Climate

Personal carbon-cutting app Joro raises $10M Series A from Sequoia, Jay-Z’s Arrive • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in carbon offsets, Climate, climate change, Joro, sequoia capitalNo Comments

Cutting your own carbon footprint isn’t easy, even for the most motivated person. Tracking, tallying, investigating, researching. For Sanchali Pal, though, that was part of the fun. Pal, who had been working in international development, wanted to start trimming her footprint. “I started building an Excel spreadsheet of the carbon emissions in my life, starting with food, and I ended up becoming this massive spreadsheet and ended up using it over six years to lower my emissions by about 30%.” Pal knew, though, that not everyone would go to those lengths. “I found it incredibly satisfying, but I’m a very particular kind of person.” Even still, she said the process was still “difficult and frustrating.” That’s what got Pal started on what would eventually become Joro, an app that helps people track and reduce their carbon footprints. Founded in 2018, Pal raised a $1 million pre-seed in 2019 and another $2.5 million in a 2020 seed round. Sequoia participated in both, leading the second round. Image Credits: Cayce Clifford Those investments have helped Joro triple its monthly active users over the past few months, reaching an average compound monthly growth rate of 25%. Now, ZebethMedia has exclusively learned that Joro raised a $10 million Series A led by existing investors Sequoia Capital and Amasia. They were joined by Norrsken, Nest co-founder Matt Rogers’ Incite, Jay-Z’s Arrive, and Mike Einziger, the lead guitarist of Incubus. The new funding will not only help build the Joro team, but it’ll also help continue the company’s shift from helping people track their footprints to helping them take action on what they learn. While Joro users can get general advice on how to cut their carbon footprint, the real power of the app happens when the user connects their financial records, synced via Plaid. From there, Joro works to estimate their carbon footprint by studying payments and amounts, like how much spending happens at gas stations or on airfare, for example. From there, it offers more personalized suggestions for how the user might cut their own carbon footprint. (Pal said that Joro never sells this data outside the platform “and never will.”) Sometimes those cuts are simple, like eating less meat, while others can be more challenging. For users with family scattered across the country, for example, eliminating air travel would be a difficult thing to ask. In that case, Joro then offers users the ability to offset their emissions. For a fee, users can offset part or all of their emissions. To make it simple, Joro offers a subscription. For users on a budget, they can set a ceiling on how much they’re willing to pay per month. Most people using the app pay about $30 per month, Pal said. Some pay as little as $10, while others with more extravagant lifestyles pay as much as $1,000 per month. Joro takes 17% of monthly subscription fees to help pay for the app’s services and — more importantly from the user’s perspective — for vetting offsets. Finding high-quality offsets is incredibly challenging for individuals. I went down that path years ago and eventually gave up because the ones that I felt were suitably additional, verifiable and permanent were only available to large buyers. I didn’t want to be throwing my money after questionable offsets, so I didn’t buy any. Because Joro aggregates its purchases across users, it can buy the types that I couldn’t access on my own. Pal said that Joro evaluates offsets every few months to ensure they’re living up to the company’s standards. In addition to the usual requirements — additionality, verifiability and permanence — the team also looks for what Pal calls “transformative potential.” “How does this affect local ecosystems? Environmental justice considerations? Especially as a consumer, as a person, if you’re buying into offsets, things you might care about more than a company.” The offsets cost Joro anywhere from $12 to $600 per metric ton. Some are nature-based solutions, while others are technological. The entire portfolio is balanced at an average of $25 per metric ton, Pal said. The startup will use its new funding to build its team and continue the shift from tracking carbon footprints to helping people take action to reduce them. The new focus not only satisfies a frequent request from users — it also should open new opportunities. “We think it could be another path to revenue, where people are actually changing things, switching to lower-carbon vendors or to lower-carbon ways of living. That’s a really great alignment of our impact model and our revenue model,” Pal said, saying that it would likely take the form of affiliate relationships between Joro and the vendors it features in the app. Pal is optimistic that the new infusion of cash and recent growth trends will help broaden Joro’s impact. Already, though, she’s stunned by how the landscape has changed recently. “Even three years ago, it was really hard to explain to people what Joro was,” she said. “The concept of climate tech barely existed, right? There was clean tech, and there was software. But software for climate? It’s been incredible to see how quickly it’s happened.”

