Invest in startups like Streamline Climate alongside Climate Capital here.
Founders: Helena Merk & Douglas Qian
Motto/Mission: Accelerating Climate Tech
Year Founded: 2022
Stage: Pre-Seed
Location: San Francisco, CA
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Climate Capital: What made you want to solve this problem?
Streamline Climate: I came into climate from a lifelong passion around animal rights, spending years working with animals directly, through animal shelters and veterinary programs with large animals (Elephants & Cheetahs). Professionally, however, I was drawn to the fast-paced nature of software, and it's ability to have a leveraged impact.
After my first startup was acquired, I had the time to re-assess levers of influence in the broader climate crisis, specifically focusing on how software could make a leveraged impact. This meant spending months speaking with hundreds of founders about their challenges, and diving into permitting and grant bottlenecks.
On the ground efforts are accelerated by policy or financing; typically a combination.
Climate Capital: What are you building?
Streamline Climate: Streamline helps climate startups find, win, and manage grant funding using AI.
Climate Capital: What is next?
Streamline Climate: We've been building hand-in-hand with design partners since March, and excited to release a public version in September during NYC Climate Week.
Climate Capital: What are the core elements of the culture you are building at your company?
Streamline Climate: We're very human-centric and feedback-obsessed.
Day to day, we laugh a lot - and work a lot. We host community events to bring together the SF climate community - most recently this included a 100 person women and climate event at Zeitgeist, and a 200+ person climate hackathon with Open AI. As a team we also spend a lot of time outdoors, from biking to rock-climbing.
Here's a bit more about what working at Streamline looks like:
https://touchgrass.notion.site/Founding-Engineer-Streamline-06274451855444ab9f7e25a172ae0fd4
Climate Capital: What are the key challenges as you scale your company?
Streamline Climate: A tool that helps you draft responses is barely scratching the surface of what's useful in winning grants. In other words, the problem (and solution) gets more interesting every day.
One example of added complexity, is realizing that much of what makes grant writing challenging, are the relationships. To win government funding, one will need community, academic, or commercial support in the shape of a Letter of Intent. Knowing who to partner with for what, is hard. To account for this, we're building a "teaming" tool.
Similarly, there's hundreds of other challenges - the hardest part is ruthlessly prioritizing to keep shipping the most value as fast as we can.
Climate Capital: What have you learned that you want to share with other founders?
Streamline Climate: Specific to LLM/Gen AI style software products:
Focus on features that are super bespoke to one verticalized need. In building our grant writing editor, for example, it would have been extremely foolish to re-build google docs or notion.
Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?
Streamline Climate: For those on the grant-making side of the world: let's chat about improving your end to end system, similar to what we've been doing for applicants. The current process for funding impact is far slower than it should be, wasting time and money that could be going towards climate impact.