Climate Capital: CC Insights

Climate Capital Events: SF Climate Week

Climate Capital — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:01:14 GMT

This is CC Insights: Perspectives from Climate Capital. You are receiving this because you have subscribed to our Substack. Upgrade to CC+ for insider access & community or manage your subscription here.

But first: Network Fund & Climate Angels

→ Invest in the Network Fund. Large fund access with micro-fund minimums.

→ Join Climate Angels. Sessions w/ top investors, discounted carry, community & more.

San Francisco Climate Week (SFCW) is a citywide convening of climate leaders across startups, investors, corporates, policymakers, and researchers. Organized alongside SF Climate Week programming, the week features hundreds of independently hosted events spanning sectors such as energy, built environment, transportation, carbon markets, nature, and climate finance. It has become one of the largest decentralized climate gatherings in the U.S., bringing together thousands of participants across the ecosystem.

For starters, join us!

Climate Capital is co-hosting a few events at SFCW, and as a CC Insights subscriber we would like to extend you an invitation. Note: please only RSVP if you are planning on attending.

We are also always thankful to our venue partner, Goodwin, for making these events possible.

SFCW Fireside w/ Goodwin

Monday, April 20 | 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM PT

We will host a fireside focused on one of the most under-discussed but increasingly investable climate categories: resilient housing and real estate infrastructure.

We are joined by Hunter Maats (formerly Ethic) and Ameet Konkar (formerly Head of Sustainability at Airbnb) from Resilience Investments, a Climate Capital Seed portfolio company focused on building next-generation affordable housing that is both climate-resilient and financially durable.

The discussion will explore how real estate investment is evolving under climate pressure, and how new capital structures are being designed to solve both affordability and resilience simultaneously.

➡ RSVP here

SFCW Lunch & Networking w/ Goodwin

Tuesday, April 21 | 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM PT

Join us at our annual lunch and networking event with founders, investors, and operators across climate.

➡ RSVP here

Are you an LP seeking LP <> GP events in climate?

We have an invite-only opportunity — email us to get the application link.

We look forward to meeting you at San Francisco Climate Week.

- The Climate Capital & RSC Teams

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Disclaimer: Under no circumstances should any information or content in this email be considered an offer to sell or solicitation of interest to purchase any securities, including any securities advised by Climate Capital or any of its affiliates or representatives. Further, no content or information herein is or is intended, nor should it be construed as, an offer to provide any investment advisory service, financial advice, legal, tax, accounting, investment, or other advice from Climate Capital or any of its affiliates (collectively "Climate Capital”). Under no circumstances should anything herein be construed as fund marketing materials by prospective investors considering investing in any Climate Capital investment fund. Content contained herein does not constitute an offer to sell — or a solicitation of an offer to buy — any securities and may not be used or relied upon in evaluating the merits of any investment. Information regarding companies highlighted herein has been provided by third parties, and Climate Capital makes no representations or warranties as to its accuracy, as to the viability of any company listed herein, or the results of any investment in a listed company.

Climate Capital: 2025 Year in Review

Climate Capital — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 20:24:44 GMT

But first: Network Fund & Climate Angels

→Invest in the Network Fund. Large fund access with micro-fund minimums. Q4 fund now open; the Q3 fund (closed) invested in 11 companies alongside Prelude, At One, Voyager, and more.

→Join Climate Angels. Sessions w/ top investors, discounted CC Syndicate carry, community & more.

As 2025 wraps up, we’re taking a moment to reflect on everything we have accomplished together. From new investments and portfolio milestones to industry recognition and growing community impact, here’s a look back:

💸By the numbers

This year, we made a total of 76 investments across the Seed Fund, Network Fund, and Syndicates, spanning our core focus areas: Energy Abundance, Physical Infrastructure, and Resilience & Adaptation.

🌟Select Investments

Some of our investments this year include:

Energy Abundance

Electric Era – Scaling EV charging deployments and intelligent energy solutions for retailers and utilities.
Inlyte Energy – Developing low-cost, scalable sodium-based storage systems.
Arbor – Building renewable energy infrastructure to accelerate the clean energy transition.
Copper – Delivering sustainable appliances and decarbonization solutions while being B Corp-certified.
Lumen Energy – Optimizing commercial building energy systems for cost savings and carbon reductions.
Transition Biomining – Site-specific, biologically-targeted solutions to enhance leaching efficiency during copper extraction

Physical Infrastructure

CarbonBuilt – Expanding low-carbon concrete and decarbonized construction materials.
Chemfinity – Growing traction for sorbent technology to recover and recycle critical minerals.

Noteworthy AI – AI-driven automation for faster, safer infrastructure inspections.
Renovate Robotics – Robotics solutions for construction and retrofitting to reduce carbon footprints.

Ferveret – Providing advanced liquid cooling solutions inspired by nuclear power plant technology.
Unlimited Industries –Scaling circular manufacturing to reduce waste and drive sustainable production.

Resilience & Adaptation

Witching Hour – Eliminating forest fire risk for utilities with predictive safety technology.
Resilience Investments – Delivering resilient, affordable housing solutions for climate-impacted regions.
Overstory – Using geospatial intelligence to improve grid reliability and wildfire resilience.
Near Space Labs – Capturing high-resolution aerial data for environmental monitoring and decision-making.

🤝 Our Investment Partners

Notable VCs we co-invested with this year include:

🏆Industry Recognition

Some of our portcos received wide recognitions this year, including:

Sway, Coral Vita, Glacier, and The Better Meat Co.

Living Carbon, Nitricity, Pano AI, Arbor, Avalanche Energy, WeaveGrid, KoBold Metals, Skyven, Lydian, Arcadia, SPAN, and Applied Carbon.

Select portco funding highlights:

Unlimited Industries: $12M Seed Round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and CIV
Vammo: $45M Series B led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund
Pila Energy: $4M Seed Round
Electric Era: California NEVI Round 2 award covering 16 sites
Aalo Atomics: $100M Series B for first nuclear plant
Overstory: $43M Series B
Boom Supersonic: $300M led by Darsana

These milestones reflect not just financial growth but real climate impact, with technologies and solutions moving toward scale.

🎉Celebrating Climate Capital

It’s not just our portfolio making waves. Climate Capital was recognized in multiple ways:

We were named one of the Most Active Early-Stage Investors in the Sightline Climate (CTVC) H1 2025 Climate Tech Investment Trends report.

In the report released in May of this year, it was such an honor to be in the Climate50 2024 List! We were recognized as one of the Top 10 Climate VCs of 2024 and Top Early-Stage VCs in Climate50.

🥂 Celebrating Our Community: Events This Year

We were proud to host and attend major climate gatherings, including San Francisco Climate Week in April and New York Climate Week in September. Partnering with Goodwin Law, we brought together founders, LPs, and friends for lightning intros and meaningful connections. RSVPs exceeded expectations, and next year we’ll plan for even more space to welcome everyone.

🌍Climate Angels in Action

This year, Climate Angels grew into an ongoing annual community of practice, bringing together former founders, new investors, and experienced angels. Members participated in founder pitches, live diligence sessions, collaborative investment reviews, and monthly webinars covering emerging sectors and investment frameworks.

We hosted expert sessions with leaders like Sophie Purdom of Planeteer, sharing market trends, and Katherine Markova of Climate Interactive, demonstrating how the En-ROADS simulator informs strategic climate investing. These experiences helped members deepen sector knowledge, engage with founders, and confidently deploy capital across the climate tech landscape.

Learn more and access past sessions:
Climate Angels 2.0 – Firm Power Spotlight
Webinar Recap with Sophie Purdom
What Moves the Needle on Climate

📅 What’s Next in 2026

Looking ahead, we’re expanding our sourcing engine, deepening support for founders, and activating more of the Climate Capital community. 2026 promises to be another year of bold climate innovation, and we’ll share our plans & goals in January. For now, wishing you & yours a joyful holiday season.🎄

- Team Climate Capital

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Inside Climate Capital's Approach to Backing Innovators

Climate Capital — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 22:06:14 GMT

→ Back CC Network Fund. Large fund access with micro-fund minimums. The Q3 fund has already invested in 10 companies alongside Prelude, At One, & Voyager.

In a recent webinar for Climate Angels, Ian Campbell, Senior Associate at Climate Capital, shared insights into our investment process and mission to support climate innovation. Building on that discussion, we are reflecting on our own journey, one shaped by curiosity, conviction, and collaboration.

Our approach

When people think about climate investing, they often imagine term sheets, big bets, and breakthrough technologies. But the real story is in the details. It is in the conversations with founders, the tough diligence calls, and the ongoing support that keeps companies moving forward.

Getting excited
Every yes begins with a moment where we get excited. Sometimes it is a founder who explains a problem in a way that makes us stop and think. One founder told us, “We’ve been living with this inefficiency for years, and nobody has tackled it because they thought it was too small.” That kind of insight is what makes us lean in. It is less about hype and more about conviction & specific knowledge.

Of course, we look for ideas that click into the bigger picture of climate impact. As we said during one session, “It’s not just about a clever technology. It’s about whether this founder has a clear ‘why’ that will carry them through the hard parts.”

Rigor
Diligence is where excitement meets discipline. One example that stood out during diligence was a company that didn’t just tell us about their milestones, they brought us along in real time. As we shared in the session, “While we were in process with this company, not only were they telling us what their milestones were, they were keeping us in the loop about what to expect next. They told us they had just applied for a grant, what it could represent in terms of funding, and when we’d know the outcome.”

That kind of proactive communication showed us a team that wasn’t overpromising. Instead, they were building trust by making their progress visible and measurable. It gave us confidence because we could see how they managed uncertainty and hit their milestones with discipline.

Partnership
For us, investing is about building relationships, not executing transactions. That means listening, asking hard questions, and being honest about what we see. Founders have told us that often our feedback is more valuable than the capital itself. One said, “You helped me understand what investors are actually looking for, and that changed how I approached my next round.” That is the kind of partnership we aim to build from day one.

Our role is also to connect founders with investors, resources, mentorship, and community. Another portfolio founder told us, “The most valuable thing was the introductions. You got us in front of people we would have never reached on our own.”

What’s your approach?

We’d love to hear from you. Got some quotes about what a founder particularly appreciated about you or your firm? Any best practices or lessons learned? We’d love to share them here with this audience if you’re open to sharing! Just shoot a quick note to cathy@climatecap.co with a sentence or two, plus your name and firm. Thanks in advance for helping all of us do more for climate founders.

Climate Angels Updated Pricing + 2 Week Trial

Early in your climate investing journey & want to level up? We’re accepting Climate Angels applications before we start our next quarterly session in early October!

We’re opening up our free 2-week trial so you can experience it firsthand.
Reduced pricing of $650/quarter or $2,000/yr (save $600)
We’ve added partners including discounts with Climate Capital, Climate Vine, and Terra.do, and access to demo days with LACI, Greentown Labs Houston, and others.

Learn more here or reach out to sherrie@climateangels.vc to activate your 2 week trial.

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Unlocking the Capital Stack: The Role of Debt in Climate Startups

Climate Capital — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 19:39:37 GMT

But first: CC Network Fund, CC Syndicate, Climate Angels

→ Back CC Network Fund. Large fund access with micro-fund minimums. In Q2, the fund invested in 18 companies, including Alta & LGND.
→ Back CC Syndicate. SPVs with investment minimums starting at $1k.
→ Join Climate Angels. Three top-tier sessions/month with veteran investors & angel peers.

In the ever-evolving world of climate tech, finding the right kind of funding is one of the biggest challenges for early-stage startups. During a recent webinar, we heard from Dimitry Gershenson, CEO of Enduring Planet, and Austin Badger, Managing Director at HSBC, who shared thoughtful insights on an often-overlooked piece of the puzzle: debt.

Missed the webinar? Access the recording here

Understanding the Capital Stack

When we talk about the capital stack, we’re referring to all the ways a startup can finance its growth, from equity to debt and everything in between. Most early-stage founders focus on raising equity, but debt deserves a seat at the table too. Used wisely, it can help companies grow without giving up too much ownership or control. Knowing the different forms of debt and how to use them strategically is key to making smart financial decisions.