GenZero’s Frederick Teo on “limitless” opportunities in climate tech • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Climate, climate tech, GenZero, Singapore, sosv, Southeast Asia, temasek, VentureNo Comments

2050 is an important year for climate tech, with the Paris Agreement calling for emissions to reach net zero by then. In a conversation with GenZero’s Frederick Teo for SOSV’s Climate Tech Summit, we talked about realistic paths to hitting that goal and how startups can tackle what Teo called one of the most existentialist challenges of our generation. GenZero is a $3.6 billion investment company that is backed by Temasek, already known for its climate investing. Teo talked about how it gauges companies before investing, supporting nascent technologies and solutions in the space and what startups can tackle in the next two decades. This Q&A was edited for length, and you can watch the full conversation here or at the bottom of the article. TC: GenZero’s initial commit is from Temasek, which was already a leader in global investing when it announced GenZero in June. It’s a wholly-owned company of Temasek, so why did Temasek decide to start GenZero and what is GenZero doing that Temasek isn’t already? FT: Temasek, as you know, has already taken a lot of steps in the past few years into making investments into sustainability, as well as clean energy and climate-related spaces. It is important for us to think about how to deploy capital in this space because obviously all of us are aware of the climate emergency, the fact that this is actually likely to be one of the most existentialist challenges of our generation. It is important for us to be able to find solutions that can actually address many of these things like global warming, sea level rises, the challenges of food production in a sustainable way. So we wanted to be able to have a dedicated capability to access some of these decarbonization opportunities, and Temasek decided to park aside a sizable amount of capital to be able to develop a team that would be able to focus on issues like carbon markets, decarbonization technologies as well as nature solutions. So that is the reason why we established GenZero as a separate investment platform company. In our work we have been looking at technology solutions such as low carbon materials and carbon capture capabilities, nature solutions that seek to protect and restore natural ecosystems, often with a view to generate carbon credits on top of that, as well as to invest into ecosystem enablers in the carbon market space. The reason for that is because we think that in the near term, energy transition would require some form of participation from carbon markets to allow people to gradually execute this transition. But we do need carbon markets to be credible, effective, transparent, high quality, and therefore there is still investments needed in order to be able to improve capabilities and technologies and solutions in that space. TC: For companies that are curious about trying to pitch themselves to you, what are some examples of your current portfolio companies? FT: In the technology space, we have invested into both funds as well as companies, so a major fund investment is Decarbonization Partners, and that is basically a climate-focused fund that is a joint venture between Temasek and BlackRock. We are an LP invested in that, and they are very focused on late-venture, early growth opportunities across different areas in the decarbonization space. We have also invested into a technology company called Newlight, which seeks to be able to produce bio plastics from captured methane. On the nature side, we have been investing into a few forestry projects that generate carbon credits, and then on the carbon market side, we count among our portfolio companies things like South Pole, which is a global leader in providing project advisory, technical advisory solutions and project development for companies seeking to embark on a net zero decarbonization journey, as well as a carbon exchange called Climate Impact X, which is headquartered here in Singapore. TC: For companies that are curious about potentially getting investment from you, what investment stage does GenZero typically look at? FT: We are kind of flexible. For very early-stage companies, say around the Series A or just before, we will work with different partners to be able to evaluate and deploy capital to support early-stage companies, but I think it’s important to understand why we need to do this. If we think about the broader net zero decarbonization challenge, everybody talks about this 2050 timeline to get to net zero. But the reality is that if we want to create significant climate impact by 2050, we are looking at new solutions that must already somewhat exist today or are starting to come into being today, because we will need another 10 to 15 years for the technologies and solutions to mature and get to a stage where they could be commercializes, and then probably another 10 to 15 years for it to actually be able to be deployed and create some kind of impact. That basically means that this current cohort of young companies are going to make a difference to the 2050 agenda. That is the reason why we are very excited to participate in this space right now, because the action must take place now in order to have any meaningful difference by 2050. TC: Considering that, with technology not coming to fruition by them until then, or making actionable results by then, in light of that, what kind of metrics or milestones do you like to see companies bring to the table before you consider them for your portfolio? FT: I think it goes back to the way we evaluate our performance at GenZero. We have a double bottom line, so our shareholder expects us to be able to obviously achieve some level of financial returns. That’s a given. But we also take the idea around measuring climate impact rather seriously. We try and understand, for example, the kind of climate impact that a solution would be able to achieve if successful deployed. We also look

