According to Tech Crunch, Brilliant Planet uses seawater in order to facilitate the multiplication of algae.

Adam Taylor, CEO at Brilliant Planet, said that "if you read the IPCC report, you know we’ve missed the point at which we can just change your behaviors and just decrease CO2 output. We’ve got to remove carbon from the atmosphere, the carbon that we already put up there."

According to the CEO of the company, there are other ways to keep the carbon footprint under control, like protecting forests, but there are challenges with regards to that practice, especially price related.

With their project, the team at Brilliant Planet want to get the price for each ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere to under 50 dollars.

Brilliant Planet grows their algae in open-air pond-based systems located on coastal desert land without the use of freshwater.

The process is solar based, since algae capture solar energy, but also the pumps taking water from the ocean are gravity-powered, meaning that the process is sustainable and it also helps de-acidify the ocean water it does use.

"We have to move very large volumes of seawater around, and that uses energy, but we’ve done a lot of design work around running the system extremely energy-efficiently. So gravity feeds down through most of the system from one pond into the next", said Taylor.

After four years of trials at a three hectare research facility in Monaco, Brilliant Planet will use the funds from the 12 million dollar Series A funding to build a 30 hectare commercial demonstration facility while continuing to do research in London.

The funding round was led by Union Square Ventures and Toyota Ventures, with participation from Future Positive Capital and S2G Ventures.