you pass CO2 through, and then you need to like release the CO2 from that filter, which is a quite energy-intensive process.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
3:32
SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh any energy that you use in that process, of course, needs to be renewable.
3:37
SPEAKER_02: And that, for one, only makes sense on grids that have a very high penetration of renewable energy, and that also makes only sense in places where you can scale renewable energy almost infinitely, basically.
3:47
SPEAKER_02: Um, because of course, in most places in the world, we need the renewable energy that we can bring online to essentially decommission fossil fuel power plants.
3:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Kenya is unique because it has a more than 90% renewable grid, and the parts of central Kenya where we deploy our plants are literally 100% renewable, and a lot of that is geothermal electricity, where naturally occurring heat from the ground essentially powers turbines to uh generate electricity in a very clean fashion.
4:15
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
4:15
SPEAKER_02: And also, quite importantly, more than 80% of the energy that we use inside our machines is actually heat.
4:22
SPEAKER_02: And if we can use that heat directly, that's actually the lowest cost form of primary energy on Earth.
4:28
SPEAKER_02: It's the lowest cost way of ever running these machines, which allows us to dramatically bring that uh technology down the cost curve as well.
4:36
SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's the energy bits that Kenya is uniquely well suited for.
4:39
SPEAKER_02: Um, you need to write geology to store the CO2, and Kenya has a lot of that too.
4:43
SPEAKER_05: How does that work?
4:43
SPEAKER_05: How deep does it go underground?
4:46
SPEAKER_02: So you want to put your CO2 roughly a thousand meters below ground.
4:50
SPEAKER_02: Um and essentially, like in Kenya's volcanic geology, especially along the East African Rift Valley, uh, we have a certain porous volcanic rock called basalt, uh, where CO2 can react with sort of naturally occurring sort of culture and magnesium deposits underground to form carbonate minerals, which is essentially the most thermodynamically stable form of carbon there is.
5:15
SPEAKER_02: It's just the safest form of ever storing CO2.
5:18
SPEAKER_02: We are literally turning this CO2 into rock.
5:21
SPEAKER_02: Um, and that is essentially a process that happens all around us all the time.
5:24
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but essentially in Kenya's fairly recent geology along the East African Rift Valley, uh, we can dramatically accelerate that process by essentially hitting highly porous volcanic rock that has the means eventually accelerating that process by quite a lot.
5:38
SPEAKER_05: Interesting.
5:39
SPEAKER_05: So there's no such thing as at some point we've stored too much CO2 down there?
5:45
SPEAKER_02: So I think there is about 9,000 cubic kilometers of porous base in just Kenya, um, which you know by itself should be roughly enough to store all of humanity's carbon emissions since the dawn of the industrial era, basically.
6:00
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
6:00
SPEAKER_02: Um if we go out into the broader rift valley, then that's definitely the case, basically.
6:05
SPEAKER_02: So um carbon mineralization, which is done by our partners, uh cellar mineral storage, uh, here in East Africa, is a very scalable way of storing CO2 in a uniquely safe fashion as well.
6:17
SPEAKER_02: Whereas, for example, in most places on earth, you essentially just lock up the CO2 underground, but it stays volatile for hundreds of years.
6:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
6:24
SPEAKER_02: Uh what we are doing here is that we're essentially turning the CO2 into rock in a matter of months to a few years.
6:30
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
6:30
SPEAKER_05: And so it runs down in like an enormous pipe.
6:33
SPEAKER_05: You build you drill a big hole and then you run a pipe in it?
6:36
SPEAKER_02: Um, yes, again, it's not an enormous pipe for that matter, basically.
6:40
SPEAKER_02: It's a fairly regular pipe resembling also what's already being done a lot here in Kenya with the production of geothermal electricity and energy, uh, where again it's a fairly similar world to that, uh, though some elements of it borrow more closely from the oil and gas industry, basically, who have already been routinely injecting CO2 below ground as part of their operations again for decades.
7:00
SPEAKER_02: So, again, this is fairly proven and safe to do.
7:02
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
7:03
SPEAKER_05: And you mentioned one other thing that uh talent is also a good reason to do that.
7:07
SPEAKER_05: What do you mean by that?
7:08
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
7:09
SPEAKER_02: So Kenya, frankly, has a very competitive talent pool.
7:12
SPEAKER_02: It is a middle-income economy that has a very, very well-educated population of Anglophone young individuals that are essentially keen to dive their teeth into tough problems to solve, basically, for themselves and for the world.
7:27
SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, climate is of course like a key such problem that both Kenya faces, but also where the global economy is shifting to create new opportunities in sectors like what we are doing, durable carbon removal.
7:39
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I think we are seeing a lot of like interest and enthusiasm of an extremely hardworking Kenyan population, uh, who we can give a very decent lifestyle to at a sort of 10th or 20th of the costs that it would take to do so in, say, the likes of Silicon Valley or Switzerland, where some of our peers are based, basically.
7:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh, where at least the sort of the more labor-intensive parts of this, the manufacturing, the project development, and so on, uh, probably face a certain disadvantage on uh just cost.
8:05
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
8:06
SPEAKER_05: And geology, probably, right?
8:07
SPEAKER_05: You said so there is space.
8:09
SPEAKER_05: Yes, exactly.
8:10
SPEAKER_02: So again, um what we are doing in some ways has sort of been proven in Iceland by some pioneers like Clumworks that we deeply respect.
8:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
8:17
SPEAKER_02: Um, but uh of course, um again, the Clumworks is an obvious contrast here because again, the whole country has a population of something like 400,000 people.
8:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
8:26
SPEAKER_02: So to the extent that this is a massive industry that we have to build from scratch, uh, potentially creating millions of jobs, um, it's not really something that we can create in many places.
8:35
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but Kenya has again the right interface of the right natural and the right human capital uh to make this happen in massive.
8:44
SPEAKER_05: So tell me a little bit about day zero, day one.
8:47
SPEAKER_05: You arrive at the airport with your big plans.
8:49
SPEAKER_05: Uh when did you meet the UN?
8:51
SPEAKER_02: That's a great question.
8:51
SPEAKER_05: So you have a co-founder as well, right?
8:53
SPEAKER_02: Yes, I have a co-founder, Duncan.
8:55
SPEAKER_02: Um and so essentially, so my story into this was that I was working consulting before and in the international development space with a company called Dahlberg.
9:06
SPEAKER_02: And we were bouncing ideas around about what the big livelihood strivers for the African continent would be this decade, this century, uh, with some external partners.
9:14
SPEAKER_02: And my idea, having just learned about the climate maths, is that we need a lot of car move essentially uh to hit net zero as a world.
9:23
SPEAKER_02: And I again then went down the rabbit hole of looking into what technologies might get us to that point, realized their capture has unique potential, and then realized uh that Kenya is the world's best place for it.