New Paris-based VC Satgana completes the first close of its €30M fund to back ClimateTech startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Climate, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

While ClimateTech may be all the rage right now – and for good reasons – new VC Paris-based firm Satgana (which means “a good company” in Sanskrit) is hoping its take on the subject will gain traction. It’s now completed the first closing of a target €30m fund to back startups in areas such as food and agriculture, energy, mobility, buildings/industry, plus, more generally, carbon removal and circular economies. The fund will invest up to €500,000 at the pre-seed and seed stages across Europe and Africa, bringing to bear its team which comprises operational and strategic experience. It also plans to apply a ‘diversity and inclusion’ lens pre and post-investment.   So far, the fund has already invested in three ClimateTech startups, with two others to be announced soon, it says. These are:  ● Orbio Earth, a German startup building a platform to for energy providers to monitor and reduce methane emissions using satellite data ● Mazi Mobility, a Kenyan startup building a network of electric motorbikes and a battery swapping infrastructure in East Africa; ● Yeasty, a French startup building an alternative protein leveraging beer yeast with a circular model. Satgana says it has counts 30+ LPs in its first closing, including Thibaud Hug de Larauze (Co-Founder & CEO of impact unicorn Back Market), Josef Bovet (CEO of Tiller Systems), Fabrice de Gaudemar (CEO of Qotto and ex-Executive Board of Eurazeo), Elsa Hermal (Co-Founder of Epicery) and the Family Office Cullom Capital. Romain Diaz, General Partner, said in a statement: “The climate and ecological crisis is the defining issue of our time. As a gigantic challenge ahead of us, it is also a massive business opportunity as we need to reinvent all the sectors of our economies to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement.” Satgana’s Venture partner will be Patrícia Silva (based out of Lisbon), who is also Co-Founder and Non-Executive Director of the Carbon Removal Centre. Investment analyst will be Anil Maguru. Advisors include Lubomila J. (Plan A & Co-Founder Greentech Alliance) and James Crowley (Former Co-founder & CTO of FundApps).

Hyundai and WeRide plan to fuel self-driving with hydrogen in China • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in autonomous driving, China, Climate, Hydrogen, hyundai, Transportation, werideNo Comments

While hydrogen is still relatively niched as a fuel for electric vehicles, a startup in China is jumping ahead to embrace it for autonomous driving scenarios. WeRide, one of the most funded robotaxi operators in China with investors including Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, said Tuesday it is joining hands with Hyundai to launch a “self-driving hydrogen-powered vehicle pilot zone” in Guangzhou, the southern metropolis where it’s headquartered. The collaboration comes at a time when the research and production of clean hydrogen increasingly becomes a focal point for China, which has been striving to decarbonize its economy. Details are scant from the announcement. It’s unclear when the pilot will kick off, what the scale of the trial is, or what exactly is being powered by hydrogen, which is considered one of the cleanest fuels as it is combined with oxygen to produce just water vapor and energy. But it won’t be surprising to see unmanned hydrogen vehicles roaming about the pilot zone since Hyundai has been betting big on the fuel. Indeed, the announcement says that WeRide, Hyundai, and Hengyun, a Chinese power generation and supply company, will work together to “create demand for the use of hydrogen fuel cell battery in unmanned street cleaning and ride-hailing.” In September last year, Hyundai said it planned to offer hydrogen cell fuel versions for all of its commercial vehicles by 2028. The tie-up with WeRide could expand the use case of its hydrogen products to robotaxis. Hydrogen-fuelled vehicles can recharge within minutes, making them an ideal medium for taxi operations if there’s enough refueling infrastructure. Guangzhou is a natural choice for the experiment given Hyundai has been producing hydrogen fuel cell systems in the city since March 2021. When the facility opened last year, the South Korean auto giant set an annual target to produce “6,500 units, with a goal to gradually expand production capacity in line with Chinese market conditions and central government policies.” China has made a big push to electrify its public transportation. In Shenzhen, the hardware capital of the world, nearly all buses and cabs run on lithium-ion battery packs. While the city has grown quieter with fresher air thanks to the initiative, battery safety and recycling remain big sticking points for the local authorities. Long lines often form at charging stations as it can take hours to fully refuel lithium-ion batteries.

