Varaha, an India-based climate tech startup, has raised $20 million in fresh funding as it looks to scale carbon removal projects from the Global South and position itself as a lower-cost supplier for verified emissions reductions.
The investment marks the first portion of a planned $45 million Series B round led by WestBridge Capital, the venture firm’s first investment in climate tech, with participation from existing investors including RTP Global and Omnivore. Founded in 2022, Varaha has raised about $33 million in equity to date, alongside $35 million in project financing and $500,000 in grants, as it builds carbon removal projects across Asia and Africa.
India has emerged as an increasingly important base for carbon removal projects, offering lower operating costs, deep agricultural supply chains, and a large pool of technical talent as corporate demand for verified removals rises, including from companies facing growing energy use from data centers and AI workloads. Varaha is positioning itself to capitalize on those advantages, arguing that its execution-focused model allows it to deliver carbon removal at lower cost while meeting the same international verification standards as higher-priced competitors in Europe and North America.
Varaha’s advantage lies less in proprietary technology and more in execution, said co-founder and chief executive Madhur Jain in an interview, arguing that high operating costs could become a constraint for carbon removal developers in wealthier markets as prices come under pressure.
“If carbon credit is a cost to the businesses that are buying these carbon credits … it’s a cost on their balance sheet. It’s not a CSR item,” Jain told TechCrunch. “And hence, if the cost of a certain geography is going to be so high by an order of magnitude of like, 1.5x to 3x credit production, it is going to be extremely hard for those companies to survive.”
Varaha develops carbon removal projects across four main pathways: regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, biochar, and enhanced rock weatherin …