9:36
SPEAKER_02: And I literally did the Excel analysis basically uh to see, and there's really no quite no such no place quite like Kenya uh to scale this.
9:45
SPEAKER_02: So uh on that realization, I moved to Kenya, uh, still with uh my previous employer, Dahlberg, at the time, basically.
9:51
SPEAKER_02: Um I transferred to their Nairobi office and was already working a lot more on the idea while I was here.
9:58
SPEAKER_02: Um and also just after I moved to Kenya, about a month or two afterwards, uh, I actually met my co-founder Duncan, uh, who has his own amazing story uh into how he got into their debt capture.
10:09
SPEAKER_02: Because he was working on this uh as a project at the University of Nairobi.
10:12
SPEAKER_02: That's in part because during COVID, um, he was home and experiencing climate change very severely firsthand.
10:21
SPEAKER_02: Kenya had a very severe drought from 2018 to 2023 uh that was made a hundred times more likely by climate change.
10:28
SPEAKER_05: I'm saying five years of drought.
10:29
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
10:30
SPEAKER_02: Um, so the last London year season, basically.
10:34
SPEAKER_02: Head to Kenya pretty hard.
10:35
SPEAKER_02: And he grew up in a part of Kenya that was always quite abundant in water, basically just at the foothills of Mount Kenya and close to one of Kenya's major rivers called the River Rogati.
10:44
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
10:45
SPEAKER_02: Um, which again he knew from his childhood, but which uh virtually dried to a trickle uh during that last drought, basically.
10:53
SPEAKER_02: And his parents are farmers, and so are many people around him, and so that drought hit his community very hard.
11:00
SPEAKER_02: And so when that happened, and when he saw that, he resolved that he would not take climate change sitting down, basically.
11:08
SPEAKER_02: Engineers make for bad victims, basically.
11:11
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so he started working on Dark Day Capture there, and then as a final leader project, and then sort of like continued that work on and off uh until we sort of met in an online community of nerds around Dark Day Capture and Common Boom.
11:25
SPEAKER_02: How does this work?
11:26
SPEAKER_02: It's called the Open Air Collective, and it's sort of a Discord set of channels, basically, that we were both in, and we got introduced to each other.
11:34
SPEAKER_02: And then I think Bunkin was mainly interested in this, like, you know, from an engineer's perspective, like as the technology side.
11:41
SPEAKER_02: But I think I told him, hey, let's make a business out of this, basically.
11:45
SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I think we then started on my kitchen table about three and a half years ago, um, bouncing ideas around.
11:52
SPEAKER_02: And uh, about two and a half years later than that, uh, we had the Global South's first uh direct air caption storage plant running in the field, uh scaling from you know zero to like about well, that time 50 and now about 70 people uh in a very short time.
12:08
SPEAKER_02: So definitely quite proud of what we've achieved.
12:11
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I can congratulate you on that.
12:12
SPEAKER_05: Well done.
12:13
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
12:13
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
12:14
SPEAKER_05: So how how was the funding process?
12:16
SPEAKER_05: Because it's quite so running renewable energy project or climate tech, as we call it, is uh requires a lot of capital you because you have to very much build the infrastructure for it here.
12:26
SPEAKER_05: You can't just you're not taking over any existing business, uh, you're not building a software application, so you need a lot of money, you need patient capital, and you probably need follow-on funding.
12:36
SPEAKER_05: How is how how did the fundraising process go for you?
12:39
SPEAKER_01: Oh, everyone thought that we were crazy.
12:41
SPEAKER_05: Oh, really?
12:41
SPEAKER_05: Mom, dad, I have an idea.
12:43
SPEAKER_02: Everyone thought that we were crazy, uh, wanting to build uh like this pretty uh pretty serious deep tech in Kenya because of course everything we do here from the RD to the manufacturing to project development, we do in-house.
12:55
SPEAKER_02: Uh, it's all very IP intensive, it's all very patent heavy.
12:58
SPEAKER_02: And it's not something that's yet routinely done in Kenya.
13:02
SPEAKER_02: Um but with the conviction that Kenya is the world's best place to do it, and that frankly, realizing that nobody would give us any DAC hardware unless we just built it ourselves, um we set out to do just that.
13:14
SPEAKER_02: And uh we got some um angels sort of linked to the card removal industry uh to give us our first checks.
13:22
SPEAKER_02: Um, we then got uh Catalyst Fund um as a sort of leading climate tech investor in Africa uh to onboard us into their accelerator as the first institutional investor to believe in us.
13:34
SPEAKER_02: Um and then frankly, after that, it really mostly was our customers uh who actually like gave us very large pre-purchases, the likes of Milky Wire that's sort of backed by folks like Klana and Spotify, and now more recently Salesforce and others, um, who really built conviction around the work that we were doing here and the sort of rapid progress that we were making, um scaling technology that's uniquely well suited for the endowments that we have in Kenya.
14:02
SPEAKER_02: And it got to a point where just ahead of our seed round, we had actually gotten$1.2 million of payments from our customers for future deliveries of carbon credits that we've contracted with them versus$1.1 million of pre-seed equity financing.
14:22
SPEAKER_02: So up to our seed round, really like the uh main investors that we had really were our customers, basically.
14:27
SPEAKER_02: And I think at some point it got to a place where the investors in this ecosystem saw that we had so much conviction from our customers that there must be something here, basically, right?
14:37
SPEAKER_02: To the extent that they were willing to prepay us for deliveries, you know, like uh years into the future.
14:43
SPEAKER_02: Um and that really was a lot of the de-risking capital that we had very early on.
14:47
SPEAKER_02: Um, and then again, for our pre-seed financing, about 80% of that really was from angels, uh, mostly linked to again the carbon removal industry, which is a fairly tight-knit sector um within itself.
15:02
SPEAKER_02: Uh and I think we were able, through you know, introductions and the usual hustling basically, uh, to meet the right people there.
15:09
SPEAKER_02: Sure hustling, I like to take some of the early risks basically for some slightly more institutional venture capital to come in for a seed round.
15:18
SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh then again after that, more recently, uh the first close to a series A.
15:23
SPEAKER_02: Um and even today, um, the majority of funding that we have had as Octavia is still uh family offices and high net worth individuals, basically.
15:36
SPEAKER_02: To build this very serious tech here in Kenya often takes the conviction of high net worth and the sort of very meaningful networking and storytelling that that requires basically mobilizing that capital.
15:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, and that's definitely like been very good for us.
15:52
SPEAKER_02: But importantly, um, out of the you know 10 million odd of capital that we've mobilized to date, uh, only$100,000 or so of that was grant financing.
16:01
SPEAKER_02: Um so almost everything that you see here is commercially financed, um, which is of course a key contrast to how deep tech um tends to get financed in most other places on earth where you know through government grants and university funding and so on, uh the early de-risking of the tech happens.
