Divert, Inc. did not start in a boardroom. It started behind a grocery store in Burlington, Massachusetts in June 2007, where Ryan Begin and Nick Whitman were staring at waste like it was a bad math...
Divert, Inc. did not start in a boardroom. It started behind a grocery store in Burlington, Massachusetts in June 2007, where Ryan Begin and Nick Whitman were staring at waste like it was a bad math problem no one wanted to solve. Nearly two decades later, that same problem just pulled in fresh capital led by Wittington Investments, Limited to push Divert deeper into the infrastructure game across North America. Same problem, bigger stage, louder signal.
Ryan Begin, CEO and Co-Founder, brought an electrical engineer’s intolerance for inefficiency from Raytheon and Proton Energy Systems, where zero carbon hydrogen was already part of the vocabulary. Nick Whitman, Co-Founder and long-time operator who transitioned to Board Member and Strategic Advisor in March 2025, brought the operational spine. Together they built a company that treats wasted food like a resource that just took a wrong exit, not like trash headed for a dead end.
Divert is headquartered in West Concord, Massachusetts, now 310+ employees strong, running a circular economy platform called Prevent, Provide, Power. The names are clean because the work is not. Data driven prevention upstream, edible food recovery for donation, and anaerobic digestion downstream that turns what cannot be eaten into renewable natural gas and soil amendments. In 2024 alone, Divert processed over 630M pounds of unsold and non-donatable food, up 52% year over year, pushing its lifetime total past 2.3B pounds. Waste moves fast. Divert moves faster.
This January funding round was led by Wittington Investments, Limited, the Weston family holding company, with new board appointments that read like infrastructure chess pieces. Zvi Orvitz, Managing Director of Sustainability and Energy Transition at Wittington, joined alongside Ali Naqvi, Chief Investment Officer at Ontario Power Generation. They sit next to a board already shaped by Ara Partners, Enbridge, and Timothy M. Laurion, the banker who spent four decades financing the environmental services industry and now chairs Divert’s audit committee.
The momentum is not abstract. Divert serves more than 7,200 retail locations across 25+ states, including five Fortune 100 companies. The first Integrated Diversion and Energy Facility in Turlock, California came online in December 2024, built to process 100,000 tons annually. Longview, Washington and Lexington, North Carolina are next in line, with a roadmap that points toward 30 facilities by 2031 and proximity to 80% of the U.S. population.
Retailers save roughly $8,000 per store each year. Donations have reached 17.8M pounds since 2018. Renewable natural gas flows into the grid. Regulations tighten. Food keeps getting wasted. Capital keeps lining up. Divert keeps diverting, and the question hanging in the feed is not whether this scales, but how quickly the rest of the system is forced to follow.