Climate

Advanced Ionics teases electrolysis innovation ‘to clean up’ the filthy hydrogen business • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Advanced Ionics, Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Biotech & Health, Clean Energy Ventures, Climate, DisruptNo Comments

Advanced Ionics, a climate-tech startup that hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is striving to drive down the price of green hydrogen by slashing how much electricity is needed for electrolysis by as much as 50%. That’s an admirable goal, because despite all the talk of hydrogen as a “fuel of the future,” the industry is still filthy for the most part — driving climate chaos via pollution-spewing production methods. Most of the hydrogen gas that humans produce is “grey“; a classification that means the producers rely on methane (or worse, burning coal) to isolate the element for use in fertilizer and as fuel. But as awareness of climate change and interest in hydrogen-powered freight grows, so too has demand for an environmentally friendlier alternative. In contrast to the grey stuff, “green” hydrogen taps renewable energy and electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. It’s a superior production method as far as the climate is concerned, but it is also costly because it demands a ton of clean energy. Image Credits: ZebethMedia As Advanced Ionics founder Chad Mason tells it, the startup’s coming electrolyzer will “use 35 Kilowatt-hours to make a kilogram of hydrogen by running at 300 Celsius,” while tapping industrial heat, non-ceramic materials (that work at lower than typical temperatures) and steam instead of liquid water. Per the CEO, “existing technologies are generally in the 45 to 60 [Kilowatt-hours] range, practically speaking.” The executive presented onstage today at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield in San Francisco. There are other ways to cut the cost of electrolysis, such as by manufacturing cheaper electrolyzers and limiting maintenance. “But if you don’t address electricity use and price of electricity, it doesn’t matter,” Mason told ZebethMedia. The company is targeting between 20% and 50% less electricity use. The CEO said his interest in electrolyzers was first sparked through anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, which his family applied to crops on their farm in North Dakota. “So I understood early on,” said Mason, “the importance of hydrogen to make all of these important commodities and chemicals that are also very polluting industries.” Armed with $4.2 million in seed funding from Boston’s Clean Energy Ventures and Texas-based SWAN Impact Network, Advanced Ionics has a ways to go. The company aims to deploy “demonstration units with a few partners” and kick off sales starting next year, and it is targeting 2025 for a commercial launch. Then, “we’re going to try to really hit the gas and produce as many of them possible, and try to have as big of an impact as possible as quickly as we can in the latter half of the decade,” said Mason.

Reverion eyes commercial launch to draw more energy out of biogas • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, biogas, Biotech & Health, Climate, Disrupt, Reverion, StartupsNo Comments

Born inside the Technical University of Munich, the engineers behind Reverion say they’ve had their heads down for seven years developing a way to get more electricity out of biogas and existing fuel-cell technology. Biogas comes from decomposing waste and is mostly made up of methane. It’s a form of chemical energy that must be converted into electricity before it can flow into homes. You could do this by burning it, but that would release pollutants and waste around half the energy; a comparably cleaner and more efficient option is to use fuel cells, which generate electricity via an electrochemical reaction — sort of like a battery. Either way, some energy is lost in the conversion process, but Reverion aims to push biogas fuel-cell efficiency toward its limit. “Normally, the industry fights for say, a 0.2% increase in efficiency per year. That’s even an achievement,” Reverion chief executive Stephan Herrmann told ZebethMedia. “We get an increase from the best power plant that’s available, of 60%, to 80% just in one step.” According to Herrmann, Reverion achieves this 20% efficiency boost by capturing and processing gas that would otherwise go unused inside the fuel cell. The CEO of the Eresing, Germany-based company presented today in San Francisco at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield. “Fuel cells themselves always have had this like 80% efficiency in them, but they have some limits,” said Herrmann. “What typically happens is that up to 30% of the fuel you feed to the fuel cell comes out unused again.” The CEO added, “We eliminate that by basically re-increasing the quality of the gas in two steps and then recycling it into the fuel cell.” With $7 million in tow, the startup says it is now gearing up to pilot 10 modular power plant units, each housed in 20-foot shipping containers with enough capacity to power 100 households apiece. Reverion aims to deliver its first unit “roughly” by the end of the first quarter of 2023 — and all 10 before the end of the year. The company secured its seed funding from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, the European Social Fund and XPrize.

