Varaha has raised $20 million as the first close of a $45 million Series B led by WestBridge Capital, with participation from existing investors RTP Global and Omnivore. The India-based startup develops carbon removal projects for smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa, primarily through biochar production and regenerative agriculture practices.
Founded in 2022, Varaha has now raised $33 million in equity plus $35 million in project financing. The company operates 20 projects converting agricultural waste (often burned) into biochar, which stores carbon in soil while reducing air pollution. It also deploys direct rice seeding, crop residue management, enhanced rock weathering, and agroforestry across farms in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.
The pitch: execution at lower cost. CEO Madhur Jain argues Varaha's advantage isn't proprietary tech but operational efficiency in emerging markets, where lower costs allow the company to deliver verified carbon removal at 1.5x to 3x cheaper than developed market projects. "If carbon credit is a cost ... it's not a CSR item," Jain told TechCrunch. "If the cost of a certain geography is going to be so high by an order of magnitude ... it is going to be extremely hard for those companies to survive."
Varaha sells credits through international registries including Puro.earth, Isometric, Verra, and Gold Standard. The company ranks as the world's second-largest provider of durable carbon deliveries and has secured offtake deals with Microsoft (100,000+ tons for biochar from cotton waste) and Google (100,000 tons).
The trade-offs: Verification standards remain consistent across geographies, but project execution in the Global South faces different infrastructure constraints and farmer enrollment challenges. Varaha's Kheti project, backed by $30.5 million from Mirova in November 2025, aims to reach 337,000 farmers across 675,000 hectares in Haryana and Punjab.
The company sequestered approximately 250,000 tons of carbon in 2025 and plans to double throughput to 500,000 tons of biomass in 2026. Biochar credits currently trade around $150 per ton CO₂e in US markets.
This is WestBridge Capital's first climate tech investment. The firm's willingness to lead a $45 million round suggests growing investor confidence in carbon removal scalability, particularly as corporate buyers seek lower-cost verified credits. The real test comes in execution at scale while maintaining verification standards.