Chris Sacca on climate investing right now; the opportunity “almost feels unfair” • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Climate, VentureNo Comments

Today, for a series of climate-related conversations organized by the global venture firm SOSV, we interviewed famed investor Chris Sacca, whose investment firm Lowercarbon Capital is managing $2 billion in capital across one fund that’s focused on nuclear fusion, another fund focused expressly on carbon removal, and the rest across a wide spectrum of bets. In our chat, Sacca dismissed questions around whether efforts like carbon capture can work at scale. (“The naysayers kind of fuel me, actually.”) He also said — naturally — that he has “no doubt we will have multiple companies worth trillions of dollars that emerge from our portfolio.” It wound up being a fairly wide-ranging conversation and you can watch it in its entirety at page bottom. Meanwhile, below are excerpts from our chat, edited lightly for length. The big news of the moment is the inflation Reduction Act. It allocates more than $300 billion to energy and climate reform, $60 billion for boosting renewable energy infrastructure, and manufacturing like wind turbines and solar panels. At the same time, it fell short of what climate activists really wanted to see. What do you make of it? Look, the President himself called it a big fucking deal. And it is. It’s a huge step forward for our industry, for our country, and the planet– no doubt about it. Bless the activists. I love where their hearts are, but we have to be pragmatic about this, and we don’t have time for purity tests. . . It was better than we could have expected, frankly, and we’re glad everyone got to the table and hammered on a solution. Were you consulted by anyone in Washington? We weren’t. Actually, I have an allergy to Washington. One of the reasons we started Lowercarbon was after years of basically rebuilding the democratic tech stack, I got a little burned out by a process that’s so many degrees removed from the ultimate solution. So we built Lowercarbon to say, look, we can build climate solutions now, where it’s up to us to deliver something that consumers and businesses want to buy from us. If we have any relationship with government, it’s government as a buyer. If free money falls out of the sky, we’ll take it, but everything we’ve done now makes sense because the unit economics are there to go ahead and compete head to toe with products that are predicated on petroleum. It was actually just a bonus that the IRA got passed, but we weren’t counting on it. Your timing is remarkable, considering that even if we were to enter into recession at this point, this money is now going to be flowing into the economy, making climate investing relatively bulletproof. [Climate investing] is recession proof, even without the IRA. Everything we’re doing is providing a substitute good. That’s what almost feels unfair. You spend years building Twitter and you put it up in the app store and you hope somebody gives a damn. It could be a really well-designed product, but maybe no one cares, whereas everything we’re building right now, we actually know the demand for it. And if we deliver a better, cheaper, faster, cooler, easier-to-use, sexier products, then we’ll even grow the market. So I actually think this is some of the easiest investing we’ve done. What’s happened in the war in Ukraine, the shortages of energy facing Europe, overall climate disasters around the planet, the commitments that companies have made to decarbonize, and the reality that clean energy and clean products are reaching price parity are just massive tailwinds that we’re trying to keep up with, frankly. You busted out of the gate last year with an $800 million fund. Then this spring, you announced a $350 million fund that was focused exclusively on carbon removal. Why break that out as a standalone effort? So basically carbon pollution that we put in the atmosphere, we’ve got to get back out . . and that can happen in a wide range of ways, from direct air capture — those big fans out in the desert that are sucking air — to accelerating biological processes [like] crushing up rock that carbon loves to attach to, or growing algae or kelp. And so we have a fund dedicated exclusively to that. It’s a burgeoning industry; we’ve partnered with companies like Stripe and the Frontier Group that they brought together. And that was a separate fund because . . . we saw the cost of building this stuff come down so precipitously, and the revenue available and the spend available go up so precipitously [that] it reminded us of the early days of Y Combinator [when] the cost of building a company had come down by orders of magnitude. Money doesn’t always produce results. It’s exciting that there’s so many options now and so much money is flooding into carbon capture, but do you worry that industry is going to say, ‘We’re putting money into this marketplace,’ or ‘We’re putting money into this technology, so we can continue on with our bad behavior’? I am not concerned because, frankly, digging up and burning old dinosaur bones is expensive, so every time we remove that from a process or a product, we make money. And carbon has real value. When we capture carbon, there are uses for it. We upcycle it into jet fuel. We’re now embedding it in stuff like concrete, so there is value there. So companies can continue with what you call bad behavior, but that’s just bad business. And so yes, I mean, greenwashing and fake ESG funds and stuff like that are bullshit. But the reality is anyone who continues down that path is just gonna get left behind by the biggest economic transformation in the history of the planet. A lot of skeptics question whether carbon capture will work at scale. I recently read that the world’s largest carbon direct air capture facility that’s currently under construction is expected to remove only