Venture debt is especially gaining traction with earlier-stage companies that have a steady stream of income. It’s a sign that debt is becoming a more mainstream option for climate startups looking to fund their next phase.

Types of Debt for Early-Stage Climate Startups

There are generally two main types of debt that climate startups might explore.

Cash flow financing includes tools like receivable financing, contract financing, term lending, and venture debt. These options can help founders unlock money based on predictable future income, giving them flexibility to manage operations or scale faster without giving away more equity.
Asset financing is another route. This involves borrowing money to purchase equipment or inventory. In some cases, startups can even sell their existing equipment to a lender and lease it back, turning a one-time purchase into a recurring expense. This can free up cash for other priorities and help balance the books more efficiently.

The Importance of Timing and Structure

One of the biggest takeaways from the conversation was around timing. Debt isn’t something companies want to seek out when they’re already in trouble. It’s far better to raise debt when business is stable and revenue is predictable. That way, companies are in a stronger position to negotiate good terms and avoid getting boxed into unfavorable deals.

Structure matters too. Founders and investors need to understand what’s in the fine print, from loan covenants to repayment flexibility. One story shared during the webinar showed how rigid loan terms created unexpected roadblocks. It was a good reminder that negotiating for flexibility upfront can make all the difference down the road. For investors, understanding how and when founders use debt and advising them to seek guidance early can be the difference between enabling strategic growth and watching a good company get tripped up by bad terms.

Evaluating Risks and Rewards

Debt can be incredibly useful, but it comes with trade-offs. If a company overestimates its future cash flow and borrows more than it can realistically repay, things can spiral quickly. Investors need to dig into the details and ensure the company has the metrics and systems in place to meet its debt obligations.

When done right, debt can be a powerful tool for climate startups. It gives founders more options and can stretch their capital further without giving away additional equity. As climate tech companies mature, investors who understand the full capital stack, including how founders strategically leverage debt, are better positioned to evaluate risk, support smart growth, and identify winning opportunities. By building trust and transparency between founders, lenders, and investors, we can unlock more paths to progress in one of the most important sectors of our time.

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Heavy Water Cooler Chat: Investing in Nuclear Startups

Climate Capital — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 17:03:37 GMT

But first: CC Network Fund, CC Syndicate, Climate Angels

The Evolving Landscape of Nuclear Energy: A Key Player in Climate Tech

In a recent webinar, Nishant Mani, Partner at Climate Capital, and Mike Mettler, Partner at Roadrunner Capital and Advisor to Climate Capital, explored the renewed momentum around nuclear energy, unpacking its evolving role in climate tech, emerging investment trends, and key regulatory dynamics shaping the field.

Missed the webinar? Access the recording here.

A Shift in Perspective

Historically, nuclear energy was stigmatized by its association with major disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, making it politically unpopular and challenging to fund. But that narrative is changing. Today, nuclear energy is being rebranded as a high-potential, zero-emissions solution critical to achieving decarbonization at scale.

Much of this shift is being driven by the explosion in energy demand. Emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and hyperscale data centers require massive amounts of consistent, local energy. Unlike solar or wind, nuclear energy can provide 24/7 baseload power with minimal carbon output, an increasingly appealing combination. This reliability, paired with advancements in safety and modular designs, is transforming nuclear’s image from legacy risk to future-ready infrastructure.

Investment Surge in Nuclear Technologies

A key signal of this shift is the wave of private capital now flowing into the sector. Companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion, and Oklo have raised hundreds of millions to develop next-generation fusion and micro-fission reactors. These are not just scientific experiments anymore; these are high-growth, venture-backed companies drawing attention from generalist and climate-focused investors alike.

The investment thesis around nuclear energy is evolving. It is not just about decarbonization; it is also about national energy security, price stability, and reliable power in an increasingly electrified world. Nuclear’s role is becoming essential as industrial power loads expand and the grid becomes more stressed.

Navigating Regulatory Challenges

While the momentum is there, the nuclear sector still faces one of the most complex regulatory environments in energy. In the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) remains the gatekeeper for any project’s path to commercialization. Traditional timelines for approval and construction can span a decade or more, a major deterrent for most VC-backed startups.

However, innovation in licensing frameworks is beginning to take shape. The NRC is now working with startups on pilot models for advanced reactors, including licensing for non-light water technologies and fusion systems. Even so, regulatory agility remains a bottleneck, and any investor or founder in the space must build realistic timelines and compliance strategies into their plans.

For fusion specifically, the challenge goes beyond just regulation; it is also about physics. While fission technologies are proven and in commercial use, fusion requires breakthroughs in plasma control, materials science, and energy capture. These hurdles do not just affect timelines; they shape entire business models.

What Investors Should Look For

For early-stage investors, the nuclear sector offers both significant potential and unique complexity. It is essential to assess whether a startup truly understands the technical and regulatory milestones required to reach commercialization.

Fusion ventures, for instance, should clearly outline their path toward net energy gain and provide realistic timelines for scaling pilot plants. Fission startups should present strong plans to streamline manufacturing, enhance safety, and navigate NRC regulations effectively. For both, factors such as fuel supply, site readiness, supply chain integration, and talent development play a crucial role in determining investability.

Bottom line: deep diligence is a must. Nuclear is far from a typical software investment. It demands systems-level thinking, patience, and a long-term perspective. But if successful, the impact could be transformative.

The Future of Nuclear Energy

Looking ahead, nuclear energy is increasingly seen as a cornerstone of the clean energy transition. It is not a replacement for renewables but a complement, offering the stable, round the clock power needed to support a decarbonized and reliable grid.

The opportunity now extends beyond building reactors. It includes innovation in nuclear fuel supply chains, small modular reactor manufacturing, AI driven monitoring tools, and industrial heat applications. This broader ecosystem opens the door for climate tech investors, infrastructure capital, and public private collaboration.

If the world is to achieve a carbon free energy future, nuclear energy will almost certainly be part of the equation. The real question is not whether, but how and how soon.

The evolving story of nuclear energy reflects a growing understanding that solving the climate crisis will take bold investments in infrastructure, science, and policy change. While hurdles remain, momentum is building. With the right mix of capital, leadership, and innovation, this sector is well positioned to deliver on its vast potential.

For founders, investors, and policymakers, now is the moment to lean in. The clean energy transition is moving forward, and nuclear energy is no longer in the background. It is stepping into the spotlight.

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Two Big Ways to Get Involved in Climate Investing - Starting Now

Climate Capital — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 17:59:49 GMT

In a news cycle dominated by AI hype, economic uncertainty, and federal funding pullbacks, climate change can feel like it’s been pushed to the sidelines. But the need for climate solutions hasn’t gone away, nor has the immense potential for return on investment on those solutions. That’s why we’re doubling down on building a stronger, more connected community of early-stage investors who believe in backing solutions for a livable future. We’re launching two ways to help you get involved with Climate Capital: Climate Angels 2.0 and the Climate Capital Network Fund.

Whether you're new to climate investing or ready to go deeper, these programs are built to meet you where you are and help you go further.

🌱 Climate Angels 2.0: Your Community for Climate Investing

Over the past two years, Climate Angels has helped dozens of operators, founders, and curious first-time investors build confidence and take action. This summer, we’re evolving into a year-round investing community to better support early-stage investors with the tools, insights, and connections they need.

As a Climate Angels member, you’ll get:

💡 Weekly live or on-demand sessions on educational investor content
🚀 Founder pitch events with Climate Capital startups
🔍 Deep dives on sectors, capital stacks, and investment theses
🤝 Hands-on diligence alongside the Climate Capital team
💬 A trusted community to ask questions, review deals, and grow

If you’re ready to learn by doing, this is your on-ramp.

📅 Apply by July 7 to get 10% off your annual membership.

💸 Climate Capital Network Fund: 10x Exposure, Proven Track Record

The Network Fund is our flagship vehicle to get exposure to 10–20 top early-stage climate startups each quarter without having to source or diligence deals yourself. This microfund has been investing since 2019 alongside top-tier climate VCs.

Here’s what sets us apart:

📈 We are in the top 2% of AngelList GPs for markups-over-baseline, with implied MOIC for our first three microfunds (‘19 - ‘21) of 5x, 4.5x, and 4.2x
🔁 A wide sourcing funnel from our large network of 400+ founders, 3K+ LPs, and major climate funds
⚡ 2025 focus: Energy generation, transmission, expansion; Adaptation & resilience; AI-enabled computing, deep tech
📊 Min investment of $5K for one quarter; reduced carry for larger annual commitments

We back 50–70 pre-seed/seed companies a year… more shots on goal, large fund access & strategy, and micro-fund LP minimums.

👉 Learn more and invest in the Q3 Network Fund

Ready to dive in? Apply to Climate Angels by July 7 or invest in the Q3 Network Fund and start backing what matters.

🧭 Capital Conversations

We’ve got two powerhouse sessions lined up exploring how capital is shaping the future of climate innovation:

🔹 Investing in Nuclear Innovation
Nishant Mani (Climate Capital) and Mike Mettler (Roadrunner Capital, Climate Capital) take us inside the evolving landscape of nuclear investment. Learn what makes this sector unique and where early-stage capital can make a difference. Register Here

🔹 How Early-Stage Startups Use Debt
Join Dimitry Gershenson (Enduring Planet) and Austin Badger (HSBC) as they break down how tools like venture debt and equipment financing can fit into a startup’s capital stack—and what investors need to know to underwrite both impact and returns. Register Here

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Webinar Recap: Understanding the FOAK Project Capital Stack

Climate Capital — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:35:03 GMT

Before we dive in: Climate Angels, CC Network Fund, & CC Syndicate

Whether you’re new to climate investing or a veteran, 3 opportunities for you:

→ Join Climate Angels. 3 top tier sessions/month with veteran investors & angel peers; apply by July 7 for 10% off. In July: Thesis deep dive, Dimitry Gershenson (Enduring Planet) and Austin Badger (HSBC) on non-dilutive potential, and more. Register Here

→ Back the CC Network Fund. So far in Q2 the fund has invested in 13 companies including Alta, reinventing critical minerals mining using biochemistry, and LGND which builds integrated services for developers and analysts to create, tune, store, and serve geographic embeddings.

→ Back the CC Syndicate. SPVs with investment minimums starting at $1k.

Webinar Recap: Understanding the FOAK Project Capital Stack

In a recent webinar hosted by Climate Capital, we welcomed Joel Armin Hoiland, Founder and CEO of Climate Finance Solutions (CFS), to discuss the current landscape of funding for first-of-a-kind (FOAK) projects. With over $1.6 billion in government grants secured, Joel provided insights into the evolving funding environment, particularly in the context of climate technology.

Missed the webinar? Access recording here

What's Changing in Climate Funding?

Historically, around $28 billion per year was allocated to climate through normal appropriations. However, recent legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), has increased federal spending to approximately $110 billion annually. This funding is crucial for supporting projects across the entire lifecycle of companies, especially for FOAK initiatives.

Despite the substantial funding available, recent changes in the federal administration have introduced uncertainty. The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) is undergoing significant downsizing, with many grants being canceled. However, while the landscape is shifting, opportunities for funding still exist, particularly for projects aligned with the administration's priorities, such as nuclear, geothermal, and critical minerals.

Tips for Savvy Investors

For early-stage investors, understanding how to support their portfolio companies in securing FOAK financing is essential. One way to do this is by encouraging companies to explore alternative sources of finance and not abandon grant opportunities. Even with fewer federal grants available, there is still a wealth of funding options that companies can tap into.

Investors should look for specific signals when assessing a company's potential for securing government grants. Key indicators include:

Relevance of Technology: The technology should have a clear potential for system-level decarbonization.
Clear Use Case: Companies should articulate a clear use case for FOAK projects, even if they lack an anchor partner at the early stages.
Technical Readiness: Companies should demonstrate a defined path toward achieving a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 7-9.
Alignment with Public Policy: Companies should align their projects with current public policy priorities to enhance their chances of securing funding.

