This Kansas Climate Tech Startup Buries Carbon Waste 5,000 Feet Underground
On a sweltering day in July, a group of business owners and elected officials gathered in Hutchinson, Kansas. Despite the heat, the occasion was festive, complete with ice cream from a local purveyor and a DJ playing Top 40. Julia Reichelstein, the 33-year-old CEO of carbon removal company Vaulted Deep, was celebrating the expansion of her company’s flagship waste management site, which she believes is the future of climate change mitigation. “We’re helping make sure that Hutchinson’s water, air, and land are clean,” she says.
The company uses technology originally applied to the oil and gas industry: It injects carbon-rich organic waste up to 5,000 feet underground, permanently sequestering it deep in the earth, halting decomposition and ensuring it can’t release greenhouse gases. This also protects the communities it serves from nutrient runoff, groundwater contamination, and chemicals like PFAS. The company generates revenue from both carbon-removal credits and waste management.
In the past 12 months, the startup inked one of the largest agreements for future carbon removal with Microsoft (4.9 million metric tons), won $8 million in the global XPrize competition for carbon removal, and struck a deal with Google for carbon removal and methane accounting. Amid turbulence in the sector, Vaulted Deep continues to thrive: The company forecasts about 175 percent year-over-year growth to eight figures in revenue in 2025, in a market where an estimated $10 billion has been spent on durable carbon removal since 2019, according to tracking platform CDR.fyi.
Reichelstein didn’t have a technical background when she co-founded Vaulted Deep. She kicked off her career building a fintech company before earning an MBA from Stanford in 2020. She made a fateful phone call in 2021: She reached out to Omar Abou-Sayed for advice on a different topic, but quickly discovered the company he’d founded in 2014, Advantek Waste Management, offered exactly the carbon-removal solution she had been looking for. It was built on technology that Abou-Sayed’s father, Ibrahim, pioneered in the late 1980s for the oil and gas industry.
Ibrahim had created a way to inject oilfield waste in the form of a slurry—a mix of solids and liquids—deep into specialized wells. “I was always telling my father that he should go build a waste management company to offer this technology,” says Abou-Sayed, 48. “Why don’t I go build that company?”
Prelude Ventures managing director Matt Eggers, who led the company’s Series A, saw the massive potential in their mission: “Omar and other people in the team are real deep experts in this technology, and Julia’s got a huge vision. She’s maniacally focused.”
With support from Advantek, Reichelstein and Abou-Sayed spun out Vaulted Deep in 2023, and have since raised $40.3 million in equity funding. On the back of a stellar year, Reichelstein is already looking ahead to new sites, like a forthcoming one in Colorado, where her company can save the planet, one community at a time.
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