16:18
SPEAKER_02: Um that is essentially something that we are realizing where we just have to be uniquely competitive to sort of like keep raising that commercial capital to sort of finance the RD and also to like keep scaling tech uh competitively at a rate where um we can just kind of keep um mobilizing the capital that we need to scale.
16:41
SPEAKER_02: And so ultimately um what it really needs to spread deep tech to new geographies is to have a very clear commitment to um you know work harder on it and essentially like uh to to outcompete uh other players in the market.
16:57
SPEAKER_02: And of course, like again, I don't want to give the impression that it's all sort of very sort of like you know, elbowy around our competition that we have and our peers in the DAC industry.
17:05
SPEAKER_02: We want to work closely, and as I mentioned earlier, we deeply admire a lot of the work that others have done, basically.
17:10
SPEAKER_02: But in some ways, I think it also needs a realization that to succeed building DAC in Kenya essentially needs us to have a sort of East Asian approach to scaling tech, where we just have to be aware that we can't rely on the same sort of like, you know, de-risking processes and so on as some of our peers will have access to.
17:29
SPEAKER_02: Uh and that essentially just needs us to commit ourselves more fully to making it happen.
17:34
SPEAKER_02: So again, that sort of like, you know, Chinese and you know, before then Japanese South Korean model of really like, you know, putting in the extra hours that you need to progress you know more quickly towards commercial value is essentially what we've been doing at Octavia for the past you know three and a half, four years.
17:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
17:52
SPEAKER_05: And I think getting your launching customers on board immediately helps you to also build in a way more efficient way.
17:59
SPEAKER_05: And and you have more dialogue, I expect, as well, regarding your milestones.
18:03
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
18:04
SPEAKER_05: You have a and in Dutch we say a stick behind the door to uh finish your stuff to make sure you're on time and deliver on your promises, which yeah.
18:13
SPEAKER_02: You know, ultimately the best endorsement for any quick startup is that our customers love what we do.
18:17
SPEAKER_02: And again, they are willing to you know signal that very clearly by just making sizable purchases from us, giving us money up front, but doing that as a signal of trust uh with sort of the project that we've been building here.
18:31
SPEAKER_02: And again, there's no better endorsement than that.
18:33
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, tell us a bit more about the customers.
18:36
SPEAKER_05: Why do they need to do direct air capture carbon removal?
18:39
SPEAKER_05: What is it?
18:40
SPEAKER_05: Why?
18:41
SPEAKER_02: It's a great question.
18:42
SPEAKER_02: So our customers are mostly leading companies in the tech and factory who have you know fewer emissions than say some large industrial players, and also the sort of profitability to essentially spend on ambitious climate commitments, and that's also a way in which they differentiate themselves to their stakeholders, their employees, their customers, their investors, and so on.
19:05
SPEAKER_02: And I think what they have realized looking into the climate science is that in a net zero world, every residual emission has to be balanced by a ton of CO2 that's durably removed from the atmosphere.
19:21
SPEAKER_02: And I think the shocking realization that a lot of um those customers and the product space had, say, like, you know, five, seven years ago, was that those technologies don't exist today.
19:31
SPEAKER_02: Um they maybe exist in patches.
19:33
SPEAKER_02: There's you know things like biochar and there's early sort of trials around bioenergy, comp caption, storage, et cetera.
19:39
SPEAKER_02: But the real scale of technology that we need to deliver net zero globally is just not there today.
19:45
SPEAKER_02: And the only technology that can really get to that scale is direct air capture.
19:50
SPEAKER_02: So forward-looking organizations have essentially committed to um, you know, taxing their emissions that they produce internally with a certain dollar amount per ton, often set quite ambitiously at something like$100 or$150 per ton, and to then essentially spending the resulting sort of like levies on projects internationally that essentially deliver the climate solutions that the world needs for net zero and idea capture is one of these.
20:20
SPEAKER_02: So that has resulted in a number of buyers clubs.
20:23
SPEAKER_02: So, for example, um the Milky Wire Climate Transformation Fund.
20:26
SPEAKER_02: Uh, again, that's the sort of money from Klana and Salesforce and Spotify and others that I mentioned earlier.
20:32
SPEAKER_02: Um, likewise, um the Frontier Climate Fund, which is a lot of the big tech companies on the US West Coast, say like that's your Facebook and Google and Shopify, Stripe, McKinsey, and others who have bought credits through our storage partner quite substantially.
20:49
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so through that, all the major buyers in this space are essentially deeply invested in Kenyan DAC and storage, either through us or through our storage partner.
20:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
20:58
SPEAKER_02: Because they see the unique potential that Kenya has in bringing their data capture, which today is quite expensive, down the cost curve uniquely fast.
21:06
SPEAKER_02: And again, really, we have now been doing this for the past three and a half years to the extent where we are now on the cusp of injecting CO2 into geological storage as one of the world's first projects to do so on a fraction of the budget and time that it took everyone else to get to that point.
21:22
SPEAKER_05: Amazing.
21:22
SPEAKER_05: And how does the regulatory environment operate uh around you guys with setting this up to getting international uh buyers um to buy into this country?
21:35
SPEAKER_05: Uh, how does that work?
21:36
SPEAKER_02: So part of why we commercialized so much faster than all of our peers who are based doing DAC in the global north is that the car markets from their inception in the Kyoto Protocol were set up to facilitate a transfer of finances and funding from the global north to the global south.
21:54
SPEAKER_02: And as the global south's first direct air capture supplier, um, we have essentially like spoken.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Language uniquely well, and also tapped the regulatory framework around car markets uniquely well, too.
22:06
SPEAKER_02: So Kenya today originates about 40% of all carbon credits originating from the African continent, basically.
22:12
SPEAKER_02: So it's fair to say that we are already like a leader by some margin in this industry, and that is now translating very well into the car mob space, too, basically, where the Kenyan government, I think, has fairly sophisticated understanding of what the community benefits plans and community benefit sharing should look like and um how to regulate this sector.
22:33
SPEAKER_02: And you know, we the people that review our permitting applications have PhDs in carbon capture and storage and so on.
22:40
SPEAKER_02: So by and large, we are very sort of happy with the sort of regulatory expertise that we have.
22:44
SPEAKER_02: It also helps that we have a sort of 40 years history in the geothermal sector, which essentially for the underground storage of CO2 and the full understanding of essentially like the underground processes and flows and so on that are involved in this uh storage and the storage side of things, that is fairly well understood uh here too.
23:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so by and large, the permitting and regulatory um side of things are very good.
23:08
SPEAKER_02: And it also helps that while the Kenyan government can't fully subsidize their gay capture to the extent that happens in other geographies.
23:16
SPEAKER_02: I mean, for one, all the billions in the world won't buy you the renewable energy endowments that Kenya has.
