A successful serial entrepreneur and a seasoned chemical engineer with a decade of experience at one of the nation’s premier national labs have come together to develop and scale a new direct air capture technology that mimics the architecture of a human lung.

The founders of the startup, named Spiritus after the Latin word for “breath,” began work in December 2021, and the company is officially coming out of stealth on Wednesday, with the announcement of an $11 million funding raise led by prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, with other investors including Page One Ventures.

Spiritus has built a novel approach to direct air carbon capture that relies on a material that absorbs carbon dioxide passively. Critically, Spiritus has developed a particular architecture that mimics the alveoli in the lungs in order to maximize the surface area for carbon dioxide to make contact with the material.

This lung-like material, technically called a “sorbent,” will be shaped in round balls and laid out like artificial fruits in a carbon-capture orchard, CEO Charles Cadieu and CTO Matt Lee told CNBC in a phone interview on Tuesday.

When the lung-like “fruit” have been collected from the carbon “orchard,” they will be put in a container, where low heat will be applied to remove the carbon dioxide. The desorption process will be powered by clean energy to ensure the process is a not adding emissions to the atmosphere. Once the CO2 has been removed from the lung-like fruit, the sorbent can then be returned to the carbon orchard and reused.