Analysis
Two small but notable seed rounds surfaced this week in Crunchbase News' roundup of deals investors might have missed: London-based Foundational raised roughly £8.2 million (about $11 million) in pre-seed funding led by Inflection, and Colombia-focused Cotierra raised $3 million co-led by PINC -- the venture arm of Finnish group Paulig -- and Carbon Removal Partners.
Foundational is building Origin, a software platform that uses satellite laser ranging instead of GPS signals to calculate satellite positions, aiming to make the technology cheaper and more scalable for satellite operators. It joins a GPS-alternative category that just got a lot more attention: Burlingame-based Xona raised a $250 million Series D at a $2.45 billion valuation led by Steve Jurvetson's Future Ventures earlier this month, and Foundational's backers -- Type One Ventures, Final Frontier, Backed VC and Adjacent -- are betting there's room for more than one approach to the same problem.
“Cotierra is pursuing a different kind of carbon removal: biochar.”
Cotierra is pursuing a different kind of carbon removal: biochar. It converts agricultural waste into biochar using smaller, decentralized reactors, paired with software that monitors production and verifies how much carbon is actually removed -- a more measurable approach than many voluntary-market carbon credits, which have drawn criticism for overstating impact. The pitch starts in Colombia's coffee-growing regions, where coffee-processing waste supplies the feedstock.
Neither round discloses a post-money valuation, which is typical at this stage, and both are a fraction of the size of the AI mega-rounds dominating this week's funding headlines -- Foundational's $11 million is smaller than the rounding error in some Series C term sheets. The risk for both: satellite positioning and industrial decarbonization are capital-intensive, multi-year bets, and a sub-$15 million seed check buys only the first stretch of runway before either company needs to prove the technology at commercial scale.
Both deals are a reminder that seed-stage hard tech keeps finding capital even as headlines concentrate on trillion-dollar AI valuations.