23:21
SPEAKER_02: Again, that is a key advantage that we have.
23:23
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but to the extent that the Kenyan government is involved in the geothermal sector through some sort of state-owned enterprises, et cetera, it is also willing to put its finger on this, it's put its thumb on the scale to make renewable energy 24-7 uh uniquely affordable and available um to innovators like us as well.
23:42
SPEAKER_02: And that's partly through, you know, special, special economic zone uh energy tariffs and so on that we have access to and others.
23:48
SPEAKER_02: So, broadly speaking, uh, we are extremely happy with the competence and the support that we are getting from our regulators.
23:56
SPEAKER_05: Nice.
23:57
SPEAKER_05: And um there's a bit of a positive, negative uh perception towards uh direct air capture and how it fits in the broader field of you know climate mitigation versus uh climate adaptation.
24:12
SPEAKER_05: How would you respond to that?
24:14
SPEAKER_02: It's a great question.
24:16
SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think we are all fighting the same fight in climate space.
24:22
SPEAKER_02: Like what all of us care about is to have a habitable planet with you know stable temperatures that humans and ecosystems can flotion.
24:29
SPEAKER_02: Um and so uh we absolutely don't want dirty data capture to be any sort of like reason for why we should do slowdown mitigation elsewhere, basically.
24:40
SPEAKER_02: And really, we want um mitigation options to essentially like happen as quickly as possible.
24:45
SPEAKER_02: And I think increasingly there's a realization that ultimately we want the most cost-effective way to solve climate change.
24:53
SPEAKER_02: And so there is going to be sectors that are going to be very hard to abate, like aviation, for example.
24:58
SPEAKER_02: Um, and for those, it will increasingly make sense to think about okay, what is our lowest cost mitigation option?
25:03
SPEAKER_02: It may be to essentially produce biofuels or synthetic fuels uh for that sector at scale.
25:10
SPEAKER_02: It may also be to essentially like keep using the same uh fueling options and so on that we have at the moment, but require durable carbon removal uh at large scale, basically, as the most more cost-effective option, basically.
25:22
SPEAKER_02: And effectively today, direct air capture and storage would most likely, in almost all instances, not be the most cost-effective options to decarbonize those other sectors.
25:31
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but for those heart-to-bate sectors, as direct air capture comes down the cost curve, we will increasingly be very attractive options.
25:38
SPEAKER_02: And of course, our goal is to actually bring DAC down the cost curve into sort of the territory of, say, like less than$100 per ton, where DAC can actually be a very attractive option for uh essentially decarbonizing a lot of sectors.
25:52
SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think ultimately we want to essentially have a level of pragmatism about like the lowest cost option should essentially win the race to decarbonize.
26:01
SPEAKER_02: And to the extent that we can do green steel and green cement and others at costs lower than their debt capture, we absolutely shouldn't.
26:07
SPEAKER_02: And we should invest in those as we should invest in carbon options to make that happen, basically.
26:12
SPEAKER_02: But essentially for the hard-to-abate sectors, uh we would essentially want um direct air capture to be a sort of considered a feasible option uh to essentially get us to net zero emissions because that's really what we care about.
26:26
SPEAKER_02: And um, to the extent that direct air capture can be the lowest cost option for a lot of like the residual emissions that we'll have, um it also unlocks a massive market for itself, of course.
26:37
SPEAKER_02: And that's part of the interest for direct air capture because in some ways there is a lot of like hard-to-bate emissions that you probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about, like you know, for the stainless steel that goes into these machines, like decarbonizing the chromium and the nickel that goes into it is very hard, basically.
26:53
SPEAKER_02: Um and again, like we may find more carbon efficient ways of doing that in the future, and we should try to.
27:00
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but to the extent that we are not able to, again, direct air capture can be essentially like universally a universally applicable solution for those hot turbid sectors, especially all the many sort of like you know, the lesser and smaller ones that we don't spend as much time and research funding and thinking about, essentially.
27:17
SPEAKER_05: Because like the the idea, of course, is that you're capturing more carbon, should never be an excuse to emit more.
27:24
SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
27:25
SPEAKER_05: Um that's difficult, but you guys can only control one side of the coin in that sense.
27:29
SPEAKER_02: And I will say there's so many uh sectors right now.
27:33
SPEAKER_02: I think to the most part, again, uh decarbonization shouldn't even be so much of a discussion right now because we know what the solution set is, basically, right?
27:42
SPEAKER_02: Like we know that um like solar and wind, we know that EVs and we know that heat pumps are increasingly just the best option.
27:49
SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, full stop is just the cheapest, best way to do things, basically.
27:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, and so it's not at all the case that 30 day capture competes with these sort of like fairly easy to abate sectors, basically, uh, where we have to write solutions already.
28:01
SPEAKER_02: And it's really just a question of deploying that as fast as we humanly can.
28:05
SPEAKER_02: Um, it is just a question of even if we do all these things, basically, we'll still have like you know five to ten billion tons of CO2 emissions per year, basically, is what the latest climate science says.
28:16
SPEAKER_02: Um, that we need to have another solution set for, basically, and that likely involves that.
28:22
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
28:23
SPEAKER_05: So you're tapping into that solution that is required.
28:26
SPEAKER_05: Yes, that's interesting.
28:28
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
28:28
SPEAKER_05: And um so you guys raise money uh in a period when raising money wasn't necessarily very easy, uh straight after COVID, you said?
28:38
SPEAKER_02: Or I mean, uh straight after COVID.
28:41
SPEAKER_02: Again, we got started in mid-2022 when it was still relatively easy, but it definitely like has gotten sort of harder every year since then.
28:48
SPEAKER_02: I think it may get a bit easier in 2026 going forward.
28:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, but yeah, definitely with you know macroeconomic conditions quite tough and inflation and uh interest rates from central banks quite high.
28:58
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't the easiest environment to fundraise, uh, also with climate facing various political headwinds in different uh jurisdictions, especially in 2025.
29:07
SPEAKER_02: Uh but yeah, I think um fair to say we've pulled through that in large part because again, our customers are still our best investors, and I think they keep signing large contracts with us, and ultimately that's what builds conviction in our investors.
29:19
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
29:20
SPEAKER_05: And do you guys have did you have any foreign investors in your in your first round?
29:25
SPEAKER_02: So um for again, remember that about half of the capital that we've had to date is family offices and high net worth individuals.
29:31
SPEAKER_02: From where were they?
29:32
SPEAKER_02: Um about three-quarters of them are from Europe, uh especially from uh the Netherlands, um Germany, and Switzerland.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, good for that.
29:41
SPEAKER_02: And then about 25% of so were from the US.
29:44
SPEAKER_02: Um and again, that's about half the capital that we've had to date.
29:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, again, about a third or so of our capital to date was from venture capital.