Bendy batteries could power new categories, and Anthro Energy thinks its cracked the code • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Batteries, Climate, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, Hardware, wearablesNo Comments

Battery technology has made significant strides in recent years, but there’s one place they haven’t changed much — they’re still as stiff as a board. The era of inflexible portable power may be coming to an end, though, if Anthro Energy can bring its bendy batteries to market. It’s getting some help with that courtesy of an oversubscribed $7.2 million seed round, which the company is announcing today, ZebethMedia exclusively learned. The round was led by Union Square Ventures and Energy Revolution Ventures with participation from Voyager Ventures, Emerson Collective, Nor’easter Ventures, Ultratech Capital Partners and the Stanford President’s Venture Fund. Anthro was founded by chemists David Mackanic and Joe Papp, who saw an opening for a flexible polymer that could not only give batteries new properties but also offer a quicker way to market than the frequently cited automotive route. “Batteries are faced with this kind of really severe innovator’s dilemma, where to get into something like an auto, it takes a ton of validation, a ton of technology development and a ton of time,” Mackanic said. “And so I realized if I want to make a difference in the battery space, I’ve got to think differently about the problems I’m solving, I’ve got to think differently about how we’re bringing this to market.”

Makersite lands $18M to help companies manage product supply chains • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Climate, environment, funding, Makersite, Planet A Ventures, Robotics & AI, startup, Startups, supply chain, sustainabilityNo Comments

In 2018, Neil D’Souza, a software engineer by trade and previously the VP of product development at Thinkstep, came to the realization that his ten-plus-year effort to solve enterprise product challenges in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk were having little impact. The way he saw it, they took too long, which minimized their influence on product design choices. “For example, analyzing a car’s life cycle assessment can easily take an automotive company an entire year,” D’Souza told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Speed matters, otherwise the analysis just becomes a meaningless report.” That frustration was the genesis of his startup, Makersite, which aims to produce near-instant impact assessments in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk to inform corporate-level decisions. Makersite, D’Souza says, is an attempt to bridge the gap between experts who know what “good” looks like from an environmental, cost, compliance or risk perspective and decision makers with control over the product supply chain. With over 30 customers including Microsoft, Cummins and Vestas and a balance sheet showing profitable operations over the last few years, Makersite is beginning to attract investor attention, this week securing $18 million in a Series A round with participation from Planet A Ventures. D’Souza says the tranche — Makersite’s first besides “a few convertible notes”; the company was bootstrapped until now — will be put toward work with integrators and resellers and expanding the size of Makersite’s team. “There are many companies out there that specialize in solving cost, compliance, risk or sustainability challenges. The problem is they each sit in siloes and the data they use is specialized to the people who work in those fields,” D’Souza said. “That’s what makes our solution different. We’re unique in the space as we’re the first to solve the challenge of bringing multi-criteria decision analysis to non-experts.” Using AI, Makersite maps a company’s product data against a material and supply chain database, generating automated reports. The idea is to help companies meet their sustainability goals while minimizing costs and keeping compliance at the forefront. The aforementioned database — which D’Souza says is among the largest of its kind — allows Makersite to identify contextual relationships to build a model of products and their supply chains automatically. The models cover not just what a product is made out of, but how every component or ingredient is manufactured — all the way from the mining resources to the factory floor. “[Makersite] enables a customer to drop in a bill of material for, say, a wind turbine, tell the AI that it’s a wind turbine, answer a few questions (e.g., about power output), and the system will automatically build a ‘cradle-to-grave’ model of that turbine that’s localized to where it’s made and where it’ll be erected,” D’Souza explained. “That allows you to optimize designs of specific elements of the turbine — like the tower and nacelle — to locally available resources and infrastructure, such as recycling facilities, and understand trade-offs across the lifecycle and criteria, like cost, risks and regulations.” As Makersite grows its headcount from around 40 employees to over 100 over the next 12 months, D’Souza says that the focus will be on building out the company’s sales and marketing teams to grow business particularly in the U.S. and Europe. On the integration side, Makersite’s investing capital in connectors to software like Autodesk to deliver cost and environmental insights within computer-assisted design platforms. “There is a paradigm shift towards sustainable products which are driven by regulation, competition, customer demand and investments,” D’Souza said. “For that, Makersite enables procurement and product design professionals to make day-to-day decisions without the need for compliance, sustainability, cost or risk experts.”