Watch Out for These Red Flags

There are also common pitfalls that can hinder a company's ability to secure FOAK financing. These include:

Lack of Strategic Planning: Companies that approach funding opportunistically without a comprehensive understanding of the funding ecosystem may miss out on the best opportunities.
Misalignment of Timelines: Understanding the lengthy timelines associated with grant applications and funding disbursement is crucial. Many companies fail to account for the time it takes to secure grants, leading to misaligned expectations.
Insufficient Internal Capacity: Companies need to have the expertise to manage grants effectively. This may involve hiring consultants or building internal capacity to navigate the complexities of grant applications.

Exploring Global Opportunities

As the U.S. funding landscape becomes more restrictive, companies are increasingly looking to Europe for funding opportunities. The EU Innovation Fund, which allocates significant resources for FOAK projects, is one avenue where U.S. companies can find support. The fund has a strong focus on large-scale commercial demonstrations, making it a vital resource for companies seeking substantial funding.

Wrapping It Up

In today’s climate, it is necessary to be adaptable and have strategic foresight in navigating the funding landscape. As government priorities evolve, both investors and companies must stay alert and proactive in identifying funding opportunities. By grasping the intricacies of the capital stack and utilizing both domestic and international resources, stakeholders can effectively position themselves for success in the dynamic climate tech sector.

For additional insights and resources, Climate Finance Solutions provides webinars and personalized strategy sessions for investors and their portfolio companies, promoting a collaborative approach to securing funding in this vital industry.

Learn more about CFS at http://www.climatefinancesolutions.com.

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

📢 Announcing Climate Angels 2.0! + Firm Power Deep Dive

Climate Capital — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 19:09:09 GMT

This is CC Insights: Perspectives from Climate Capital. Upgrade to CC+ for insider access & community or manage your subscription.

Over the past two years, we’ve held three cohorts of Climate Angels. Some were former founders or operators. Others were curious professionals seeking their first deal. Yet others were already angel investing, looking to sharpen their diligence and provide structure to their decision-making. Many now back startups across the climate landscape.

Starting this summer, we are expanding the offering. Climate Angels will evolve from a six-week program to an ongoing annual learning community. Membership is designed for early-stage investors who want to stay close to deals, build with others, and support the climate tech ecosystem.

What to expect from Climate Angels

Climate Angels offers a comprehensive program designed to help both new and experienced investors deepen their understanding of investing and confidently deploy capital. Each month features webinars and topic deep dives covering themes such as capital stack structures, emerging climate sectors, and investment thesis development. Investors also gain practical frameworks for sourcing deals, conducting diligence, and managing portfolios.

We’ll be holding regular founder pitches to hear from select startups in the Climate Capital network and engage live with extended Q&A sessions within the Climate Angels community.

The program also includes working sessions where members collaboratively review memos and recent investments, conduct diligence on active deals, and participate in bring-your-own-deal sessions to receive feedback. Community-led learning is a core feature, with member-hosted roundtables on sector-specific topics and idea-sharing calls.

For those newer to climate investing or aiming to refine their approach, Climate Angels offers hands-on experience developing investment theses, exploring climate tech topics, and participating in live diligence alongside the Climate Capital team. We equip members with the knowledge and network needed to confidently write checks and get involved.

Learn more here and register before July 7 for a 10% discount.

💡Sector Insights💡

One of the core pillars of Climate Angels is helping investors stay ahead of the curve by unpacking timely, relevant topics. Below is a write-up from a recent sector spotlight we offered designed to give angels actionable perspective, market context, and a clearer path to investment. This particular session was on clean firm power and exploring how investors can approach this growing sector, especially at the early stages.

What’s Up With Clean Firm Power

To level set, we covered economics as a key driver behind the rapid growth of renewables in the U.S. Renewables have become cheaper than building or operating new natural gas plants, making cost the primary factor motivating adoption. While policy and regulation can affect the speed of this transition, ultimately, economic considerations lead the way. Fossil fuel generation costs have stabilized, whereas renewable technologies continue to improve and become more affordable, further tipping the scales in favor of clean energy. However, as variable renewables (like wind and solar) become the backbone of the energy mix, clean firm power becomes critical to ensuring reliability when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, highlighting the need for continued investment in this space.

How can early stage investors get involved in supporting clean firm power when these technologies typically involve large infrastructure projects with high capital costs? As an angel investor, it’s important to focus on technologies that optimize and enhance existing energy infrastructure rather than committing to large-scale, capital-intensive projects. Enabling or ancillary technologies offer more accessible entry points and can often be supported through various early-stage investing vehicles such as direct investments, syndicates, or specialized funds. These solutions can play a crucial role in improving the efficiency and reliability of the current grid while accelerating the shift toward cleaner energy. Investments that enable clean firm power, such as long-duration storage, demand-side management, or grid-balancing tools, are especially valuable because they complement intermittent renewables and help make a fully decarbonized grid more achievable.

Successfully transitioning the grid will require a balanced and realistic strategy. This means combining rapidly deployable solutions like solar plus storage with investments in long-duration energy storage and grid infrastructure optimization. By concentrating on enabling technologies that make existing systems more efficient and resilient, investors can achieve more immediate impact, contribute to a rapidly evolving part of the renewable energy landscape, and help accelerate the clean power transition.

Want to get a taste for more relevant topics in climate investing? Join us for our next deep dive on June 13 with Joel Armin-Hoiland as he covers the climate capital stack, government grants, and where FOAK financing fits in.

SUBSCRIBE TO CC+

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Webinar Recap with Sophie Purdom (Planeteer, CTVC)

Climate Capital — Wed, 21 May 2025 22:32:27 GMT

This is CC Insights: Perspectives from Climate Capital. Upgrade to CC+ for insider access & community or manage your subscription.

Before we dive in…

Dive into the capital stack with Joel Armin Hoiland on June 13 at 12:00 PM PT. Hear how government funding and policy shifts are shaping the climate tech landscape. You’ll get fresh insights on how to diligence startups for grant readiness, which technologies are best positioned, and how grants fit into the broader funding stack.

Register here

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Recapping our conversation with Sophie Purdom

Last week, we hosted a webinar with Sophie Purdom, Managing Partner at Planeteer and Co-founder of CTVC, unpacking the latest insights from CTVC’s climate market briefing. Below is a quick recap of the key trends shaping climate tech this year: where the capital is (and isn’t) flowing, which sectors are surging or slipping, and why early-stage founders still have room to run. Want more? Join CC+ to access the full recording.

Climate Tech in 2025: A Tale of Two Markets

The climate tech market continues to evolve. It continues to grow, but is much more complex beneath the surface. Here's a snapshot of the current landscape from the webinar:

Where the Money Has Gone

Over $182B has flowed into climate tech over the last five years compared to $25B in cleantech 1.0 but it's far from evenly distributed. Three sectors dominate:

Transportation
Energy
Industry

But when you flip from dollars to deals, the picture diversifies: early-stage founders are building across the full spectrum of climate verticals.

Energy overtakes Transportation for the first time since 2020

Annual investment by vertical, 2020–2024 ($bn)

Source: Sightline Climate

🧭 Market Phases & Funding Trends

Three clear market eras have emerged:

2020–2021 Boom: Surging capital, hype, and new entrants.
2022 Retrenchment: Valuations stabilized and check sizes shrank.
Mid-2023 Onward: Flat funding, smaller rounds, but more deals than ever.

📉 Growth-stage investments fell 38% YoY (to <$7B), but early-stage investment has remained steady. That’s your “tale of two markets.”

🔄 Exits & Bankruptcies

More climate tech companies exited in 2024 than ever before—but most were quiet tuck-in M&A deals. Translation: small outcomes.

Major public exit: Ola Electric (India)
Notable M&A: Oxy acquired Carbon Engineering
High-profile failures: SunPower (40-year-old solar firm), Proterra, Volta, Wisk

Exits are still rare, fragile, and often not headline-worthy - a trend to watch in 2025.

🏗️ The Capital Stack Is Shifting

The climate capital stack is evolving fast. With government grants at risk and infrastructure dollars dominating, VCs are being squeezed:

Most VC money still comes from generalist funds (2/3 of capital).
$50B in new AUM was raised recently; but much flows to infrastructure, not VC.
For the first time ever, dry powder shrank

Expect more emphasis on working capital, non-dilutive funding, and catalytic capital like venture debt and project finance.

🔥 What’s Hot (and How to Think About It)

Here’s where capital is clustering:

AI-adjacent infrastructure (e.g., data centers)
Next-gen energy generation (e.g., SMRs)
Energy storage, transmission, and management tools

That said, early-stage investing still comes down to fundamentals: finding sharp teams, solving meaningful problems, and getting in before the generalists do.

📣 Final Thoughts

Despite the headwinds, founders are still building. Over 1,000 new climate startups raised venture funding for the first time last year. Early-stage momentum is holding strong, even if exits and growth capital are slowing.

The takeaway? The opportunity is real, but the market requires more nuanced strategies, smarter financing, and a sober eye toward capital cycles.

Missed the session? Join CC+ for the recording of this and future webinars.

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––

Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

We’ve relaunched CC+

Climate Capital — Tue, 13 May 2025 20:14:31 GMT

This is CC Insights: Perspectives from Climate Capital. Upgrade to CC+ for insider access & community or manage your subscription.

Join CC+ for Premium Access & Community

We are excited to announce the (re)launch of our CC+ newsletter and investor community! Our goal is to unlock more capital for climate solutions by making investing more accessible, actionable, and community-driven. Members enjoy:

Weekly “On our radar”: A selection of startups actively raising.

CC+ Member Deal Sharing: Share deals you’re investing in that have room – and get access from others.

Monthly Online Events: Webinars with industry experts (recorded & live access).
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Insights From Our Portfolio of 400+ Companies: As one of the most active investors in climate tech, we have a unique perspective on what’s working and where companies are succeeding.
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Private Slack Channel: For those who want to lean in! Discussions, deal-sharing, content & community.

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We’re excited to do more for the climate investor ecosystem, and hope you’ll be a part of it.

––

Is this thing on?

Climate Capital — Fri, 02 May 2025 18:46:51 GMT

This is CC Insights: Free, weekly(ish) newsletter with perspectives & data from Climate Capital. Upgrade to CC+ or manage your subscription here.

Climate Capital has invested in 400+ startups since 2015. Co-invest with us.

Before we dive in…

Join us Friday, May 16 at 12:00 PM PT, with Sophie Purdom, Managing Partner at Planeteer Capital and Co-Founder of CTVC, as we break down the key trends, capital flows, and market signals shaping the first half of 2025.

📅 Register today

Can't make it? Join CC+ for access to a recording of this and future sessions.

Is this thing on?

This post was originally published on Keep Cool and is re-posted here with permission.

In this piece, Climate Capital Venture Partner Nick van Osdol pushes beyond the hype to explore whether the attention being paid to AI-driven electricity demand growth is truly proportional to its actual impact. The piece also proves prescient, insofar as 2025 has seen a flood of news surrounding increasingly efficient AI and LLM models—including from the likes of Chinese competitors like DeepSeek—many more startups raising capital to make data centers more efficient, provide energy to them, or otherwise leverage AI or facilitate its improvement, and large tech companies pulling back on data center investments (with companies like Amazon and Microsoft announcing as much).

Still, the overarching sentiment among investors and operators is that, even if AI doesn’t achieve human-like intelligence, electricity growth for data centers is going to explode. In short order. See below for sample forecasts from reputable analyst groups and orgs.

Of course, forecasting is notoriously difficult. One need only look at previous attempts to forecast solar capacity additions historically to see it’s a perniciously tricky business.

Chart via McKinsey (see here for full article)

Still, to get to the point and the piece, it’s worth asking: How quickly will the data center and AI boom really necessitate massive amounts of net new, ideally clean electrons? Shouldn’t all that AI make everything more efficient and seamless as is? Let’s dive in.

DEEP DIVE

One of the biggest stories in 2024 in energy circles was, indubitably, the massive forecast growth in electricity needs for data centers and AI. The increased need for data centers follows on the heels of the massive wave of interest in and demand for AI, machine learning, and the slurry of other words that describe a whole host of computing-intensive applications.