29:52
SPEAKER_02: Um, those are mostly from Africa-focused funds.
29:55
SPEAKER_02: Um though um, of course, their investors, their uh LPs, the limited partners are also mostly sort of like you know, European and do you feel like you have to shift your narrative a little bit when you pitch to an Africa-focused fund versus when you were pitching to European uh investors?
30:15
SPEAKER_02: That's definitely the case.
30:16
SPEAKER_02: I mean, and not in sort of ways that are like, you know, malicious in any way, basically.
30:21
SPEAKER_02: It's just that it's fair to say that there's much less awareness of deep tech um on the African continent.
30:27
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
30:28
SPEAKER_02: And we'd like to think that that is shifting now.
30:30
SPEAKER_02: There is some funds coming to market that deliberately want to invest in more sort of like, you know, deep tech development uh in on the African continent too.
30:39
SPEAKER_02: Um but for the time being, you know, like for example, talking to an American or European um climate tech, we see there is certain vocabulary, like, you know, uh technological readiness levels and so on, the scale of that from one to nine, um, that would be fairly well understood.
30:55
SPEAKER_02: Um where I think sometimes we have to do a bit more hand holding basically around our sort of like, you know, um milestones and then how around how to sort of like assess our um commercial proposition to folks that are perhaps more used to investing in software.
31:10
SPEAKER_02: And to some extent that's the case everywhere, basically.
31:12
SPEAKER_02: I think it's fair to say that like the sort of climate tech and deep tech and maybe bio, maybe biotech space um in sort of Europe and US has increasingly sort of spun up its own set of vocabularies basically and its own set of funds with that as well.
31:26
SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think we're still a bit far behind that um in Africa and in Kenya more broadly.
31:32
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I'd like to think that we're also increasingly catching up there as well.
31:35
SPEAKER_02: Um and yeah, I think for the most part it's really just that addressing that knowledge gap.
31:40
SPEAKER_02: I think that that's a big thing.
31:41
SPEAKER_05: It's interesting you say it because I would assume it might be the other way around that perhaps a European investor might be more um hesitant because of uh the fact that you guys are doing it in a continent where you're the first um to create such a big facility.
31:57
SPEAKER_02: And I mean that's definitely a hurdle, and it is fair to say that like, you know, for the most part, uh European and American investors just wouldn't invest in any other thing.
32:06
SPEAKER_02: There's some exceptions, you know, low-com capital and others have made meaningful investments in Kenya and other places um in Africa.
32:15
SPEAKER_02: But you're right that the familiarity of this region is quite low, which is partly why we ultimately had to go with um sort of African VCs uh for the portion of our funding that is from venture capital, basically.
32:27
SPEAKER_02: Um and I think in some ways that also cuts both ways.
32:31
SPEAKER_02: I mean, um you'd have to do more education handholding with the local VCs, but then uh it's also fair to say that the market is far less saturated uh with direct data capture than say it would be in the US and Europe, where there definitely is an oversaturation of um direct data capture in the sort of venture capital space, a lot of it a lot of which is really straight into commercialized.
32:52
SPEAKER_02: So um I think that's sort of quite the rest.
32:55
SPEAKER_05: Why do you say it's more difficult to commercialize those technologies in Europe versus here?
33:00
SPEAKER_05: What do you think the big issue is?
33:01
SPEAKER_02: It's a great question.
33:02
SPEAKER_02: Um and some of it is quite idiosyncratic to like direct data capture specifically.
33:08
SPEAKER_02: So uh permitting storage sites in the US and Europe has been a very lengthy and slow process, basically.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:14
SPEAKER_02: And I think frankly, anything that's to do with permitting projects in the real world is just hard in like Europe and the US these days.
33:22
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a very common complaint.
33:24
SPEAKER_02: And you know, if it takes you, you know, three, four, five, six, seven years to just get a permit, basically, that's far beyond the sort of timeline that a ventures type company needs to actually generate a return.
33:34
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I think that's a challenge that a lot of our peers have really faced.
33:37
SPEAKER_02: Um and I think Kenya and many sort of emerging markets have just much more growth-friendly permitting regimes, basically, where they want growth, they want investment, basically, and there's maybe less of a sort of like uh entrenched NIMBY culture that will essentially like make it very hard for anything to get built in anywhere, basically.
33:59
SPEAKER_02: And I think what we're increasingly seeing that like for infrastructure type projects like direct data capture, um, I think that just you know favors jurisdictions like Kenya that want to see growth, that want to create jobs, and that want to essentially welcome that investment.
34:12
SPEAKER_02: Um and essentially that is increasingly becoming a huge competitive edge, even to the extent that we don't have the same subsidy regimes and so on, basically.
34:22
SPEAKER_02: Um I mean, it's frankly to the point where we saw some of the most generous incentives for clean tech investments in the US that have ever existed anywhere in the world, basically.
34:33
SPEAKER_02: But you know, if it takes you more than the duration of a political cycle to actually like build these projects and get these things permitted, basically.
34:41
SPEAKER_02: And then before you know it, like the whole political winds shift again, basically, and the subsidies go away, basically.
34:46
SPEAKER_02: I think what investors in infrastructure increasingly waking up to is that like that stability just matters a lot more, basically, and that sort of like willingness to permit and build.
34:56
SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think that for customers at least, and I'd like to think increasingly for infrastructure investors in climate around the world, uh, I think their realization is that well, it just makes a lot more sense to just go where you just have predictable timelines with these things.
35:10
SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, Kenya, I think is still seen potentially a bit unfairly as having some political risk around this, basically, around you know, our foreign currency risk and political risk and so on.
35:21
SPEAKER_02: But I think for the most part, um I think Kenya is increasingly proving itself as a very stable like jurisdiction to like scale this larger scale infrastructure for you know like hydrogen and other projects, data centers, etc.
35:34
SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, and that's partly why Kenya last year was the 25th largest sort of destination for venture capital investment uh on earth, like you know, on par with the likes of Indonesia and Italy and you know other places basically that are that sort of you know far richer and sort of like you know larger than Kenya economy-wise, but where Kenya really punches above its weight and rolling out the next generation of climate tech infrastructure.
35:58
SPEAKER_05: I read that as well, that in in in most African countries the uh largest percentage of VC funding has still been going into fintech, whereas Kenya has directed it more towards climate tech investments, uh disproportionately more than the other countries.
36:11
SPEAKER_05: Um but it's but it's interesting to hear, right?
36:13
SPEAKER_05: Because you, even though it was probably a very lengthy process, it doesn't sound like it was too hard for you guys to raise funding and to commercialize because you got your contracts in immediately.
36:21
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
36:22
SPEAKER_05: What do you think would have been different if you would have started fundraising today for the first time with this idea?
36:28
SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure that much is yet changed.
36:31
SPEAKER_02: No.
