The voluntary carbon market is crowded with promises that wilt under sunlight. Everyone’s selling offsets, but too often it’s smoke dressed up as sustainability. Chestnut Carbon is taking a different path, one rooted in the dirt, not just in the deck. Founded in 2022 by Ben Dell, who also runs alternative asset manager Kimmeridge, and Dr. Kyle Holland, a veteran of carbon forestry who built EP Carbon and Forest Carbon Works, this New York–based company is scaling nature-based removal in a way that doesn’t just check boxes, it plants permanence. Their latest move: a $90 million Series B extension led by Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the same heavyweight that anchored their initial $160 million raise earlier this year.
You don’t see CPP Investments doubling down unless they see infrastructure, not PR. Chestnut Carbon has already planted more than 17 million trees across 30,000 acres, with over 60,000 acres secured under ownership. They’ve signed long-term agreements with buyers like Microsoft, which locked in nearly 8 million tonnes of CO₂ removal over 25 years, and Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team, a brand that doesn’t exactly bet on shaky engineering. Every credit they issue is Gold Standard–verified, backed by Forest Stewardship Council certification, and secured through conservation easements designed to store carbon for a century. Permanence isn’t a marketing line here, it’s a design principle.
That credibility comes from a leadership mix that balances finance, science, and execution. Ben Dell aligns the capital and strategy. Dr. Kyle Holland drives the product and science. Greg Adams steers the financials with precision. And Bill Rogers, Head of Sustainable Energies at CPP Investments, brings strategic oversight that signals confidence to the institutional market. Together they’re proving that carbon removal can scale without cutting corners.
The fresh $90 million goes straight into expanding land acquisitions, sharpening proprietary modeling tools, and advancing remote sensing capabilities. The target is bold but clear: 500,000 acres by 2030. To get there, Chestnut Carbon is recruiting forestry specialists, data scientists, and carbon finance experts, blending boots-on-the-ground operations with software that makes every acre measurable in real time. It’s not theory, it’s a pipeline of forests growing across eight southern U.S. states.
The takeaway is simple but sharp: credibility in climate tech isn’t earned through glossy reports, it’s built acre by acre. Chestnut Carbon is showing that the future of the carbon market belongs to companies that root their promises in soil, science, and scale. When capital chases permanence instead of optics, the market finally starts to grow up.