Wait. Pause. Should this be one of the biggest stories of 2024? I’ll poke and prod at that question a bit in here. Said differently: Is this thing actually on?

The data dump

It is ‘indubitably’ true that the amount of data the world produces and makes efforts to store, manage, and process is growing exponentially. A statistic that has stuck with me since first encountering it is that China used more concrete between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. did in the 20th century. Similarly, the world produced more data in the past three years than in all human history preceding it, whether you measure data in books in libraries or photos taken on iPhones 1 through 13.

Against this backdrop, forecasts for data center demand are skyrocketing. I doubt I need to parrot off too many headlines here; you’ve likely seen many, and a few more will suffice:

$1T+ spent building data centers over the next few years on data centers and the infrastructure to power them (Goldman Sachs)
1.7T / year gallons of freshwater demand from data centers by 2027 (Deloitte).
800+ TWh/yr by U.S. data centers by 2026 (IEA).

Additional data center power demand forecasts in the U.S. out to say, 2030, could represent the addition of electricity demand equivalent to 3 NYCs (Apollo).

Analyzing utilities’ plans tells a similar story. Georgia Power’s (the largest subsidiary of Southern Company, one of the U.S.’s largest electricity generators) recent load growth forecast is basically all data center-driven demand. (h/t to Simon Mahan for this one):

These latest ‘load growth’ projections from Georgia Power have ballooned by roughly 50% to 36.5 MW since its last round of projections, primarily due to the forecast data center demand visualized above. Its 2028 to 2029 pipeline, in particular, tripled from 6 GW to nearly 20 GW. To put this in perspective, the two most recent nuclear reactors completed in Georgia offer about 2 GW of capacity (and were way over budget and delivered far later than original target dates).

In light of this, staggering partnerships and investment announcements are coming to the fore. For instance, last month, KKR and Energy Capital Partners announced a $50 billion “strategic partnership” to invest in new data centers and to otherwise support growth in computing for AI. Similarly, BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, Microsoft, and MGX—an AI investor—announced a $100 billion partnership to invest in data centers and support power infrastructure in September, too.

All of this is exciting at one level; while AI may well be overhyped in some cases, it can and will indubitably do many cool things for humanity. Advances enabled by more computing power will unlock “wins” across many applications, as has been true for decades already. For instance, advances in DNA sequencing (with significant cost reductions) are a success story that depended in large part on advances in computing over the past decades. In the future, other health-related progress (as one focal example) may well be wonderful. For a recent example, as noted in VentureBeat:

“Google DeepMind has unexpectedly released the source code and model weights of AlphaFold 3 for academic use, marking a significant advance that could accelerate scientific discovery and drug development. The surprise announcement comes just weeks after the system’s creators, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on protein structure prediction.”

But all this work does hinge on more data center capacity, which raises costs and challenges:

Cost: Building a data center costs $10+ million per MW of power capacity (Morgan Stanley) just for construction. A GW facility thus requires a $10+ billion investment before purchasing the computers, accounting for cooling needs, etc.... (Note: power production is a fraction of total build costs, though power availability matters a lot).

Power: Power capacity is a primary constraint in building new data centers. Real estate with high-power infrastructure and power availability is exceptionally high in demand.

Semiconductors (‘chips’): There’s massive demand for semiconductors (such as those made by NVIDIA, currently the world’s most valuable company) that power computers. Hence, there are also intense backlogs for additional chips.

Still, returning to the Chinese concrete statistic from earlier, that continues to strike me as more remarkable than forecasts for data center construction demand growth and whatever else it may require.

For one, the advent of cloud computing, increased internet speed and internet access globally, and more sophisticated, powerful computers, whether in data centers or our pockets, is a trend that’s been percolating for some time—its acceleration doesn’t surprise me that much. Many massive businesses are already built on top of collecting your data, whether to target advertisements at you more precisely or to make remote-operated drones for warfare more, well, “precise.”

Secondly, the concrete stat deals more ‘concretely’ in the physical world, where constraints ranging from power and raw input materials to space for factory development are typically more limited. Physical constraints are germane to data centers, too, but as we’ll get into shortly, there’s a lot more advancement in technological efficiencies in the data center world than in the cement-making world.

Thirdly, concrete production is a much more greenhouse gas emissions-intensive enterprise than all of the world’s computing needs (by a factor of more than 10).

Of course, that last point could change. Through some combination of advanced cement and concrete production that shifts the process from an emissions-intensive one to a less emissions-intensive one, or by way of a massive surge in how much power is used by data centers and computers, there’s an imaginable future in which computing overtakes concrete as a bigger greenhouse gas emissions and hence, climate change, story.

I do not think that specific version of the future is ours, though.

A data center in Noord Holland, The Netherlands (Shutterstock)

Case studies in efficiency

Here’s the meat: why am I not that obsessed with this story, at least as typically presented?

For one, data center growth has already been a welcome boon for cleaner energy development for many years. Amazon has procured 77 TWh of renewable energy generation so far for its cloud computing and AI needs. Many other players continue to invest in renewables to add cleaner power capacity and mitigate emissions. See here, here, here, and here for recent announcements.

Most importantly, there are big-time efficiency opportunities when it comes to computing, whether in large-scale chip production itself or in the computing capacity of chips themselves. On the former front, chip manufacturers, motivated by eye-watering demand for their products, are well-positioned to invest in improvements in physical production efficiency (see, for instance, Taiwan Semiconductor’s recent production yield results at a plant in Arizona.)

On the latter front, this entire ‘story’ has been enabled by improvements in computer chips. Decades ago, computers were the size of rooms. Today, chips are dazzlingly dense and tiny.

The trend towards increasingly more mind-bogglingly powerful chips in small form factors will continue and could offset rising power demand projections significantly. Efficiency improvements in chips over the past fifteen years are already well documented and support the possibility of further 100x efficiency improvements. As charted by Hannah Ritchie:

NVIDIA’s hottest , highly sought-after new chips, Blackwell-architecture GPUs, could offer up to 96% energy reductions. To date, Nvidia has shipped ~13,000 Blackwell samples to customers and aims to sell billions of dollars worth in financial quarters to come.

If projected chip efficiencies come to bear (even if they’re in the right ballpark), that alone will dramatically cut into forecasts for load growth. Plus, the efficiency conversation also extends well beyond power needs and computing capacity. Today, traditional air cooling can consume up to 50% of electricity in data centers; novel cooling technologies offer significant opportunities to reduce cost, power demands, emissions, and more.

To recap so far, my take here is that efficiency gains across the data center hardware and software stack may temper the higher end of data center demand growth forecasts considerably. The corollary I’ll draw is every past red flag that’s been raised about copper, lithium, or oil shortfalls. What invariably happens when demand for a commodity materializes is that we find new ways to accommodate it. The world has never run out of a commodity; when demand spikes, new supply usually ‘magically’ materializes (it’s not magic; it’s markets).

Caveats for the computers

All the above said, it is tautologically true that the data center demand growth story is ‘real.’ Demand is going up. Plus, as long as a story runs laps around the right people’s minds (as this story is currently doing, ranging from utility CEOs to tech executives and, clearly, even my own), then the story is very real insofar as it hogs our own built-in computers’ (our brains’) available capacity.

Further, beyond the scope of the construction, investment, and additional power consumption needed for data centers, there are other reasons the story is compelling. Data centers could become ideal test beds for first-of-a-kind (‘FOAK’) projects for new energy generation, distribution, and storage technologies and projects. This is already happening and is a big positive: Fervo Energy already has an operational FOAK project for its advanced geothermal energy technologies and approaches in Nevada that it is expanding to service Google’s increasing low-emission power needs.

Similarly, data center demand forecasts have offered a boon to the nuclear energy industry, of late, which has otherwise languished in the U.S. for decades. Announcements like the following have been a dime a dozen over the past few months:

Data centers could also become a catalyst for environmental and permitting reform, which may be a bright spot for the new, otherwise climate-disoriented U.S. federal administration. Insofar as tech companies' plans to develop novel energy infrastructure to power data centers are or would at times get thwarted by environmental restrictions (see a recent Meta-backed plan for a nuclear-powered data center that was sunk by a rare bee species), it stands to reason companies will throw their lobbying weight behind reforms that could make building cleaner energy infrastructure easier.

Finally, data centers could also drive closer collaboration between utilities and other stakeholders who intersect and need to collaborate, at least to a degree, when facing increased power needs. Most data centers are grid-connected assets; few are built on a proverbial “island.” That’s unlikely to change soon. While somewhat flexible in their power usage, data centers require, at minimum, reasonably consistent power access, which is not something ‘transient’ renewables like wind and solar alone, or even solar and wind paired with battery energy storage systems, can accommodate. As noted by David Porter of the Electric Power Research Institute recently (quoted in Axios here):

"Porter also said hyperscalers and utilities can better collaborate on timing of data center construction and arrival of new power assets."

All that’s welcome!

Caveats on the caveats

…That said, there’s also a real risk a short-term shortfall in data center capacity could yield additional, long-lived fossil fuel-focused infrastructure. For instance, Dominion Energy, a large U.S. utility, released plans earlier this year to add 21 GW of clean energy by 2039. It also penciled in almost 6 GW of new gas generation simultaneously. If and when operational, it’s hard to see Dominion deprecating that new gas capacity earlier than needed when you consider the investments needed to develop it. Similarly, Entergy, another major U.S. utility, recently proposed 1.5 GW of new natural gas generation capacity to power a data center in Louisiana.

Further, as welcome as the revival of retired nuclear power plants or even new (potentially small, modular, advanced nuclear power plants) would be, long lead times for nuclear development risk serving as a smokescreen for companies who commit to reviving, building, and/or paying for power from them. Consider this hypothetical:

If I’m a tech company and I want to shore up my promises to push for a more sustainable way of doing business, and I need more data centers, saying I will pay to develop an advanced nuclear power plant on my site does a few things.

My announcement and intentions may be based in truth. I (the tech company) may be 100% serious about working with the developer to build the plant, complete with needed approvals.
The deal may signal to my investors, customers, and regulators that I’m still committed to reducing emissions and other environmental impacts from my operations.

But the deal may also allow me to continue business as usual, sourcing electricity from a grid connection, with power serviced by a utility (that may be building more gas plants to meet demand), at least as long as everyone waits for the nuclear plant to get built or certified for resumed operation.

The problem here is that nuclear development plans often take longer than expected (even if the expectations are already decadal). Or they may not come to fruition at all, especially as far as new reactor designs are concerned.

In this hypothetical, neither the tech company, the developer, nor the utility has necessarily done anything wrong. However, the tech company has effectively mortgaged all the emissions that persisted throughout the proposed nuclear plant development phase for a reduction in future emissions. If the plans then fail through or take longer than anticipated, the future emissions reductions remain unrealized or, at minimum, the actual emissions reduction is lower than initially imagined.

In the worst-case scenario, where the plant development is abandoned, the tech company and its developer have failed to build the proverbial ‘house,’ leaving everyone with no salve for future emissions and a backlog of emissions from the development phase that could have been abated otherwise, such as with solar, wind, and batteries, to offset some of the emissions from the start.

Opening our aperture

When we zoom out globally and even in the U.S., data center demand, no matter how robust the forecast you choose, will remain a small portion of the overall drivers of electricity demand growth. China has expanded its electricity production more than fourfold over the past decade or so. Little to none of this has anything to do with data centers.

Globally, if we analyze projected electricity demand growth out to 2030, as the IEA did in its annual World Energy Outlook report (2024 version referenced), data centers comprise only a small sliver of the total electricity demand growth pie. I ate much larger slices of pumpkin pie last week, probably ones more commensurate with “Other industry.”

To put a finer point on this thought expansion exercise, as examined and illustrated (in the following chart after the quote) by Hannah Ritchie in a recent topical piece (linked 7 words ago):

“These projections are very uncertain. The IEA tried to put bounds on the sensitivity of these estimates by publishing ‘fast AI growth’ and ‘slow AI growth’ scenarios. In the chart below I’ve shown where these would rank. Even in the fast growth scenario, data centres don’t move up the list of the big drivers of electricity demand.”