36:31
SPEAKER_02: There is new funds coming to market, as I mentioned, that may sort of like change this over time.
36:36
SPEAKER_02: But frankly, I don't think we have enough success cases of globally competitive African technology, specifically African hardware.
36:45
SPEAKER_02: Um, where frankly, a lot of the technology that we deploy in on this continent is still essentially Chinese built.
36:51
SPEAKER_02: And uh what a lot of climate tech locally comes down to is essentially different financing options for that Chinese hardware, basically.
36:59
SPEAKER_02: I think, and in some ways that's you know, natural and fine.
37:02
SPEAKER_02: I think we sort of have to sort of climb up the value chain of what we can do on the African continent and in Kenya specifically.
37:08
SPEAKER_02: Um I think we definitely present a certain ambition and we want to be a data point towards actually like that happening at much larger and more ambitious scale, basically, of actually building globally competitive climate tech here and you know, maybe leveraging some of the endowments that we have in Kenya in the broader East African uh Rift Valley, um, to just kind of like get the leg up to allow us to actually do this at larger scale, basically.
37:29
SPEAKER_02: But then to the extent that we have that data point, yeah, we want to essentially like um do that more and compete globally to make that happen.
37:37
SPEAKER_02: I think what we are seeing now, especially in Kenya, um in climate tech, is super exciting developments of more and more companies actually like investing seriously in their manufacturing, uh essentially like you know, climbing up the sort of value chain of like, you know, doing some sort of locally tailored RD and doing more of the sort of like value addition locally, basically, which I think is building the manufacturing base for more serious tech innovations to come out of again to Kenya specifically.
38:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
38:04
SPEAKER_02: And I think in some ways, um, the reason why we don't sort of raise as much fintech funding in some ways is because we've kind of solved fintech about 20 years ago with MPESA, which is now like you know, as part of Safari Com a$10 billion market cap company that does sort of continuously roll out like new services to like for you know retail consumers to invest in stock markets and so on.
38:28
SPEAKER_02: So essentially, like a lot of what uh essentially is done by startups in other African markets, is essentially done by a large listed company here in Kenya.
38:36
SPEAKER_02: And so I think for us, the next frontier of tech, and I think this is exciting because that is really where Kenya and I think broader like Africa with its demographic dividend has like a competitive edge now, is essentially around value addition in manufacturing, basically, um, and in sectors like again, e-mobility.
38:54
SPEAKER_02: I think is, for example, a big success case, uh success study in East Africa, where there's a lot of activity, and again, we want to essentially be that success study, a success case in that next wave of climate tech that we see in car removal in this region specifically, um, and potentially all the things that it could sort of like grow on top of it, right?
39:13
SPEAKER_02: So, like the really exciting bit about their day capture and storage is that both are anchor technologies for the energy transition.
39:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, once you have direct data capture, you can essentially use that CO2 for clean commodities, like you know, green fuels, green plastics, green chemicals, and so on.
39:28
SPEAKER_02: Um and likewise, once you have the storage site basically, and you can actually store CO2, you can do things like green steel, like green cement and other commodities, for all of which there's also like a lot of demand around the world, basically.
39:40
SPEAKER_02: Um so I think with the work that we are now doing, and I think essentially one to like mushroom out from basically, um, we can position Kenya as a global leader in the energy transition.
39:52
SPEAKER_02: Because I think one thing hasn't been fully realized yet, which is that the energy transition also is a geographic transition of sorts, where there will be winners or losers according to who has the best renewable energy endowments, right?
40:07
SPEAKER_02: And I think one, I think sometimes discussed part of it, which is quite interesting, is interesting, is that it does in some ways like shift power closer to the equator, which does have better endowments for solar energy and less seasonality uh requiring storage to kind of shift that solar energy around, basically, for which Kenya is of course very well situated, being right on the equator.
40:27
SPEAKER_02: Um but then beyond that, too, and I think this is maybe less discussed, is that there is certain energy-intensive technologies uh which in the net zero world benefit from forms of clean energy that are available 24-7.
40:41
SPEAKER_02: And of course, there is various ways in which the world is solving for this with new geothermal technologies and new nuclear technologies and so on.
40:48
SPEAKER_02: But there's also just countries like Kenya that have enormous um geothermal endowments, which can provide that 24-7 clean energy at uniquely low cost, and which interestingly also have a uniquely um low sort of like shackle of like a legacy energy system, basically, um that essentially building on an outdated grid.
41:10
SPEAKER_05: You're not you're building the grid still.
41:12
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
41:12
SPEAKER_02: And it does sort of come back down to like essentially like that often discussed point of leapfrogging, but in some ways, like it's the sort of like the mother of all leapfrogs, basically, because you know, whereas for previous like um leapfrogs, again, like going from you know, like the like uh fixed telephone telephone lines to like mobile, for example, as is often discussed, what it comes down to for Kenya would have been that, well, we just don't need to build out that own infrastructure, we can go straight to the next one.
41:36
SPEAKER_02: But for this, it's it's much more than that, right?
41:38
SPEAKER_02: Like it's just that like um we can just go full on on essentially building out a renewable energy ecosystem and show the world what like a hundred percent renewable grid looks like, um whereas much of the world actually has to transition out of its existing energy infrastructure, which understandably it has built a bunch of critical systems around, basically.
41:56
SPEAKER_02: So Which is probably more expensive than it's not just that like we don't have to build the old infrastructure, it's that like essentially like um that much of the global north and all industrialized countries will have to spend decades actually transitioning out of like um an existing like energy infrastructure that is very expensive and difficult to uh fully decarbonize.
42:16
SPEAKER_02: Whereas Kenya, like for industries that need to account for the carbon emissions per something that they build basically or produce, um, we have now a uniquely strong incentive for companies around the world to essentially set up production here, especially now with the carbon border carbon border adjustment mechanism in Europe and elsewhere, um, to just set up low-carbon production here and then actually export that around the world, where um we just have a unique endowment for um the low-carbon economy in Kenya.
42:46
SPEAKER_02: And I think in many ways, DAC is in some ways the first and easiest case study for this, basically, but it's in no way, in no ways unique to direct air capturing, what we are doing here specifically.
42:57
SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think increasingly uh companies will see that we can scale business models here uniquely well that hinge on having that 24-7 renewable energy and high penetration of renewables on the grid to scale competitively.
43:11
SPEAKER_02: And that's something that we're extremely excited about.
43:14
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
43:14
SPEAKER_05: So, what what is the world gonna look like for you then in 10 to 15 years?
43:18
SPEAKER_05: How many, you know, is all the is Boeing gonna set up operations here, build the planes from Kenya?
43:23
SPEAKER_02: I mean, ultimately, like, you know, we want Kenya's endowments to be a big part of the global solution to climate change.
