Welcome to Founder Spotlight Rewind — a chance to catch up with the incredible founders we've previously featured and get the latest on how their companies are evolving. Whether it's major milestones, new products, or expanded impact, we're excited to share what's next in their journey. Upgrade to CC+ for insider access & community or manage your subscription here.
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Meet Chad Massura, founder of Rosy
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Founder: Chad Massura
Motto: Rosy formulates and manufactures soil from captured carbon. Our mission is to help growers nurture soil, plant, and planet health. By combining advanced soil science, CO₂ sequestration, and biochar inoculation, we create high-performance, carbon-negative products that make it easy to grow confidently and joyfully while restoring the Earth.
Year Founded: 2022
Stage: Series A
Location: New York, USA
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Climate Capital: What made you want to solve this problem?
Chad: As a lifelong gardener, I saw firsthand that most potting soils rely on peat and synthetics that degrade ecosystems and release massive amounts of CO₂. I wanted to fix that. The horticulture industry had no scalable, climate-positive alternative - yet gardening touches hundreds of millions of people and millions of cubic feet of soil every year. That scale is an opportunity to turn one of the planet’s oldest hobbies into a global climate solution.
Rosy was founded to do exactly that: replace extractive materials like peat with captured carbon in the form of biochar. Our aim is to make soil not just sustainable, but regenerative - turning every bag sold into a verifiable act of carbon removal.
Climate Capital: What are you building?
Chad: Our patented formulations combine biochar, compost, and beneficial microbes to optimize aeration, water retention, and nutrient efficiency for both consumer and commercial growers. Our R&D program is focused on building the next generation of growing media for the horticulture and agriculture industries, helping growers reduce inputs, improve yields, and rebuild soil health at scale.
Climate Capital: What is next?
Chad: Since launching in 2022, Rosy has grown from a concept into a fast-scaling brand distributed through hundreds of independent garden centers, national retailers like Target, and direct-to-consumer channels. We’ve built an in-house soil lab, completed thousands of plant trials, and established a reliable domestic biochar supply chain. Together with our community of growers, we’ve already locked away 1000+ tons of CO₂ and continue to increase our carbon impact every single day.
Moving forward, we’re deepening partnerships across horticulture and agriculture to expand access to peat-free, performance-driven growing media. Our focus is on advancing research, regionalizing production, and collaborating with growers to demonstrate that carbon-negative inputs can outperform conventional peat-based mixes - both agronomically and economically.
Climate Capital: What are the core elements of the culture you are building at your company?
Chad: At Rosy Soil we prioritize a culture of curiosity, science and sustainability. We’ve built a team of soil scientists, growers, and climate optimists united by a shared belief that better inputs make better outcomes - for plants, for people, and for the planet. Collaboration, transparency, and experimentation are central to our culture. Everyone contributes to improving our blends and reducing our footprint.
Climate Capital: What are the key challenges as you scale your company?
Chad: Scaling a new class of growing media at industrial volumes is complex. As demand accelerates, our focus has continually evolved to maintaining the same level of quality, consistency, and biological performance across every batch, region, and supplier. Each input - from compost to biochar - carries variability, so we’ve built strict sourcing and testing protocols to ensure every Rosy blend performs the same, whether it’s in a home pot or a greenhouse bench.
We’re also scaling production capacity while keeping carbon integrity verifiable. That means coordinating upstream biochar manufacturing, logistics, and quality control across a growing supply chain, all while meeting the agronomic standards of professional growers. The challenge is operationalizing our research at scale, and it’s a fun one.
Climate Capital: What have you learned that you want to share with other founders?
Chad: Focus on product performance first. The mission matters, but consistency and results build the trust that ultimately achieves that mission. In our case, every grower cares about what happens in the pot - if you can outperform the status quo, the impact takes care of itself. Build a team that loves the details, test relentlessly, and let the data guide you.
Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?
Chad: If you’re into gardening, we’d love for you to check out Rosy at Target, Amazon, or rosysoil.com. We’re always learning and improving, so your feedback means a lot and helps us grow better, too.
If you want to learn more, visit https://rosysoil.com/!