Hannah Ritchie

Suffice it to say, the data center story may be a bit myopic, the same way climate and energy-focused communications often are (mine included). As long as we’re going to spend time discussing things, it’s helpful to ‘open the aperture’ to bring other ideas into the fold.

The net-net

The data center story is ultimately a perfectly relevant and interesting one, as it’s an intersection point between countless macro trends across energy and climate, whether demand growth versus efficiency gains or the tension between innovation, the rising electricity demands invariably innovation adds, and the urgent need for decarbonization.

But if we choose to harp on data center demand growth, we might as well discuss load growth across countless needs and technologies. In some places, the need is far more fundamental to survival than what AI applications enabled by more computing can offer. In many countries, the average citizen’s access to air conditioning (life-saving), electricity in general (significantly life-improving), and even things most of us take for granted, like clothes washing (also dramatically life-improving).

I’d like to see gains in electricity access (above) expand more rapidly (source: IEA)

Ultimately, we can use the data center discussion to refine our thinking and, ideally, drive change around how we create and allocate more power, raw materials, or capital across all its forms—from dollars to human labor hours and our attention. In my mind, that’s the highest and best takeaway from this story. The demand growth ‘hockey-stick’ will happen again. How we handle it now will inevitably inform how we handle it in the future.

For a more esoteric note to close on in the vein of how we allocate our attention (which is about as close an equivalent to data center capacity as you’ll get in human form), I’ll quote from my favorite book I read this year, “The Unforgiveable” by Cristina Campo:

“To ask a man to never be distracted, to be continually turning his faculty of attention away from the errors of imagination, the laziness of habit, the hypnosis of custom, is to ask him to realize his highest form… It is to ask him for something very close to holiness in a time that seems to be pursuing, with blind fury and bone-chilling success, nothing so much as a total divorce of the human mind from its capacity for attention.”

Read More: Is This Thing On?

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Global Recycling Day: Is Your Portfolio Missing This Thread?

Climate Capital — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 22:04:28 GMT

tldr; On Global Recycling Day (March 18), we are drawing your attention to a rapidly growing opportunity - Textile Recycling.

Author: Kirthika Padmanabhan (Climate Capital)
Contributor: Sruthi Madhavan (Strategy&, PwC)

Before we dive in…

Unlock the knowledge and skills to help you become a successful investor with Climate Angels - an immersive 6-week program. Designed for aspiring angel investors, this experience runs from March 20 to April 24, featuring weekly 90-minute sessions packed with expert insights, hands-on learning with Climate Capital Partners & exclusive guest talks. Two of six sessions will focus on exciting investment areas in the current market. Apply by tomorrow, March 19.

Climate Capital has invested in 400+ climate startups since 2015. Co-invest with us.

🚨 Let’s size the problem first:

An average American consumer throws away 81.5 pounds of clothes every year. Every year an estimated 92M Tonnes of textiles waste is generated and this number is growing rapidly, getting dumped in landfills or in the global south.
~10% of global GHG emissions ($1.2B Tonnes) are contributed by the textile industry, growing at 50%. That’s bigger than the emissions of the maritime and shipping industries’ companies
35% of microplastics in the ocean come from synthetic fibers and ~20% of global waste water pollution comes from the textile industry

♻️ Big problem indeed - let’s look at the Waste-to-Value Opportunity.

The textile industry's "take-make-waste" model is broken. With $500 billion lost annually from underutilized clothing and less than 1% of textiles are recycled, the inefficiency is staggering. A shift to circularity (recycling, reselling, repurposing) is being driven by,

Market size: The $2T+ Textile industry is growing rapidly, estimated to be $3T by 2030 producing over 100B garments annually.
Regulatory Tailwinds: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws led by EU and by California and New York in the US are putting pressure on textile brands as these laws directly impact operational costs and market access.
Technological advancements like AI-powered sorting, and chemical fiber-to-fiber recycling further unlock the potential for scale. Platforms that facilitate circular transactions generate network effects, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of growth and profitability.
Supply Chain Resilience: Recycling reduces reliance on volatile raw material costs, positioning circular textile startups as essential future suppliers
Consumer Adoption: Sustainability is now a competitive differentiator, with consumers actively seeking sustainable products.

💰 Investment opportunity in Textile Recycling:

According to Fashion for Good, Apparel Impact Institute and other industry organizations, there is a $1T decarbonization investment opportunity to enable the textile industry to meet its net zero goals. This involves both scaling existing solutions and investing in new innovations across financing solutions.

Below is a quick view of some of the themes of innovations across the textile value chain. Innovative fibers from seaweed (Keel Labs), Unspun’s 3D weaving Technology, Alchemie Technology’s waterless smart dyeing, Smartex’s modern textile factory, Indyx’s digital wardrobe, Retraced digital product passport to name a few examples.

As each of these areas needs a deep dive, for today, let’s talk about Textile (fiber-to-fiber) Recycling. VC capital continues to come up as a need for bridging the innovation gap and to accelerate recycling innovations. Of the $1T financing opportunity identified, approximately $82B opportunity exists in the category of next-generation sustainable and recycled materials, prime for VC investments (risk/return profile).

An emerging list of VCs are leading the charge with investments in Textile Circularity - At One Ventures, Alante Capital, Climate Capital, SOSV, Anthropocene Ventures, Closed Loop Partners, Regeneration.VC etc have led early stage investments. In addition, Corporate VCs e.g Ingka Investments (Ikea) has earmarked €667M to focus on textile waste. Brands like H&M and Patagonia are also leading investments and partnerships with recyclers.

Here are a few select (2024-2025) VC investments in Textile recycling technologies in the last 12 months:

Other companies that raised in 2024 include:

The future of textiles is circular, and the industry is being re-spun. Brands are stepping up with collaborative partnerships, innovators are ready to scale, industry organizations are leading research and consumers demand change. For investors, turning waste into value is a clear call to action now. Don't let your portfolio miss this essential thread! 🧵👗♻️

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Where should a climate investor be investing now? Join Climate Angels

Climate Capital — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 21:39:05 GMT

Climate Capital has invested in 400+ climate startups since 2015. Co-invest with us.

We’re excited to announce the third cohort of Climate Angels!

What is Climate Angels?

Climate Angels is a six-week investor education program designed to provide insights into the energy and climate startup world, as well as provide investment strategies and network building. This program is a great fit for budding angel investors, former founders, and seasoned professionals interested in accelerating the energy transition as a funder in the space. Learn more & apply here.

Is climate investing (still) important in 2025?

As the urgency of addressing climate change grows (see here and here), investing in solutions has never been more critical. However, with policy changes & funding shifts, it's clear that the most impactful solutions will need to thrive based on being the best solution in the market - and the founders building those solutions need early capital to get started. In our third cohort, two of the six sessions will focus on key sectors that climate investors should consider amid macroeconomic shifts.

What is the state of climate investing?

Climate tech investing has settled into a new normal, totaling $30 billion in 2024. This was a 14% drop from 2023, less than the previous year’s 24% drop. According to CTVC, the number of deals in climate remained relatively flat with 1,460 deals in 2024 compared with 1,468 in 2023.

What does 2025 hold? Investors are increasingly focusing on grid technologies, firm power sources like nuclear and geothermal, and the built environment, as these are sectors poised for long-term growth. Backing these industries ensures support for companies that are both resilient and adaptable to market fluctuations.

For example, as we see a rise in AI and the need for increased energy for data centers and firm energy, companies that support these demands will continue to succeed. Companies such as Scala and Crusoe support clean energy for data centers. Geothermal company Fervo recently announced $255 million in funding to generate up to 2 GW of baseload power in Utah. Nuclear energy is also gaining momentum, with Google announcing a groundbreaking partnership with Kairos Power to develop a fleet of advanced small modular reactors - a first of its kind initiative aimed at meeting the growing clean energy demands of data centers.

Climate Angels Program Curriculum

Our program dives into sector trends and market dynamics to deliver actionable insights backed by real-world deals, guest speakers, and hands-on exercises. Throughout the program, you will diligence a live deal or co-work on an active investment thesis with a Climate Capital Syndicate Partner to gain hands-on experience.

Over six weeks, our goal is for you to develop a strong investment thesis, explore key relevant climate tech sectors, and learn how to identify and evaluate high-potential startups. We’ll guide you through deal execution, term sheets, and valuation so you feel prepared to make more informed investment decisions and better support your portfolio of companies.

Want to learn more?

Join us for a live webinar:

Date: March 7, 2025
Time: 10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET
Register: https://lu.ma/omoi0xib

Ready to apply? Mention “Climate Angels Blog” in the application to receive a $200 discount off of the membership fee 🤫

We can’t wait to welcome you to the Climate Angels community!

––

Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Climate Capital 5.0

Sundeep Ahuja — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 20:13:08 GMT

TL;DR: CC Bio is spinning out, CC Index is now CC Micro, & we’re moving CC Syndicate, Climate Scout Fund & Climate Angels under CC Programs and hiring a GM to run so we can focus on the future of Climate Capital: CC Seed.

When I bought the domain climatecapital.co & launched my first climate SPV in 2015, it was the realization of a dream I’d had since 2010 to invest in venture scale climate solutions. I was *so* excited :) That was CC 1.0.

In 2019, I launched our first microfund. LPs trusted me to invest their capital, and implied MOIC on our first three microfunds is 5x, 4.5x, 4.2x. That was CC 2.0 & you can invest in our latest microfund here.

In 2021, I recruited Michael Luciani & three others to launch the Climate Capital Syndicate which to date has deployed $18m into so many incredible companies including Colossal, Copper, Arbor, Panthalassa, ExoWatt, & Ren Fusion; view more here. CC 3.0.

Michael, Jenny, Nishant, Ian, Schaffer, and others on the CC team helped launch CC 4.0 in early 2023: a 5/5 star podcast, 3 newsletters (one with a 60%+ open rate), many IRL events throughout the year, the Bio Fund, the Climate Scout Fund, the Climate Angels program, and of course, our flagship Seed Fund.

The world came to know who Climate Capital was and the incredible founders we were investing in. Several publications have since named us as one of the most active climate investors in the world. Exciting times.

At the top of this year I said it was time to focus, and focus we did: no more new initiatives, far fewer events, and most of our time focused on our Seed, Bio, and Index Funds with opportunistic SPVs along the way.

As we focused, though, we realized we needed to focus even further to clearly show LPs & founders that our funds were the future of Climate Capital. Hard decisions were made & today we announce Climate Capital 5.0: a restructuring that allows us to further focus on our flagship Seed fund:

Climate Capital Bio is spinning out & rebranding as Juniper. The new brand will help them be regarded as exclusively focused on climate x bio, and help them continue to be a category leader.
Climate Capital Index Fund is rebranding to CC Micro. We hope the new brand makes it clear to founders what our check size is (small @ $10k - $25k) while also assuring them that they are more than just an index position we’re taking: we believe in & support them.
We’re moving CC Syndicate, the Climate Scout Fund & the Climate Angels Program under a single “Climate Capital Programs” umbrella & are looking for a GM to manage. This is a part-time role to start but will grow to full-time with cash & carry comp; email contact [at] climatecap [dot] co if interested. Putting these Programs under an experienced GM with a dedicated P&L will allow them to thrive while freeing up the core team to focus on our Seed fund.

While I don’t yet know what CC 6.0 will look like, I’m confident that the focus of CC 5.0 will help the world see Climate Capital as both a catalyst investor backing & supporting many of the best climate founders in the world via our microfund & Programs and as a more traditional – and Tier 1 – climate fund via CC Seed.

Join us by investing in CC Micro here and back CC Syndicate here.

L.F.G.

Sundeep

An Interview with Ginkgo Bioworks Co-founder Dr. Austin Che

Mackenzie Scurka — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 18:10:59 GMT

Climate Capital has invested in 300+ climate startups since 2015. CC Insights shares what we are learning about the early stage climate tech ecosystem. Co-invest with us.