Palau Project ‘s $125K deck • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Climate, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, EC How To, EC Pitch Deck Teardowns, pitch deck, Pitch Deck Teardown, Startups, VentureNo Comments

I get a lot of pitch deck submissions for this ZebethMedia Pitch Deck Teardown series from people who are raising friend and family rounds, and I mostly pass on them. Often, these decks aren’t very good, but it’s important to remember that they don’t have to be. For a small round (say $200,000 or below), most well-connected entrepreneurs will be able to find a group of people who believe in them and are willing to invest in them. It’s not about the product (there typically isn’t one), and it’s not about the solution (the company is still iterating). Such investors are usually betting on two things: Is this market big enough, and is the problem worth solving big or pertinent enough to give this company a possibility of success? Are the founders the right people to solve this problem? Do they have the connections, skills or experience that gives them an unfair advantage? Here’s the truth: When considering very early stage companies, if you can’t say “Yes” to both of those questions with 100% certainty, you shouldn’t invest. If the market isn’t big enough, don’t invest. If the founders are smart, friendly and amazing, but they don’t have something special that gives them a head start, don’t invest. It was against that backdrop that I received the pitch deck for Palau Project. Its founder, Jerome Cloetens, is a professional kite surfer (!) with an economics degree and an MBA, and he’s taking on climate change. Let’s take a closer look at how all those pieces come together in a pitch deck. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. Slides in this deck This pre-seed deck has 22 slides, but it could probably have been 10 slides or so. That said, it looks good, and although it jumps from topic to topic a little, I can see how the presentation would take shape. Cloetens notes that the slide deck has been slightly updated since the fundraise, and he mentioned it’s “not precisely as Pitched; some of the design and small content changes (Such as our traction metrics) have been updated.” Cover slide Problem impact slide Problem slide Solution slide Product slide Product slide Product slide Challenge slide Value Proposition slide Business model slide Market size slide Market slide Traction slide Metrics slide Milestones slide Team slide Founders slide “Seed round” Interstitial slide Mission slide The Ask slide Milestones slide “Equity for thrifthers” closing slide Three things to love As I mentioned in the intro, this is a pre-seed deck. As per slide #20, the founders were trying to raise $500,000, and they closed on about $125,000. That isn’t entirely uncommon at early stages. Slightly later on, your plan needs to match the funds, which needs to match the milestones you’re trying to hit. At this stage, “I just need some money to prove what we are trying to do” will work, and if the angel investors think it makes sense, you’ll raise money. Simple product, testable now [Slide 5] Palau Project’s product is super simple, but the power will be in the data. Image Credits: Palau Project Make your product demos this simple if you can — it’s easy to understand, visual and impactful. I mentioned earlier that all that matters is the market size and team, and I’ll get to that in just a moment. For now, I was really impressed at how simple the idea is, and how easy it is to imagine this in use. Scan a barcode, get information about a product and get nudged towards products that have less impact on the climate. As an investor, I would immediately have three questions: How good is the database and how many products are captured there? Will people actually use this when they are walking around, shopping? This use case appears to be in-person, but the business model refers to a commission. How would the manufacturers know that a user has changed their behavior as a result of using an app? You can learn two things from this slide: Make your product demos this simple if you can — it’s easy to understand, visual and impactful. The second step is to tie it to your value propositions: What’s in it for the consumer? What’s in it for the product manufacturers? What’s in it for your company (i.e. how does this help you gain or retain customers, and how does it help you generate value)? Traction! [Slide 13] A product this early with traction is beautiful. Image Credits: Palau ProjectWhen a company is raising its first round, it’s unlikely that it has a product at all, never mind a product with actual traction. If you do happen to have such a product, scream about it from the rooftops. Having 30 downloads per day is impressive, and 10,000 scans shows that the app is working and getting some user engagement. Engagement time is cool, too — there are a lot of early indicators showing up here that the founders may be on to something. Going from 0 to 700 weekly active users in a new market (Portugal) is impressive, too. Again, the slide raises questions for me: Scans are great, but I want to know what percentage of those scans were successful (i.e. had products in the database). If users scanned 10,000 items and ended up with 600 hits, and 9,400 “We don’t know this product,” that will make a lot of users turn away immediately. 25-30 new users per day is impressive, but show us a graph and the total number of sign-ups. TikTok videos are cool, but that’s a vanity metric that means nothing unless it moves the needle on the business side. Did the video result in downloads? More scans? More inquiries? What you can learn from this slide as a startup is to think about