Sila’s Gene Berdichevsky on the ‘5-year roller coaster’ facing battery companies • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Batteries, Climate, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, EC Founder Interview, gene berdichevsky, Sila, TransportationNo Comments

As hundreds of thousands of EVs come to market over the next few years, demand for critical battery materials like lithium, graphite, nickel, and cobalt has never been higher. Automakers are scrambling to ensure their own supply of key raw materials and, in the process, reduce their reliance on China, the dominant force in the industry. The result? The price of raw materials has skyrocketed, and it might not come back down to earth for some time. Battery chemistry company Sila says it has a solution to relieve at least one of the current bottlenecks — replacing the graphite in a battery cell’s anode with silicon, which can be made anywhere. The startup finds itself in a perfect storm of product-market fit and is steadily advancing on its path to produce battery cells for automakers on U.S. soil. “I didn’t think the U.S. was gonna pass legislation that is an order of magnitude bigger than anything Europe’s ever done for climate. But it’s very American to wait for a while and then come in big.” Sila CEO Gene Berdichevsky In the year since we last interviewed Sila’s co-founder and CEO, Gene Berdichevsky, Sila announced that its silicon anode material will appear in the Mercedes electric G-Class in 2025. In addition, Sila purchased a facility in Washington that will produce automotive-scale quantities of Sila’s battery technology starting in 2024. In that time, the Inflation Reduction Act became the law of the land. The IRA will provide tax incentives for EVs that are manufactured in the U.S. and that are built with critical materials manufactured in the U.S., which has become a massive tailwind for battery startups like Sila. We sat down again with Berdichevsky to talk about how the IRA will affect the battery industry, when material supply constraints will ease, and why battery recycling will become the next big industry. The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity. ZebethMedia: Your new factory will produce 10 gigawatt hours of capacity annually. When you announced the buy, you told me that scaling from 10 GWh to 150 GWh would require another $2 billion. Are you currently doing another round? Gene Berdichevsky: That’s still true. We haven’t announced a fundraise for that yet, but when we’re ready we’ll need a combination of equity and debt. There’s no reason to raise $2 billion of equity once you have a proven factory and customers and all the rest. Part of that could be leveraging the Department of Energy loan guarantee, as well, which is the same program that funded Tesla, Ford, GM and others to build EVs over the last decade.

Top climate tech deals net nearly $4B in Q3, outpacing other industries • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 16, 2022Posted in cb insights, Climate, climate tech, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, fundraisingNo Comments

Climate tech wrapped a strong Q3, landing three of the top four equity deals, including the whopping $1 billion Series A raised by fleet charging startup TeraWatt. While the broader market might be cooling, climate tech continues to be a hot ticket, with investment figures for top deals in Q3 outpacing the two previous quarters this year. In total, five climate tech startups made CB Insights’ top 10 equity deals list in Q3, pulling in a combined $3.7 billion. That far exceeds last quarter’s $2.5 billion across eight top startups and Q1’s $1.4 billion across five top startups. Top climate tech investments continued to diversify, too, showing just how deeply it’s becoming embedded into the economy.

Inside Sono Motors’ family-friendly $25,000 solar EV • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 15, 2022Posted in Climate, electric vehicle, Sion, solar-powered EV, Sono Motors, TransportationNo Comments