Climate Capital Bio is a Pre-Seed venture fund backing biotech climate solutions that allow the decarbonization of the world's largest and least sustainable industries. Led by founders-turned investors Jenny Kan and Michael Luciani, the fund is built on Jenny’s expertise as lead engineer in a Nobel Laureate’s synthetic biology lab & Michael's experience in politics and as a founder with a successful exit.

This post is written by Mackenzie Scurka: Program Director at Juniper Zero. Launched by Climate Capital Bio, Juniper Zero is an incubator equipping early stage founders with the tools they need to grow their climate biotech startups.

Climate Capital Bio held its first Annual General Meeting earlier this year, a success thanks in part to a panel of awesome guest speakers. Among them was Dr. Austin Che, co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks.

Ginkgo is the leading horizontal platform for synthetic biology, making biology easier to engineer. They provide customers across diverse markets the tools for programming cells to enable their biological innovations. Ginkgo is also building a global infrastructure for biosecurity to prevent, detect, and respond to biological threats. Ginkgo was the first biotech company to join Y Combinator back in 2014, and they went public on the NYSE in 2021. The company is now valued today at over $2B.

CCB Co-GP Dr. Jenny Kan interviewed Dr. Che, and we’re excited to share some of his insights on the past, present, and future of biotech, within climate and beyond.

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For those who are not familiar with what Ginkgo Bioworks does, can you give us a quick overview of the company?

Today what we do is provide highly automated cell programming services for companies in a wide range of industries, including pharma, ag, and industrials. Our mantra is that we want to make biology easier to engineer for you–we don't develop our own products. We are investing in the data, the automation, the software, the physical and the virtual infrastructure that is common across many biological projects, and we have scale by running that all on a centralized platform.

From your perspective, how has the journey of building a synthetic biology company changed in the last 15 years or so?

I haven't personally started another company [in the last 15 years], but I've talked to a lot of startups. I think it's definitely easier. There are a lot more companies and a lot more investment going through Synbio now than 2008, for sure. There are investors whose entire thesis is synthetic biology, which was unthinkable back in 2008. And I think market adoption, which is the pull for all this, is certainly accelerating. There are actually products you can buy today. And Ginkgo and other companies now exist to help new companies get off the ground, both by providing a roadmap for new companies and also to support them with a more developed ecosystem and infrastructure. There's also a lot more governmental support now, with a focus on the bioeconomy from the Biden administration, and I think that has shifted a lot of the discussions.

What industries do you think are currently right for synthetic biology to come in and make a huge difference?

My view is that the areas that are most exciting for Synbio are things that are specifically unique to biology, and I think one of the biggest is in climate around carbon capture and carbon manipulation in general… I think now is as good a time as any to focus our efforts on solving that global problem, and it’s hard to imagine what other technology could solve something on that scale.

The other area that I'm particularly interested in, and this is less about what will make money, are areas of consumer biotech– generally, ‘whimsical biology’ or ‘fun biology.’ One of the projects we're working on is a glowing plant. You know, it's a petunia that glows. It was just approved by the USDA for sale and you can buy it today, and the feedback on it has been amazing. Like, so many people want it. And it's just a plant. It doesn't even glow enough to be useful as a light, but it's just cool. It's awesome. And why do I think that something like this is useful for the industry? Because it gets people excited by biology. For example, no one cared about AI until Chat GPT. Mobile phones are used more as entertainment devices than they are for making phone calls. And today, biology is associated with health, food, not really fun stuff. I think showing that biology can be fun will get people excited and show what bioengineering can do for the world.

I just ordered one of those glowing plants for my backyard. I can't wait to see what it actually looks like. When we think about creating these consumer facing products, we see food that’s produced by engineered biological systems, we see materials. What are some of the friction points that you are seeing that make biology more difficult to get into the hands of consumers?

Certainly regulation is one of them. Like the glowing plant that you ordered–I think that version has been available for many years. It was just sitting with the USDA for a couple years for approval. So I think regulation is something people worry about, including consumer acceptance and GMOs and so forth. But I think [concerns around GMOs] are not going to be as big of an issue as people think. You know, people will say that they’re anti-GMO, but in the end they want the glowing plant. I think it's just about changing people's mindset about what a GMO is and what it can do.

Glowing plants by Light Bio

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Thank you again to Dr. Austin Che for shedding light on the journey of synthetic biology and its transformative potential across diverse industries, from addressing global challenges like climate change to sparking curiosity and delight through consumer-facing innovations. Despite regulatory hurdles and societal perceptions, the evolution of biotech continues to accelerate. We’re excited to back entrepreneurs building a sustainable future where biological engineering improves lives and ecosystems alike!

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

A New Paradigm — How AI and Robotics are Changing Materials Discovery

Climate Capital — Thu, 30 May 2024 19:13:58 GMT

Climate Capital has invested in 300+ climate startups since 2015. CC Insights shares what we are learning about the early stage climate tech ecosystem. Co-invest with us.

This week’s post is a little different — as a team, we’re constantly consuming analyses and perspectives from seasoned professionals across the energy transition. This week, we’re bringing you a post authored by someone who will be mid-career at a very different point in the energy transition: Meet Melyne Zhou.

Melyne is a 15-year-old dedicated to leveraging materials science for climate tech solutions. She is currently developing a proposal for bio-inspired ion gel membranes in redox flow batteries to enable long-duration energy storage applications. Melyne has previously written about nanomaterials in solar energy applications. In her free time, she enjoys reading biographies and diving down rabbit holes. She can be found writing on Medium and in her newsletter, Mind and Matter.

The next generation of climate innovators is looking bright, and we’re thrilled to have one of them share their perspective on CC Insights. Enjoy!

From the concrete in our skyscrapers to the silicon that powers our devices, materials are everywhere. They built up human civilization as it is today. They can make or break a growing list of climate technologies. Yet traditionally, they also take notoriously long to discover and develop, limiting the speed and scale required to solve the world’s biggest problems. Fortunately, with a materials revolution spearheaded by developments in AI and robotics on the horizon, this won’t be the case for long.

The Case for New Materials

According to Natural Resources Canada, the cost of many clean technologies can be attributed, by up to 50%, to the materials they are made from. Better batteries, large-scale carbon capture, materials for a circular economy — these are just some of the many technologies that rely fundamentally on the materials they are built with. The typical 20+ year development timeline and billions in investment are being dramatically reduced.

The global market for advanced materials is predicted to be $76.26 billion in 2023, on the rise in years to come. And a growing list of organizations and startups are excited to join the space.

So if accelerated materials discovery is something we needed yesterday, how have materials traditionally been discovered?

How are Materials Discovered?

The answer: slowly, and laboriously. Before the 1600s, most materials were discovered through pure experiment and coincidence. The discovery of metals laid the literal foundations of human civilization, bringing us from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. This is referred to as the First Paradigm of Materials Discovery — where experiments were conducted purely with observation and luck.

Then, scientists began to study the laws of science, and the Second Paradigm began. Experimental scientists used proven scientific theory to guide their exploration and discoveries, rather than relying on pure luck. Rather than fumbling around blindly, we began using our first scientific flashlights.

💡 Thomas Edison, often credited for the development of the lightbulb, wasn’t actually the first to invent the concept. Rather, he was the first to try thousands and thousands of filaments before settling on the bamboo filament that would make a long-lasting light bulb.

He once said of his work, “I have not failed 10,000 times — I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

In the 1950s, we entered the Third Paradigm: computational materials science. With the development of simulation tools based on scientific theory, we could calculate the approximate properties of materials — unfortunately, these calculations required and still do require immense computational power to calculate properties of more complex materials.

Now, we’re in the midst of a fourth (and fifth) revolution. With more and more data at our disposal and the rise of AI leads us into data-driven, accelerated discovery of materials.

Major paradigm shifts in Science, source IBM

Machine Learning In Materials Science

There are a number of ways machine learning (ML) can be applied to materials discovery — and a number of models that can be used. But they all share one thing in common: saving significant time, financial investment, or both.

💡 But first, what even is machine learning? Machine learning (ML) is when a model “learns” by analyzing existing data and uses what it learns to complete tasks typically done by humans — such as identifying whether an image is of a cat or a dog, or the best way to win a chess game.

The same goes in materials science. Machine learning can be applied in a number of different ways, from predicting properties to discovering new materials!

High-level workflow of the general machine learning process, source Vijay Kanade (SpiceWorks)

Supervised learning

When we have large amounts of labeled data, the model recognizes patterns or correlations in the data and can predict a property y for datapoint x. For example, the model will train itself using pictures of cats labeled as cats, and dogs labeled as dogs. It can then look at new pictures of cats and dogs it has never seen before, and classify those, too.

Supervised learning is used mostly for predictive analysis. We can narrow down a larger list of potential materials to a much smaller pool of potential materials by predicting their properties.

Unsupervised learning

On the other hand, unsupervised learning is when the model analyzes unlabeled data and tries to identify patterns or structures without explicit instruction.

They can output new examples of x once they are trained on an unlabeled dataset. One way to do this is through clustering, which is grouping the data into clusters based on a particular metric. Another is when the model tries to identify the underlying structure of the data, then generate new samples similar to the training data.

💡 There is also semi-supervised learning, which lays at the intersection between supervised and unsupervised learning. It uses both labeled and unlabeled data — which is often the only choice, as data can be limited in volume or quality depending on the industry.

The Discovery Cycle

When new materials must be discovered, they go through a development process. Prospective materials must be identified, synthesized, scaled up for manufacturing, and tested under various conditions.

Rather than relying on trial and error aided by educated guesses, AI models leverage existing databases to pinpoint precisely why a material can conduct so much better than another. And it can do this quickly, at scale, at all of these stages.

Data Collection

The first step is to curate our dataset. Let’s say we want to find a non-toxic material for flexible batteries — we’ll need to gather data on the capacity, cycling stability, and charge/discharge efficiency of existing and known materials. This could include experimental data or computational calculations (using methods like DFT). There are also many databases containing information about the electronic to structural properties of the materials, such as the Materials Project.

One problem is that data about materials is often sparse, high-dimensional, biased, and noisy — which is why domain knowledge is still an essential part of materials discovery.

Feature Engineering

Raw data isn’t always in a format that can be read by the model, which is where feature engineering comes in.

💡 Features are measurable properties or characteristics of the data — they’re also known as variables or attributes. The model uses them as input to make decisions.

They can be numerical features, which are continuous values that can be measured (like the number of squares and circles). They can also be categorical, discrete values (such as the color of each shape).

Features must also be adjusted during the process to suit the dataset and purpose, such as by handling missing data and replacing certain values or scaling numerical features, preventing certain features from disproportionately influencing the results due to differences in magnitude. Feature engineering allows for the model to recognize patterns and relationships from the data.

Model Training and Evaluation

There are a number of machine learning models that have been explored for materials discovery. Each of them runs input data into the algorithm and compares the sample output to its own processed output.

What are the applications?

*KoBold Metals uses AI-based technology to search for critical minerals, source *KoBold Metals

Virtual Screening — The model sifts through a large number of prospective materials and narrows it down to a smaller list of candidates. These materials are then tested through high-throughput techniques and analyzed for development.
Predicting Properties — The model, usually supervised, analyzes the properties of materials in the dataset, such as their conductivity and hardness. It applies this information to predict the properties of other, prospective materials.

These aren’t the only ways machine learning can be used. *KoBold Metals combines geoscience excellence and AI to accelerate natural resources exploration, to find materials like lithium and cobalt.

Also UK-based, the goal of Materials Nexus is to accurately and rapidly model new material properties to accelerate the development of next-generation materials, with a current focus on rare earth magnets.

Materials Zone provides a platform to manage R&D data in materials development, and helps researchers communicate with factories and manufacturing facilities.

Large Language Models

Thousands of papers are released every day — around 5.14 million papers were published in 2022 alone!

With such a huge quantity of papers, researchers must pick and choose what to read — and they could miss out on important advances or other significant details. LLMs can summarize research in a particular domain and filter out what isn’t relevant, creating shorter and more concise lists of prospective materials.

They can identify patterns that may be challenging for an individual to discern manually. They can also identify information in previously published research on the synthesis or most commonly reported properties of materials of interest.