43:32
SPEAKER_02: We want people to point, like again, we want historians 20 years from now to write the history of how the world fixed climate change, basically, and to point at East Africa, to point at a map, to point at East Africa and say, this is where a lot of the right solutions have been.
43:49
SPEAKER_02: I'll leave that to the historians and maybe hopefully you've forgotten at that point.
43:52
SPEAKER_02: Uh but more importantly, like uh we want Kenyans again.
43:55
SPEAKER_02: This is not about me, this is about like Kenya turning its renewable energy wealth.
44:00
SPEAKER_02: Into prosperity for its people.
44:01
SPEAKER_02: I think that is ultimately the largest thing that we are trying to do with Octavia with our 99% Kenyan team to essentially like um start with DAC and start with showing the world that we can bring direct air capture down the cost curve uniquely quickly here to deploy it at scale and build it uniquely quickly here in Kenya as well, and for Kenya to be the vanguard of the direct air capture space that it should be.
44:28
SPEAKER_02: And then to use that as a springboard, as mentioned earlier, to kind of showcase that it's not just direct air capture and storage and so carbon removal that Kenya is uniquely well positioned for, but potentially also, you know, like using that air capture CO2 to, as we discussed, like produce like green fuels for Boeing and others, and as we mentioned, um and uh to you know, like use the storage to you know produce green steel um and so on, to really just showcase Kenya as a leader in the green transition uh for industries that just need that sort of heavy sort of like green energy um to really scale commercially.
45:03
SPEAKER_02: Um and yeah, we just hope to be a great proof point.
45:07
SPEAKER_02: Uh, we hope to create fantastic returns for our investors.
45:09
SPEAKER_02: Uh we take a fiduciary duty pretty seriously.
45:12
SPEAKER_02: Um and yes, I think ultimately like success for us in 10, 20 years.
45:17
SPEAKER_02: Uh well, 10 years I think looks like roughly like um removing CO2 from the atmosphere at the scale of hundreds, hundreds of thousands of tons, if not millions of tons, uh, and then say 20 years to do that more at the scale of billions of tons.
45:31
SPEAKER_02: We have real hope in the fight against climate change because that's ultimately what DAC is.
45:36
SPEAKER_02: Um it is a sign that we are not just um that climate change is not just a runaway problem that we are unable to fix through like the political systems and so on that we have.
45:46
SPEAKER_02: But it is a problem that has a real price tag, but like an affordable one, um, and one that essentially like allows the world to work together as in through different countries, basically, um, with each sort of deploying their strengths to build out solutions um that provide unique abundance um for all humans around the world and that ultimately um allow us to um transition the world to net zero uh without breaking the bank.
46:14
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
46:15
SPEAKER_05: It's nice.
46:15
SPEAKER_05: You have a it sounds interesting.
46:17
SPEAKER_05: I'm gonna be there in 20 years.
46:18
SPEAKER_05: I'm gonna come take a look, see how big the manufacturing plant is, but then yeah.
46:22
SPEAKER_05: Maybe I also have a question.
46:24
SPEAKER_05: So you currently employ 70 people um and uh you guys require a lot of engineers, probably, uh technically schooled people.
46:33
SPEAKER_05: Do you have good collaborations with universities as well?
46:36
SPEAKER_05: Do you see that there's um enough knowledge coming out uh regarding um uh building renewable energy projects?
46:44
SPEAKER_05: Do you think that uh Kenyan schools are are uh um forming uh people well to tackle these types of engineering issues?
46:53
SPEAKER_02: So again, um Kenya's educational facilities are world-class.
46:59
SPEAKER_02: Um they are very much on par with what you would find in a sort of country at a similar income level, something like an India thereabouts, basically, which is essentially quite comparable to Kenya in its income level, uh, where again you would be less surprised to find really excellent Indian engineers.
47:14
SPEAKER_02: The same is very true for Kenya.
47:15
SPEAKER_02: Um we have close partnerships with uh the likes of the University of Nairobi, uh, Jomukenyata University of Agriculture and Technology, or JQAT, um Strathmore University and others who are producing a large pool of excellently trained engineers who are extremely hardworking and very globally competitive, Anglophone with all the you know access to global educational resources and collaborations that that entails.
47:42
SPEAKER_02: Um and so yeah, I think we um have a lot of um trust in uh the talent that comes from our universities here in Kenya.
47:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
47:56
SPEAKER_02: Um and um they come again often sort of with you know general, like you know, mechanical, electrical, chemical, engineering backgrounds, basically.
48:05
SPEAKER_02: Um and we do a lot of our like that sort of more sector-specific training in-house, basically.
48:10
SPEAKER_02: I think it's fair to say that Kenya increasingly has a um has a good set of master's courses and postgraduate studies around renewable energy, specifically renewable energy systems, and some of again, these technologies like e-mobility and car removal that sort of plug into that.
48:29
SPEAKER_02: And we are trying to shape those curricula in a way that sort of can be more um facilitating of like the next wave of technologies that are emerging.
48:38
SPEAKER_02: I think there's more work that we can do there, so we're always willing to work with partners like locally and internationally uh to make more of those collaborations and that knowledge base sort of like happen here.
48:48
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but for the most part, uh again, we we judge sort of like uh Kenya by its talent, and Kenya has invested heavily in education over the past decades, and um it has a very excellent uh set of engineers um and other, you know, ready to get their hands dirty on carbon.
49:04
SPEAKER_02: Ready to get their hands dirty, uh that's exactly it.
49:07
SPEAKER_05: So you have a background in in business, mostly business consulting, right?
49:10
SPEAKER_05: And um, your co-founder is a hardcore engineer, you said?
49:14
SPEAKER_05: He's a hardcore engineer indeed.
49:16
SPEAKER_05: He's a mechanical engineer, but background.
49:17
SPEAKER_05: Mechanical engineer, sorry, that's what I meant.
49:20
SPEAKER_05: We can translate that directly into a hardcore engineer.
49:23
SPEAKER_05: But so uh it's quite interesting to um I think it's very good that you guys have uh an engineer and a business person running the business.
49:33
SPEAKER_05: Uh how has your role changed since employing 70 people?
49:38
SPEAKER_02: It's a great question.
49:39
SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm no longer washing dishes for one.
49:41
unknown: What are you?
49:41
SPEAKER_02: I'm no longer washing dishes for one, which is my business, um, which I used to do at the very start.
49:47
SPEAKER_02: Um Yeah, because you were working from your kitchen table right next to the like making the snacks uh and and washing the dishes.
49:55
SPEAKER_02: Um I think uh my role in many ways has transitioned more into a sort of probably narrower um commercialization and fundraising type angle, telling the story in many ways, which is probably where my talents are.
50:16
SPEAKER_02: Yes, I'm able to be quite focused, I think, through the amazing team that we have built.