Greener wants to help consumers and businesses be more sustainable • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Australia, Climate, funding, Greener, StartupsNo Comments

Many consumers and companies want to reduce their impact on the environment but may not know where to start or how to sustain the necessary changes. Founder of Greener, an Australian cleantech startup, Tom Ferrier, wants to help. He argues that sustainability and climate action doesn’t need to be complicated. His startup is geared towards simplifying the decision-making process to help consumers and businesses understand sustainability and reduce their emissions, such as by making different purchasing decisions — and he points to a statistic that suggests around 88% of consumers in the U.S. and the U.K want businesses to help them be more sustainable. For consumers, Greener offers an app that links to the user’s bank account, enabling customers to learn about their carbon impact and get suggestions to make better choices on shopping greener based on potential purchases for 250+ brands. “For consumers, it is as simple as downloading the app and securely connecting their bank account using our open banking technology partner Basiq, to start tracking their carbon footprint [of every dollar spent],” he said. “Once a new user signs up to Greener, open banking technology alongside data and expertise from the world’s leading climate scientists, enables the Greener app to instantly calculate the greenhouse gas emissions of the user’s spending.” When asked about users’ data privacy, Perrier explained that Basiq open banking makes it easy for Greener customers to sign up and connect their bank account. “Basiq open banking also allows us to securely pass anonymous, aggregated data back to businesses to provide them with insights that will help them build customer loyalty and attract even more climate-conscious customers,” Ferrier said. Offering a double-sided tech solution, Greener also provides tailored solutions for businesses of all sizes towards reducing their footprint based on business type, size, business model and current sustainable activities. Ferrier told ZebethMedia that a business can see where they are on the sustainability journey and is provided with personalized, clear advice on what they can do to reduce their carbon emissions and waste. From its consumer app trials, the company saw that it was able to help shoppers reduce the emissions of their purchases by 23%. The company also saw upwards of 10% of customer growth, with shoppers switching to greener businesses from non-green competition services. The startup is announcing a seed raise of 4 million AUD today ($2.5 million), led by NAB Ventures with participation from RealVC. It plans to use the funding to continue its product development, which is currently in beta, and ramp up to the public launch of its consumer app and Greener for Business solutions next year. “Although there are other carbon tracking and offset platforms in the market, no other business is tackling the climate solution from both sides – consumer and business,” Ferrier argued. Greener’s app is free for consumers, while businesses fund the model at a low margin and can be rewarded with new customers and personalized services, he told ZebethMedia. L-R: Co-founders of Greener, Tom Ferrier and Neil McVeigh (Image credits: Greener) Greener suggests the opportunity is enormous as 300g of CO2 is attached to every dollar spent, with $184 billion spent globally every day. The major challenge facing climate action is awareness, Ferrier continued. He added that the company sees education as the solution, closing the gap between motivation and know-how, and rewarding consumers and businesses for their efforts. The startup has partnered with a number of brands, such as Microsoft, T2 Tea, Scoop Wholefoods, Brew Dog, Huskee and Go for Zero, since its inception in 2019. Greener has also partnered with the City of Sydney and the Australian Retailer Association (ARA) to help their members accelerate net-zero strategies. Greener’s previous backers include Phil Vernon, former CEO of the managed investment fund Australian Ethical. “We all have a part to play in climate action and NAB certainly recognises our role,” said Todd Forest, managing director of NAB Ventures, in a statement. “We’re continuously looking at ways we can support our customers and colleagues to take action to reduce their carbon footprint and we think Greener’s product has great potential. Greener is an excellent fit for NAB Ventures and we look forward to working with them and exploring further opportunities together.”