Generative models

“De novo” means “from scratch,” which is essentially what generative models do. Similar to predictive models, the model is trained on a dataset and learns to identify patterns and relationships. What makes them different is their aim to generate something new based on what it’s learned.

Generally, a molecular compound is generated, then screened to weed out unstable compounds. Unstable compounds are when, due to the laws of thermodynamics, materials react so unusually (such as by decomposing upon synthesis) that they cannot be synthesized to serve their purpose.

Traditional materials discovery is focused on predicting properties from structure. Rather than screening through known and existing materials, one goal is to generate structures given the desired properties — which is called inverse design.

Overview of architecture of Deepmind’s GNoME model, source GNoME

Graph neural networks (GNNs), which uses a graph-based representation of molecules, have recently garnered excitement. Google’s DeepMind recently released GNoME, which claims to have discovered 800 years’ worth of knowledge, discovering 2.2 million new crystals and at least 380,000 stable materials. The implications for cleantech are clear — 528 potential lithium ion conductors were also found.

META’s AI research team has also been working on the Open Catalyst Project, which aims to discover low-cost catalysts for energy storage. It combines computational calculations with ML models to screen for millions of potential catalysts. Microsoft, too, released MatterGen, which also leverages generative AI to discover stable materials that can satisfy a target property.

UK-based startup Orbital Materials aims to develop a foundation machine learning model to design green materials, starting with carbon capture materials.

Autonomous Experiments — Self-Driving Labs

Every AI-driven initiative in the materials discovery space shares one thing in common: they still require experimental validation.

The Acceleration Consortium, an organization started from the University of Toronto, received a $200 million grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) to deploy self-driving labs to accelerate materials discovery and development — largest federal research grant ever awarded to a Canadian university.

Machine learning models alone cannot replace experimental science — as Alàn Aspuru-Guzik, head of the Acceleration Consortium, says, “AI is kind of like the brain, but we are nothing without our hands.”

The Acceleration Consortium includes seven labs, each focused on a specific domain from small organic molecules to organs-on-a-chip. It also includes 100+ members and partners, with backgrounds ranging from academia to industry. The goal is to create “self-driving labs,” which combine robotics, AI systems, and human intelligence to accelerate the experimental discovery of new materials.

The need for SDLs

The AC aims to reduce the 20 years and billions in investment that it usually takes to bring new materials from lab to market. Results in the lab can be difficult to scale up to commercial production — a rate we can’t accept as the need for better materials in the face of the climate crisis grows.

Photograph: Johnny Guatto/University of Toronto

Self-driving labs can also remove errors human researchers might make, providing more reliable results along with a team member who can work 24/7. It’s also important to note that SDLs aren’t replacing human scientists. The goal is to reduce the amount of time researchers spend on tedious tasks so they can focus on what matters most — rather than pipetting solutions drop by drop, they can create new hypotheses or work on improving models.

How do SDLs work?

Self-driving labs are still in the early stages. ML models plan and control the experiments, while the robotic parts repeat their intended purpose until they are told to stop. Most are currently only able to perform basic tasks, and while faster and more accurate, many on the market are also very expensive.

Switzerland-based Chemspeed provides lab automation and digitalization solutions — called high-throughput tools. They offer a number of robotic tools and workspaces, with functions from mixing solutions to twisting bottle caps on and off. Kebotix offers a closed-loop discovery platform that combines computational chemistry, machine learning and a self-driving robotic lab.

Conclusion

It’s clear that material science is needed for a cleaner future — and the industry doesn’t have time to waste. The demand for new materials is only growing, and so much is left undiscovered in the field of materials science.

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Notes:

Companies marked with an asterisk (*) are Climate Capital portfolio companies.
The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Juniper Zero: Out of the Lab and into the Bio-economy

Mackenzie Scurka — Thu, 09 May 2024 20:34:29 GMT

Climate Capital has invested in 300+ climate startups since 2015. CC Insights shares what we are learning about the early stage climate tech ecosystem. Co-invest with us.

There’s never been a better or more important time to decarbonize our highest polluting industries, yet the path to climate entrepreneurship is inaccessible and funding remains misaligned with our emissions reduction priorities. In response, Climate Capital Bio presents Juniper Zero: a free, virtual incubator for founders building at the intersection of climate and biotech. Apply today.

The first human genome was sequenced in 2003 for $3 billion. Today, you can have your entire genetic sequence mapped for as little as $200. This plunge in sequencing costs is fueling a biotech revolution. While the media often spotlights the medical breakthroughs stemming from these advancements, human health actually represents just a fraction of the bio-economy. The majority of biotech innovations are happening in sectors like food & ag, materials synthesis, and industrials, enabled by Synthetic Biology (SynBio) – our ability to engineer living things (such as microorganisms, plants, and animals) or biological parts (such as enzymes and metabolic pathways) to create new functions or products. In fact, over 60% of all physical inputs to the global economy can be synthesized through bio-manufacturing.

As the cost of engineering biology continues to drop and the breadth of real-world problems biology can solve explodes as a result, the golden age of bringing SynBio innovations to market is upon us. For the first time in history, more life science PhDs are working in industry than academia. In 2022, industry employed 48.1% of PhDs while academia hit a historical low of 32.5% across all disciplines. The expansion of opportunities for company creation, industry jobs, and funding, along with other cultural factors, is bringing more of synthetic biology’s brightest minds into business, and this shift couldn’t come at a better time for the planet.

Leaps in synthetic biology have made key techniques like gene editing and precision fermentation faster, more affordable, and, crucially, easier to scale. These SynBio techniques have the potential to revolutionize underinvested climate verticals, such as manufacturing, chemicals, food & ag, and the built environment, which make up 75% of overall GHG emissions but have received a disproportionately low share of climate funding compared to energy and transportation. At Climate Capital Bio, we’re already witnessing the beginning of this innovation wave: from chocolate bars and coffee grown from plant cells, microbes that enable climate-resilient farming, to polyurethane made without toxic fossil fuel-based chemicals - these are just a few of the companies that we’ve invested in that we’re watching change the world.

A historically high number of PhDs in industry doesn’t mean that the path from PhD to entrepreneur is easy. Anything but! There’s a current accessible pipeline for life science graduates into the Bayers and Pfizers of the world, but one of the highest impact careers these scientists could embark on is to found and/or work for the startups that will become the new, green, industrial giants of the 21st century. Federal grants funded through new legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have blown wind under the wings of fledgling biotech companies, but they need more support from the private sector to usher them out of the lab and into the bio-economy.

Recognizing biology’s potential to decarbonize the world’s least sustainable verticals, and harnessing the momentum of public and private sector interest in the bioeconomy, we are thrilled to announce that we are supporting early stage founders through Juniper Zero.

Funded by a federal grant from the Minority Business Development Agency’s Capital Readiness Program, Juniper Zero is our new non-profit incubator for early-stage companies using synthetic biology to build climate solutions. The program is built around a 12-week curriculum designed to equip founders with the skills and network needed to take their companies from zero to one in terms of venture backability.

Named after the diverse and climate-resilient Juniper genus, Juniper Zero aims to provide founders from around the country with the resources and ecosystem they need through a three-pronged approach:

Capacity Building: Entrepreneurial support and training across key areas, like IP and licensing, workforce building, science communication, and more.
Access to Capital: Expert tips on tapping into the early-stage venture ecosystem and introductions to a diversified portfolio of capital providers.
Access to Network: Connections to a large network of peers, mentors, talent, investors, coaches, and other strategic partners.

Every week, Juniper Zero will host workshops and Q&As with industry luminaries, including CEOs and Partners from unicorns, fast-growing startups, and funds. Check out Juniper Zero’s website for our latest lineup of speakers and partners.

The incubator is free, virtual, and open to all companies based in the United States. Programming begins at the beginning of the summer and will culminate in an in-person Demo Day where participants will share their work with a curated group of investors and other industry stakeholders. We welcome founders building technology companies that use biology to create a positive impact on climate, including companies building tools and infrastructure that support climate biotech, such as AI/ML, biological methods, software, etc. To join our next cohort, apply through our quick, 10-minute screening application.

If you’re interested in becoming a mentor or guest speaker for the program (or if you would just like to get updates about the program!), please fill out this form.

Juniper Zero is a 501(c)(3) fiscally sponsored organization and contributions to the program are eligible for tax exemption. Each $1 donated to the fund unlocks an additional $3 from the government, amplifying philanthropic impact x4. If interested in supporting the program or mentoring participants, please contact Program Director Mackenzie Scurka at mackenzie@climatecap.co.

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Terms:

Biotechnology (Biotech): technology based on biology
Synthetic Biology (SynBio): the engineering of living things (e.g. microorganisms, plants, animals) or biological parts (e.g. enzymes, metabolic pathways) to create new functions or products
Bio-economy: all of the economic activity that utilizes biological resources
Bio-manufacturing: the production of goods and materials using biological parts and/or systems
Sequencing: the process of mapping DNA

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Reflections on my Climate Angels Course

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 18:00:46 GMT

Climate Capital has invested in 300+ climate startups since 2015. CC Insights shares what we are learning about the early stage climate tech ecosystem. Co-invest with us.

Climate Capital’s Climate Angels program, is a new initiative that aims to prepare new & emerging angel investors to start or accelerate their climate investing journey by learning alongside the Climate Capital team.

This guest post is written by Matt Blythe: Ex-founder, and now an Angel investor focused on deep tech and hardware. Climate Angels alumnus.

I came into the Climate Angels course as a moderately successful ex-founder with experience in starting and growing a software company in the energy infrastructure space.

However, I knew that I wanted to leave software behind and angel invest in businesses building physical assets to decarbonize heavy industrial processes.

Some of the questions I wanted to work through on the course were things like:

What should I spend time on to improve my chances of finding great early-stage start-ups that fit my investment thesis around industrial decarbonization?
How do I get into these start-ups’ rounds as an angel when I haven’t built and scaled a hardware or deep tech start-up myself?
And what did the first investments and relationships with those founders look like for more experienced climate angels than me?

Here are some of my reflections on what I learnt in the Climate Angels course about those questions and how I’ve applied them so far.

Sourcing great start-ups

So the course itself has a strong practical element, it’s not just theory. You get put into small groups with coursemates and a mentor to flesh out your initial investment thesis and then you do weekly calls to collaborate on researching investment areas and sharing any deals you find.

I like this approach a lot because if you’re new to angel investing in climate tech, it’s hard to know where to begin and how to unearth great start-ups. Instead of watching what everyone else is doing on LinkedIn and following the hype, just pick a specific sector, industry, or area that fits within your overall investment thesis and start reading everything you can about it.

The immediate benefit of this is that it gives you something specific and achievable to work on. In the longer term though, it’s useful because when you’re starting out as a climate angel, it’s difficult to distinguish which technologies and ideas are truly novel if you don’t really understand the space that a company is operating in and who else is working on similar things.

Doing your own research also helps you to generate ideas about where and how to find promising early-stage start-ups. For example, I began teaching myself about the industrial process heating sector and saw that an existing unicorn within the space had made several recent acquisitions of smaller start-ups. When I looked up the founders of these start-ups, I noticed that some of them were now quietly building their next start-ups in stealth.

One of the course speakers, Leo Banchik (Voyager Ventures), mentioned that in his early days of angel investing he would do things like sending cold LinkedIn messages to founders working in stealth on areas that he was interested in. Having done some research about industrial process heating, I felt confident enough to cold email some of the founders that I identified working in stealth on their next start-ups and all of them responded.

I think the other big benefit of spending time on research is that you’ll find that other climate angels and VCs will start to seek out your opinion if they know that you’ve built up more knowledge than them about a particular industry, sector, or area. This means deals that you don’t even know about will begin coming your way, though it’s important to say that you have to actively and regularly communicate what you’re researching on for this to work. There are of course many other ways to source great start-ups but I’ve found this one works well for me.

Getting into deals

Once you’ve found a promising early-stage start-up, you’ve still got to spend time talking to the founders to learn about their business, diligence it, and then convince them to let you participate in their round once you have conviction in what they’re building. This is especially hard if you’re an individual angel fighting for allocation in a round alongside VCs.