50:20
SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, I have great support on fronts like you know, policy and HR and sort of like partnerships.
50:28
SPEAKER_02: Um Duncan essentially manages our team of sort of like you know, 50 technical staff thereabouts, basically 50 plus um, you know, 45 engineers and then technicians, shop pro staff and so on.
50:41
SPEAKER_02: Um and yeah, I think with that, um I'm still not getting bored quite yet, basically.
50:49
SPEAKER_02: Um, but yeah, I would say that's roughly how my role has shifted.
50:53
SPEAKER_02: It's maybe less sort of like generalists on the business side, and I get to delegate a lot of the sort of like meaningful work in you know pushing the policy landscape along and and um working with partners in this ecosystem uh and and globally to like scale car removal, to position car removal in compliance markets around the world and so on.
51:13
SPEAKER_02: Um and yeah, I get to focus more on the storytelling and well, also just making that story happen through mobilizing the funding that we need to scale and ultimately uh delivering against our you know uh milestones and building a sort of business that pays its bills and its profit.
51:31
SPEAKER_05: So working a bit more on the business than in the business.
51:34
SPEAKER_05: So, how is it for you to transition?
51:37
SPEAKER_05: Because I know that you know in the beginning you're getting your hands dirty, you're in every process, you're setting up everything from zero to one, zero to one.
51:43
SPEAKER_05: You guys are at a space now where you have to go from one to ten, um, which means that you have to put yourself at different tables, right?
51:50
SPEAKER_05: You have to sit with uh people who are policymakers, larger scale investors.
51:55
SPEAKER_05: Uh, how was that transition for you?
51:57
SPEAKER_05: Were there any things you found difficult in kind of adapting your mindset, or did it make you feel uncomfortable in the beginning?
52:04
SPEAKER_02: That's a great question.
52:10
SPEAKER_02: I don't think I felt very uncomfortable around the larger ambitions that we had.
52:15
SPEAKER_02: But again, remember, in some ways, that's always the ambitions that we wanted to work at today.
52:21
SPEAKER_02: Uh that's always the ambition that again got me to move from life to Kenya those years ago and do things at a larger scale.
52:27
SPEAKER_02: So it's definitely nice to be taken more serious uh as a company.
52:32
SPEAKER_02: Um and I think there is certain partnerships that we're able to now have with Kenya's largest concrete instant producer um that we would have been not possible to have like a couple of years ago, basically.
52:44
SPEAKER_02: And so I think uh in some ways the stakes are higher.
52:47
SPEAKER_02: I think you know it requires us to um like have a ducks in a row and like do the right.
52:53
SPEAKER_05: Tell your story consistently, yeah.
52:55
SPEAKER_02: Have like you know, hit our milestones, like have to write financial projections and so on.
53:00
SPEAKER_02: Um I think it's definitely like still like a vocabulary that I'm involving there myself, basically, like you know, how do you like off-balance sheet finance like large capital projects in the field and so on?
53:13
SPEAKER_02: So those are things that that I'm definitely still growing in.
53:17
SPEAKER_02: Um but yeah, I think by and large, um I think the transition from sort of being very operational to being very strategic.
53:25
SPEAKER_02: Um I think you know, broadly speaking, fit me well.
53:28
SPEAKER_02: I'm still fairly operational on the fundraising side, and I think that's yeah, probably a capacity that we still have to build more inside our team.
53:35
SPEAKER_02: Or, you know, frankly, we're just not yet at the point where like the business is stable enough for it to just be fully institutionally financed and so on.
53:42
SPEAKER_02: Um but yeah, I would say overall, I think I I always love seeing growth in uh the team members around me, basically.
53:53
SPEAKER_02: And I I love getting out of the way and helping people become their best professional selves at Octavia, which is something that we see to a huge extent because we are a hugely young team, and again, that really just reflects Kenya's demography.
54:07
SPEAKER_02: Like in the vast majority of our team are younger than 30.
54:11
SPEAKER_05: Um that sounds like so much fun.
54:13
SPEAKER_02: It is a lot of fun, and I think it also like is it makes for uniquely sort of like you know, strong work ethic and equipment to the business and making it making things happen.
54:22
SPEAKER_02: The average Octavian works well over 60 hours a week, and ultimately um that means that we're able to make progress um at a really rapid clip.
54:30
SPEAKER_02: But it also means that the people that work at Octavia grow themselves at a uniquely fast rate as well, and do things that frankly our peers around the world just haven't been able to at a fraction of the cost, and while you know, only having a couple of years of work experience.
54:45
SPEAKER_02: So I think there's a certain magic that happens if you sort of commit yourself to solving some of the world's hardest problems in direct air capture, you know, literally like grabbing carbon from air.
54:57
SPEAKER_02: Like it's probably up there because one of the hardest things to do, um, making something from air.
55:02
SPEAKER_02: Um and um yeah, I think there's a certain magic that happens when you solve the hardest problems and really uh commit yourself to making that happen and building a team that is motivated at solving problems on that scale, basically.
55:18
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's just the growth that we have seen around our team that uh I think makes me very proud and willing to get out of the way um and just let people unfold their full potential.
55:28
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
55:28
SPEAKER_05: Well, your work wouldn't be as fun if all your colleagues were shit.
55:31
SPEAKER_05: That's true.
55:33
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
55:33
SPEAKER_05: Um, I unfortunately we're gonna go to the end of this uh episode, but as you know, this is uh an episode about perception versus reality.
55:42
SPEAKER_05: So I'd like to ask you um to describe in one word what Kenya isn't and what people might think it is, and then to also give me a word for what Kenya actually is, what you'd like to bring forward.
55:56
SPEAKER_02: So Kenya is not as risky as the rest of Africa.
56:01
SPEAKER_02: I think people often perceive Africa to be a risky region, and I think for the most part they are right.
56:08
SPEAKER_02: And while I'm I'm hopeful about the broader Africa region, I'm deeply bullish on Kenya as a specific market that people should be taking very seriously as a uh fast-growing, emerging market with a lot of potential for generating real investment returns.
56:26
SPEAKER_02: Um and so what Kenya is, and that's something we're really trying to show, is um Kenya is a place where Africans build the future and where we can show that that is possible.
56:39
SPEAKER_02: Um, and where we have a uniquely strong business environment, uh great ease of doing business, supportive, competent regulators, um, a low level of corruption to make real projects happen and generate returns off a uniquely competitive uh set of endowments that we have, both on the natural and human capital side.
57:03
SPEAKER_05: Kenya is a climate frontrunner.
57:05
SPEAKER_02: Climate will lead in many sectors that today are called climate tech, but 20, 30 years from now will just be how the world works.
57:15
SPEAKER_05: I like that.
57:16
SPEAKER_05: Thank you so much.
57:17
SPEAKER_05: Thanks for coming.
57:19
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
57:19
SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that too.