Renewable nitrogen fertilizer pioneer Nitricity raises $20 million in Series A funding

Nitricity, the agtech startup revolutionizing nitrogen fertilizer production, announced the close of its Series A investment capital raise at $20 million. This fundraising round was led by Khosla Ventures and Fine Structure Ventures with additional participation from Energy Impact Partners, Lowercarbon Capital, and MCJ Collective.

Nitricity electrifies and distributes the production of nitrogen fertilizer. The Nitricity approach uses a new technology for regionalized nutrient production using low-cost solar or wind. This marks a major difference from the existing nitrogen supply chain, which is highly centralized and uses fossil fuels and costly transportation.

″This fundraising round brings us one step closer toward sustainable and locally produced fertilizer,″ said Nicolas Pinkowski, CEO and co-founder of Nitricity. ″It’s time to bring this to market. We have aggressive growth plans in motion.″

With this financing, Nitricity has raised $27 million in total funding to date. This will accelerate its ability to bring climate-smart fertilizer to a market experiencing ongoing and historic fertilizer price volatility and supply challenges.

″This electrified technology provides fertilizer in a climate-smart nitrate form, designed for efficient application, allowing it to address greenhouse gas emissions beyond ammonia-based technologies,″ said Joshua McEnaney, president, CTO and co-founder at Nitricity. ″This is an opportunity to attack not just the 1-2% of global GHG emissions in the production, but the additional 5% of GHG emissions in the application by mitigating nitrous oxide formation. We are pushing hard to scale up and implement this solution.″

Nitricity’s technology has been proven in commercial-scale farming operations through multiple functional pilots, including sub-surface fertigation of tomatoes in a collaboration with California State University Fresno’s Center for Irrigation Technology and the Water, Energy and Technology Center. Through solar-fertilizer technology, Nitricity has demonstrated the power of its system to produce and apply nitrogen fertilizer closer to the end-user – unlike any other fertilizer system today.

″Today’s fertilizer industry is facing the perfect storm of high GHG emissions, high fossil fuel consumption, rising costs and geopolitical disruptions,″ said Rajesh Swaminathan, partner at Khosla Ventures. ″Nitricity’s decentralized approach to manufacturing fertilizers using just air, water and renewables-based electricity was born out of a vision to completely transform a 100-year-old industry, and we are excited to be partnering with them.″

″Nitricity has made rapid progress since our initial investment in their Seed round," said Allison Hinckley, senior associate at Fine Structure Ventures, a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments. ″In response, we are increasing our support of the company to aid in bringing their differentiated, decarbonized fertilizer products to market in the near term.″

Nitricity aims for its renewable technology to be available in the market and benefitting the entire value chain within a two-year period.

About Nitricity

Nitricity produces nitrogen fertilizer with only air, water and renewable electricity. Founded by a team of graduate students from Stanford University in 2018 – Nicolas Pinkowski serving as CEO, Joshua McEnaney serving as president and CTO, and Jay Schwalbe serving as CSO – the company is scaling its technology to provide cost-effective, regional, and decarbonized fertilizer production. For more information, please visit www.nitricity.co.