Seven scaleups hog over 70% funding to Africa’s Solar PayGo ventures • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in africa, Climate, solarNo Comments

Over the last 10 years startups in Africa’s off-grid solar sector have attracted over $2.3 billion funding. However, the largest share of the financing has gone to just seven pay-as-you-go (PayGo) Africa-based scaleups, leaving hundreds others in the early-stage struggling to fundraise, according to the biennial Gogla-World Bank report. The seven most funded solar startups are Sun King, Zola Electric, M-Kopa, Bboxx, d.light, Engie Energy Access, and Lumos which, according to the Gogla Investment database, have attracted 72% of the sector’s equity, debt and grant financing while over 150 startups in the seed and phases accounted for the rest of the amount. In terms of equity funding, the scale-ups received investments worth $600 million, between 2015 and last year, as early-stage startups attracted $255 million VC funding over the same period. Overall, access to debt has not been easy for most early-stage startups in Africa especially since the Covid pandemic hit, yet the scaleups continue to unlock more debt funding amidst a similar operating environment. The aforementioned scaleups operate pay-go models that offer asset-based financing (pay-to-own) for solar kits and lanterns, products that are hugely popular in Sub-Saharan Africa where millions are off-grid, as national power grids remain underdeveloped. The lack of capital means that the early-stage startups are not able acquire assets like solar kits and lanterns, which are required to help them scale and capture more consumers and markets. Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda and Ghana, DRC are some of their major markets in Africa “Start-up companies report that accessing equity capital has been challenging, resulting in some being over leveraged, and others facing business difficulties. Lack of early-stage equity has resulted in the stifled growth of many companies,” “This is a barrier to the expansion of off-grid solar in new markets; as equity, grants, or output-based incentives, such as results-based financing, are generally best placed instruments for market expansion,” said Gogla, a global association for the off-grid solar energy industry, in the report. The trend is likely to continue as data on disclosed deals from the BigDeal database shows that so far this year, several of the seven scaleups accounted for most of the funding has been raised by the off-grid solar Paygo companies. A review of the data shows that nearly half a billion dollars in debt-equity funding has been raised by nearly 30 startups and scale-ups this year. Of the amount, $367 million is equity funding raised by 11 companies — including SunKing, M-Kopa and d.light which claimed 93% of the total equity amount. If we add d.light’s $50 million and Bboxx’s $35.5 million debt-funding, the four scale-ups so far account for 86% of the total funding raised by startups in Africa’s paygo solar sector. The ability of these companies to attract funding is attributable to their ability to capture huge markets across Africa, and by tapping syndicated loans. These companies, some of which offer financing for other assets, have also been quick to add new revenue streams further tapping and increasing their clientele base.

Farmers are key to Lithos Carbon’s quest to remove gigatons of carbon • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in agriculture, carbon removal, Climate, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, StartupsNo Comments

It almost sounds too good to be true: Take basalt dust that today is wasted in the manufacturing of things like asphalt shingles, sprinkle it on farmers’ fields, and it raises crop yields while also removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Where’s the catch? For the entire thing to work, farmers need to add just the right amount of basalt. Too little and they don’t capture much carbon and their crops don’t see any benefits. Too much and the field could end up releasing carbon instead of removing it. Soils are complex systems. The team at Lithos Carbon thinks they’ve cracked the code. They’re working with farmers in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast, where they’ve already captured over 2,000 tons of carbon this year. The startup just announced a $6.3 million seed round led by Union Square Ventures and Greylock Partners with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Carbon Removal Partners, the Carbon Drawdown Initiative, Fall Line Capital and Cavallo Ventures. For Greylock and Bain, it’s their first climate investment.

