Divert, Inc. Secures Funding for Circular Economy Food Waste Solutions

Divert, Inc. has been in the food system trenches since 2007, long before “circular economy” was polite conversation. West Concord, Massachusetts isn’t where you expect a national infrastructure story to begin, but real ones often start that way. Ryan Begin and Nick Whitman didn’t launch with slogans. They launched with engineering discipline and the belief that food waste isn’t just moral failure, it’s a systems failure that needs industrial-scale solutions.

Ryan Begin, CEO and co-founder, built Divert with the instincts of an engineer who’s watched theory collide with physics. Raytheon. Proton Energy Systems. Zero-carbon hydrogen before it was pitchable. That DNA shows. Nearly two decades in, Divert isn’t chasing attention, it’s infrastructure. Fourteen facilities. Operations across 25+ states. Roughly 8,000 customer locations, including five Fortune 100 companies, quietly routing unsold food somewhere smarter than landfills.

In January 2026, Divert secured new growth capital led by Wittington Investments, Limited, the Weston family, backed firm with deep roots in global food and retail. The amount stayed private, which says enough. This was about alignment, not headlines. Board additions Zvi Orvitz (Wittington) and Ali Naqvi (CIO, Ontario Power Generation) reinforce the shift: this is energy infrastructure now, not compost theater.

The capital is going into steel and concrete. Integrated Diversion and Energy Facilities in Longview, WA and Lexington, NC come online in 2026, each capable of processing up to 100,000 tons of unsold food annually, converting what can’t be donated into renewable natural gas and soil amendments. In 2024 alone, Divert processed 630M+ pounds of unsold food, up 52% YoY, pushing lifetime totals past 3.2B pounds. Execution, not slogans.

Since 2018, Divert has raised roughly $468M in disclosed equity and project financing, secured a $175M RNG offtake with bp, and signed a $1B infrastructure agreement with Enbridge. And it still feels early, because infrastructure always does right before it becomes unavoidable.