Founders: Julia Reichelstein (CEO), Omar Abou-Sayed
Launched: 2023
Headquarters: Houston, Texas
Funding: $56 million
Valuation: N/A
Key Technologies: N/A
Industry: Climate technology
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 0
Vaulted Deep is a tiny startup with a tidy idea: It uses technology originally developed for the oil and gas industry to inject organic landfill waste deep into the earth. Landfill waste is a large producer of the greenhouse gases carbon and methane.
The company, with a lean team of roughly 50 employees, is already injecting slurry into permitted wells in Kansas and California. Vaulted Deep is eyeing more wells — potentially several hundred — around the United States. In July 2025, the company signed a 15-year agreement with Microsoft for 4.9 million tons of carbon removal, one of the largest removal contracts globally. Vaulted Deep has also partnered with Google to remove 50,000 tons of CO2 by 2030, and to quantify methane prevention from organic waste.
Organic waste releases carbon dioxide and accounts for as much as 17% of total methane emissions, according to the EPA. Methane is a particularly destructive greenhouse gas and ozone pollutant.
More than a decade ago, Vaulted Deep co-founder Omar Abou-Sayed realized the potential in the oil-and-gas technology to put waste 5,000-feet underground. Abou-Sayed thought that organic waste producers such as municipalities, wastewater utilities, food and ag processors and paper mills might prefer to dispose of their waste, including excrement, leftover food, paper and plant material underground instead of in landfills, using the same deep geological formations, capped by thick impermeable shale, that have safely contained hydrocarbons for millions of years.
"We think Vaulted has an approach that because of its benefits to local communities, and because of its impact on not only CO2 but also methane, is poised to deliver that scale of impact over the long run," Randy Spock, Google's carbon credits and removal lead, told CNBC last November.
Abou-Sayed's father, working for Arco (now a Marathon Petroleum affiliate), was part of a team that developed the technology in Alaska's oil fields. But the time wasn't right to transfer the injection idea to a carbon-capture product: Abou-Sayed thought the politics of climate change would make innovation tough.
Eventually, though, the market for carbon capture credits developed. And in 2022, companies including Stripe, Alphabet and Shopify launched a $1 billion buyer pool, Frontier, to accelerate development of permanent carbon removal technologies.
Abou-Sayed and co-founder Julia Reichelstein, who had previously worked in fintech and venture capital, saw the support they needed, and founded Vaulted Deep in 2023. In November 2024, they raised a $32 million A round from venture capital firms focusing on climate, including Prelude Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital and Earthshot Ventures.
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