Intropic helps single-use plastics decompose from the inside out • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, bioplastics, Climate, Disrupt, Hardware, Intropic, StartupsNo Comments

Plastics are great for so many things, but they stay around for an awfully long time. Intropic leaps to the rescue with a set of enzymes that can be added to plastics at the very beginning of their life cycle, before it is even turned into products. The additives the company makes have been proof-of-concept tested and it wants to upend how plastics are made and disposed of. Intropic’s additives make many of the most commonly used plastics biodegradable in normal commercial composting. The enzymes are added to the pellets or powders that are used in the normal course of plastic production. This gives plastics new, biodegradable capabilities without changing the manufacturing processes used to create plastic products. At the end of the lifecycle, when it’s time to get rid of the material, the products can be composted into their component parts. Aaron Hall, CEO at Intropic, and Jolene Mattson, the company’s process engineer. Image Credits: Intropic Materials. The problem with current ways of disposing of plastics is that while materials made of plastic can decompose, nature does it from the outside in, and it takes a very long time. The innovation from Intropic, pitching in the Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022, is the additives are added to the plastic raw materials, which means that the materials dissolve through a process called depolymerization. Essentially, the polymer chains are reduced to monomers, which nature’s normal decomposition processes can take care of. The company claims that when the plastics are subjected to water and relatively low heat (40ºC / 104ºF), PLA and PCL plastics treated with the additives can break down 98% faster than without the additives. At an industrial scale (for example, when the plastics are cutoffs or leftovers from regular manufacturing processes), the water-and-heat bath can break down the plastics in less than 48 hours, which can then be further processed. For post-consumer plastics, those same conditions occur naturally in commercial composting. “The enzymes are activated by temperature and water, not one or the other. We need both. And that’s really important because if it were just temperature, you wouldn’t be able to put this in a truck or a warehouse in Arizona or Houston in the summer,” explains Aaron Hall, CEO and founder at Intropic. “If it were just water, when it gets humid, all of a sudden you’ve got things melting or degrading. For now, we need both, but in the future, there are angles that we can explore to create even more handles of control, which is a lot of the fun.” Because the additives are added before the manufacturers have started shaping the products, the possible use cases are vast, the company told me, and because the manufacturing process itself doesn’t change, it could, in theory, be rolled out very quickly. “We’re developing enzymatic additives that can go inside of plastics and enable them to self-degrade. There are many different application spaces where that is relevant,” says Hall. “Single-use packaging, especially food packaging, is an enormous space that we’re interested in, but there are lots of other single-use plastics that are also important, right? Think about all of the tech packaging. The plastics our headphones come in, all the little sleeves, shrink wrap, etc.” An undegraded film of PLA (polylactic acid) plastic, left, is shown with biodegraded fragments of PLA, right. Image Credits: Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering The company is at the early stages of what it’s doing, but is making some very interesting progress. It has completed its proof-of-concept work and has published a few papers in academic papers to show that the technology works. Right now, Intropic is working to scale up its manufacturing to the kilogram scale. “We are not tied to this number, but for the sake of an example, let’s say we’re going to use 1% of additives. That means that one kilo of additive can equate to 100 kilos of the finished product,” Hall explains. “That’s more than enough to do testing and validation for the initial stages. From there, we’re looking to find partners.” The company is particularly focused on ensuring its product will work at enormous scales, to maximize its force for good, and tackle as much of the plastics problem as possible. “The way we’re looking to formulate is that we’re working on making this into a ‘master batch.’ It will be a powder or a pellet, depending on what our partners need. We’ll be able to add that at the beginning, which means we’ll be able to get into all sorts of products,” says Hall. “This could be anything from coatings, such as an aqueous coating or a solvent-based coating, all the way through to injection molding, roll-to-roll and lamination, covering the full spectrum of plastics manufacturing. That’s, ultimately, what’s really cool about this being an additive: That’s just naturally how the process flow goes, which means it’s fairly straightforward to integrate into many of these channels.” Image Credits: TechCruch The company is very careful about making universal declarations about its efficacy, explaining that the additives do need to be activated with heat and water for the rapid breakdown to occur. I asked whether there would be a benefit to having these plastic additives, even if the final product ends up in landfills, for example. “As a PhD-trained scientist, I’m going to be careful about making claims,” Hall laughs, “but having these enzymes inside could lead to something that has a much faster degradation even in a landfill environment with less-optimal conditions. That’s certainly a possibility, but something that we would want to validate before we make any strong claims about it. Having said that, it is exciting to entertain that thought, and there’s no reason to think it would absolutely not work.” What struck me the most about talking with the Intropic team is that it sees itself as part of a large, overall solution to the plastics problem. The team also spoke with great enthusiasm about other innovations in the materials space, especially