There is a big element in the course on strategies to do this well. One of the key points is that you need to first figure out what your two or three biggest strengths or ‘superpowers’ are that you can communicate to start-up founders that you meet. For example, I have experience in doing relatively high-value B2B sales, energy, and infrastructure sector contacts, and I have been a founder myself so I have some insights into building and growing a start-up.

After you’ve decided what these are, I have found the best way to build a relationship with interesting founders you don’t know is to try to help them before you ask for anything in return. Ideally, this will involve drawing on one of your strengths but it could also be as simple as introducing them to someone talented in your network that might be able to help them or offering to review their pitch deck, website, marketing or something they else want help with.

So far I have done different things to get into deals that I was excited about. In one case, I started by just cold messaging a founder with some observations I had about a potential use case for their technology. This morphed into a call to learn more about their business, then requests to give feedback on their pitch deck for their upcoming fundraise, followed by requests for introductions to relevant VCs, which gave me a platform to get to know the founder better and observe their progress too.

In another case, I was able to offer introductions for discovery calls with potential customers in the energy sector as well as some mentoring and guidance on B2B sales approaches and tactics to position myself to join the start-up’s round. You might think that all VCs investing in start-ups will offer something similar to their founders but in fact, that’s not always the case and many will have no experience themselves of doing things like sales in a start-up.

The value of spending time researching a sector that you are talking to founders operating in is also apparent when you want to get into deals. It helps you to ask better and more probing questions when you do engage with founders and this means that they don’t have to spend time explaining the basics of their world to you and your feedback is also more likely to be useful to them.

Making your first investments

When you do pull the trigger on your first few investments as a climate angel, you may well be thinking I don’t know if these companies will turn into unicorns or have I really done enough due diligence and spent enough time researching other start-ups working on similar solutions.

Another course speaker, Sophie Purdom (Planeteer Capital), talked a bit about this and made a nice point that the initial angel investments that most people do, including successful angels like herself who go on to start a VC, are not necessarily their greatest successes and that’s absolutely fine, don’t overthink it. A disappointing investment does not have to define you as an investor and you learn more each time you invest which helps you to improve too.

Sophie also talked about how the nature of your relationships with founders that you invest in will vary a lot from case to case. In some cases, you might WhatsApp regularly about everyday business details, while in others you will have more formal scheduled check-ins or even little interaction after investing depending on what the founders want. The main thing is to be receptive to their needs and priorities because you’re going to be in it together for the long haul and these will change over time, so your relationship with them will naturally change too.

I’ve tried to apply her insights in my own interactions with climate tech founders that I have angel invested in by avoiding the temptation to bombard them with my own ideas and advice. Instead, I just ask them upfront after investing how often they would like to interact and what, if any, areas they want input on or what’s bothering them most at any particular point in time. My relationships with some of the founders I have invested in are much closer than with others and knowing that is entirely typical has helped me get much more comfortable with this.

Overall, if you’re looking to start angel investing in climate tech start-ups, then the Climate Angels course will help you take practical steps to get going, expose you to some very high-quality investors already in the space, and rapidly expand your network of relevant contacts that you can collaborate with.

If you found any of these reflections useful or simply want to chat about industrial decarbonization, then feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn here.

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

Announcing Climate Angels Cohort 2 + Upcoming Webinars

Jennifer Turliuk — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 20:44:41 GMT

This post is written by Jennifer Turliuk on the Climate Angels team. Jennifer is Partner @ Climate Angels, Partner @ Climate Capital Syndicate, and an angel investor, entrepreneur (acquired), author, and keynote speaker.

We're thrilled to announce the launch of Climate Angels Cohort 2 in partnership with TerraDo, along with two exciting events: a webinar on climate tech investing (tomorrow!) and a fireside chat with Paul Hawken, founder of Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration.

Thinking back to our inaugural Climate Angels cohort, we’re filled with gratitude for the vibrant community that came together to forge a path in climate tech investing. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed their time, knowledge, and passion to make this program a success.

Special shoutouts to our incredible instructors, speakers and mentors from Lowercarbon Capital, MCJ Collective, Planeteer Capital, Earthshot Ventures, Climactic, Voyager Ventures, Plug and Play Tech Center, Gaingels, Elemental Excelerator and many others who enriched our journey with their insights. Your contributions have been invaluable in empowering our participants to drive impactful investments in the fight against climate change.

To our amazing Climate Angels Fellows, your enthusiasm and commitment to making a difference have truly inspired us. We’re excited to see how you’ll apply the knowledge and connections gained here to foster a more sustainable future.

Our Fellows say it best:

"The Climate Angels program is jam-packed with great insights & materials to learn and get started with angel Investing, as well as sessions with some top 'who's who's' of the climate landscape. All of this accelerated my journey into angel investing for the climate. As a bonus, when I found and made an investment in a deal as part of the program's capstone project, I was able to apply a strategy and principled approach to analyzing the deal and follow that structure through to tracking it in my portfolio."

Craig Vigor, Partner, Verdensa

"Great class! Would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to invest in climate tech to make a planetary impact for future generations!"

Agneta Rosenberg

From a climate tech unicorn founder, to an exited entrepreneur, to someone starting their own fund, to a venture partner, to folks making their first climate tech investments, to folks who’d made a number of climate tech investments before, it was awesome to see the breadth of backgrounds our fellows brought to the table.

Our next cohort of Climate Angels is in partnership with Terra.do, kicking off on April 18th! If you’re passionate about climate tech and eager to join a community of like-minded investors, we invite you to express your interest. Tell us why you are excited about investing in climate at https://climateangels.vc, where you can apply to our upcoming cohort and continue this journey with us. Together, let’s keep pushing the boundaries of climate tech investing and create a lasting impact on our planet.

Fireside Chat with Paul Hawken (Founder of Project Drawdown & Project Regeneration) + Webinar on Climate Tech Investing

This month, we're thrilled to bring you two exceptional opportunities to dive deep into the world of climate tech investing, featuring insights from industry experts and renowned environmentalist Paul Hawken.

Investing in Climate Tech: Insights from the Front Lines (virtual)

Date: Thursday, March 28th (tomorrow!)
Time: 9:00 AM PST
Register: https://lu.ma/xw673jg2
Join our panel of seasoned investors from Climate Angels as they share their experiences and perspectives on the climate tech investing landscape. This live webinar and podcast recording will provide you with a deeper understanding of the sector's challenges and opportunities.

Fireside Chat with Paul Hawken (virtual)

Date: Wednesday, April 4th
Time: 9:00 AM PST
Register https://lu.ma/eay2d5m9
Don't miss this special virtual event with Paul Hawken, founder of Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration, and entrepreneur, investor, environmentalist and NYT best-selling author. Paul will offer his unique perspective on impactful climate investments and the current state of climate technology.

Both events promise enriching discussions and actionable insights. Whether you're an experienced investor or just curious about climate tech, these sessions will provide valuable perspectives.

Register now to secure your spot for both events, and feel free to submit any questions for Paul Hawken in advance at https://forms.gle/3euJEnqWhFePi3dj7.

We look forward to welcoming you to these exciting discussions!

To learn more about Climate Angels, visit https://climateangels.vc.

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Note: The Author’s opinions are their own and not necessarily representative of Climate Capital.

2023 & 2024 at Climate Capital

Sundeep Ahuja — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 23:25:36 GMT

Climate Capital has invested in 300+ climate startups since 2015. CC Insights shares what we are learning about the early stage climate tech ecosystem. Co-invest with us.

2023 TL;DR:

We’ve expanded our investment offerings:
- Climate Capital Seed: Investing in early stage founders across verticals, from energy production to climate adaptation.
- Climate Capital Bio: Backing founders building biotech climate solutions that accelerate the decarbonization of the largest and least sustainable sectors of the economy.
- Climate Capital Syndicate: Climate Capital Syndicate is a group of founders, execs & developers, led by a team of former founders & domain experts.
We’ve built media channels:
- Climate Capital Podcast (CC Pod)
- CC Insights
And we’ve built programs:
- Climate Angels Program
- Climate Scout Fund
- Climate Capital Bio Incubator Grant

It’s a testament to how busy we’ve been that we’re publishing our 2023 look back this far into January – but busy we are! Over the last year, we’ve launched a podcast, a newsletter, an angel education program, a scout fund, and an incubator – all while supporting and learning from the smartest people on the planet as they tackle the grand challenges posed by climate change.

Since 2018, our objective has been straightforward: back exceptional founders addressing emissions reduction & climate adaptation. In pursuit of that mission, we have landed among the most active early-stage climate investors in the world.

2023 @ Climate Capital

A few companies we invested in this year:

In 2023, we invested in 133 clean energy & climate companies. Here’s a snapshot:

*Scalvy: Modular powertrains for EV OEMs.
*Hephaestus: Simulation acceleration engines for plasma system design.
*Found Energy: Upcycling aluminum into fuel
*Carbon Crusher: Carbon-negative road repair.
*Channing St Copper Co.: Energy-storage-enabled induction cooking ranges.
*Wild Microbes: Biomanufacturing with microbial innovation.
*Aralez Bio: Developing non-canonical amino acids for chemical design.
*Pomodyne: Growing fresh fruit anywhere in the world.
*Climate Robotics: Soil carbon sequestration with robots.
*Lightship: All-electric RV trailers.
*Presto: Fleet EV charging network & software.
*Vaulted Deep: 10K year permanence through geologic CDR.

We’ve grown our team!

Mackenzie Scurka, Program Director
Catherine Bautista, EA+
Ian Campbell, Associate

Our pillars are Capital, Community, and Content. In addition to backing 133 companies across climate technology, we’ve been building out our community & content:

Climate Capital Bio Incubator: Climate Capital Bio has secured a multi-million grant from the Biden administration to build an early stage incubator for underrepresented founders at the intersection of Biotech and Climate. This program will nurture early-stage ventures in critical sectors like manufacturing, agriculture, and chemical synthesis, fostering solutions led by female founders and people of color who may not have access to capital, networks, or familiarity with entrepreneurship, and will be free for all accepted participants. Read more here or email Program Director Mackenzie Scurka to learn how to get involved.

Climate Scout Fund: The Climate Scout Fund combines the global networks of Climate Capital, Earthshot Ventures, and Elemental Excelerator to empower a diverse set of today’s climate-tech leaders with capital and community to seed tomorrow’s most impactful climate solutions. Read more here.

Climate Angels Program: A new initiative that aims to prepare new & emerging angel investors to start or accelerate their climate investing journey by learning alongside the Climate Capital team. Read more here.

Climate Capital Podcast (CC Pod): The 5/5 rated Climate Capital Podcast (CC Pod), is a weekly dive into the stories of climate tech entrepreneurs shaping our sustainable future. So far, we’ve featured companies like *Enduring Planet, *Living Carbon, *Gelatex, *Aralez Bio, *Spira, *Tandem Repeat, *Wild Microbes, *Rubi Laboratories, *California Cultured, *Melibio, *Pomodyne, and *Concert Bio.

Looking ahead to 2024

If 2023 was the year to launch new initiatives to build out our offering, 2024 will be the year in which we develop these initiatives into industry-leading programs. In other words, our mantra this year is “focus & execute.”

Still, we have the DNA to build; a few things we’d like to launch include:

While we soft-launched a new portfolio page (check it out!) enabling visitors to sort our 300+ portfolio companies by industry, stage, geo, and more, we want to relaunch the website as a hub for early stage climate innovation as much as a website about our firm.
A more robust community for our founders, and a better way to enable them to connect with relevant parties who can support their journey (LPs, corporates, potential hires, etc.)
You’ll see us expand our scope a bit beyond strictly climate to also include biodiversity, detoxification, and select other areas for a healthier people & planet.

If you have ideas or want to help with any of the above initiatives, please reach out & let’s chat! At the least, let’s stay in touch; we have lots to build together:

Explore our website to know more about who we are and what we do.
Stay updated by subscribing to our Substack.
Tune in to CC Pod for more exciting discussions.
Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay in the loop.

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Note: Companies marked with an asterisk (*) are Climate Capital portfolio companies.