Alumnus’s Company Wins XPRIZE  

December 13, 2025

A Longhorn is changing the world yet again.  

The Houston-based company Mati Carbon recently won the $50 million grand prize from the XPRIZE competition in carbon removal. And leading the company’s science team to success as the chief science officer was Jake Jordan, an alumnus of The University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences. (Ph.D. 2017).  

“We’ve been vetted by a panel of some of the most serious people I can think of for evaluating a project like this,” Jordan said. “It’s really exciting, but it’s also a pretty big mandate to be a good steward of this money and to make sure that those resources are used to better the primary stakeholders, which of course are our partner farmers.”  

The XPRIZE is a global science competition focused on solving some of the world’s most pressing problems, with competitors having to meet challenge milestones and have their methods analyzed by subject matter experts. Mati Carbon was among the four finalists that successfully removed more than 1,000 net tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the final year of the four-year carbon removal competition, which began with over 1,300 teams from around the world.  

Mati Carbon uses enhanced rock weathering to remove CO2 while increasing crop yields for farmers in India and Africa who farm on small plots without industrial fertilizers or high-tech machinery.   

The company spreads pulverized volcanic rocks onto agricultural fields. As the rock is weathered away, it undergoes chemical reactions that both trap CO2 from the atmosphere and release mineral nutrients that crops need to thrive. The company tracks the volume of stored CO2 and then sells carbon credits to corporations with net zero goals.  

As a doctoral student at the Jackson School, Jordan worked with Professor Mark Hesse to shed light on the transport of geochemical tracers in melts. Although Jordan has moved away from modeling planetary interiors at Mati Carbon, he said that there’s a thematic connection between his doctoral research and his current carbon storage work.  

“What melt migration basically means is, how do these little bits of melt from the planetary interior make it onto the surface? And why do they look the way that they do?” Jordan said. “And here I am now, trying to find those rocks so we can put them on farmland.” 

Jordan will be returning to The University of Texas at Austin in Spring 2026 as a speaker at UT Energy Week and the Jackson School’s DeFord Lecture Series.