Sono Motors, the company building an electric vehicle that’s partially powered by the sun, debuted its flagship Sion in New York City this week as part of a multi-city tour throughout the U.S. The company aims to launch the $25,000 five-seater hatchback in Europe first — production is expected to start in the second half next year, with initial deliveries to customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland before the year is out — but wanted to explore demand for the vehicle among Americans. After a marketing event in Times Square, Sono brought its Sion to a lot in Greenpoint overlooking the East River and Manhattan’s skyline. It was a sunny day, a good omen for a car that runs off solar energy, and in a strange but happy twist of events, Whoopi Goldberg was there to check out the car, too. Even though most of the final design of the Sion has been determined, the car Sono brought to Brooklyn was still a prototype, so there were still a few kinks to work out. The company told me there would be one last design iteration before it goes to series production next year. It’s not exactly a sexy-looking car, but it looks and feels capable, sturdy even, and the semi-finished product, which Sono markets as perfect for families and commuters, was impressive. Deceptively spacious Whoopi Goldberg and Rebecca Bellan posing in front of the Sion EV. Image Credits: Rebecca Bellan “This car would be great if you have a family,” Goldberg said to me. “You can put eight people in there and the dog!” While eight people would certainly stretch the limits of what Sono is advertising, I could see what she meant. The hatchback, while small enough to drive around in an urban setting, is roomier on the inside than it looks. A tall person would certainly have enough headroom and might have just enough legroom to be totally at ease. The trunk is also large enough to fit at least one ZebethMedia reporter comfortably. Beneath the trunk is a hidden compartment for additional storage, although a spare tire wouldn’t go amiss should Sono decide to add that in. The back seats go down flat — perfect to chuck a bed in the back in case someone really wanted to test the limits of a solar powered battery and go camping with the Sion. “This can replace the mini van,” said Goldberg. “You can go shopping in it. You can feel comfortable parking it. And because it’s so inexpensive I think it makes it a lot easier for families. I have grandkids who can afford this. This is what I’d recommend for my family.” The inexpensiveness of the car also explains why the interior is, if not Spartan, then simple. The seats are comfortable enough, but nothing plush and soft like you’d find in a luxury car. I didn’t see a cupholder in the backseat, only two in the front, which may put off American families, but there were little pockets on the backs of the driver and passenger seats. The dashboard was also simple, with a 10-inch touch display screen which controls the infotainment system. The system has Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integrations, Bluetooth hands-free calling, climate control, and apps that display information about solar power, energy consumption and charging/discharging control. The only notable flourish in the cabin was a line of decorative moss, placed behind some sort of plexiglass, just ’cause. Goodbye, range anxiety? Sono Motors Sion charging port. Image Credits: Rebecca Bellan The Sion’s matte black outer shell consists of 456 integrated solar half-cells that collect energy from the sun and drip feed that energy into the battery. The car’s display features an image of the car that’s constantly updating to show how much solar power is being collected from the different panels and how that contributes to the total range. The Sion’s 54 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery — made by BYD — offers a 190-mile battery range, with an additional 70 to 150 miles extra per week from the sun. This is made possible by the Sion’s proprietary motor control unit (MCU), which Christian Scheckenbach, Sono’s head of communications, told me is the brain of the solar system. “We have low voltage coming from the solar panels, with seven circuits going to the MCU, and then you get high voltage into the DCU,” said Scheckenbach. “You can get a lot of energy yield this way compared to solar panels that are on a house. And it allows us to update in real time rather than every few minutes so we can see what is the max yield we can get out of the system. So it’s a mix of hardware engineering and software to create the overall solar system.” The battery, which charges in the front of the car, has plugs for 75 kW DC and 11 kW AC chargers, as well as a plug that allows for bidirectional charging up to 11 kW. Sono says this allows the Sion to charge your e-bike, power your home, put energy back into the grid or even charge another EV. A smooth enough ride I didn’t get to drive the vehicle myself, and we were only doing laps in an empty lot, but the drive seemed…smooth enough. It certainly seemed like it had a nice turn radius, which is always helpful when making sketchy U-turns on city streets. There was an unfortunate moment when the vehicle stopped entirely and starting making a sound not unlike the noise my freezer makes when it’s trying, and failing, to make ice. “This is why this is a prototype and not a show car,” said Scheckenbach. He also said the Sion is not designed to be an EV race car — Sono is capping the speed limit at 140 kph, or about 87 mph. So it can still go on the highway, but maybe couldn’t hold its own in the fast lane. A direct to consumer car The Sion will

Some new venture firms are so niche, it’s tempting to laugh off their focus • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 14, 2022Posted in Climate, VentureNo Comments

There are big, overarching top-down trends, and there are little-bitty baby trends that have a way of growing into bigger ones. A big trend right now, for example, centers on certain firms that passed out enormous checks to startup founders in recent years and drove valuations sky high in the process. It turns out this strategy doesn’t work as well as they’d anticipated, and some of these same firms are now splitting up with some of their partners and asking their own investors for a lot less capital. Another big trend? Venture firms that are more aggressively investing in publicly traded companies given that many have seen their share prices hammered in the downturn. (We began seeing this trend back in January and the WSJ notes that it is only picking up steam.) Now here’s a new baby trend that’s interesting: new firms that are so niche that, at first glance, it’s easy to laugh off their focus. A venture firm focused solely dedicated to oral care and not something, um, a little broader? A firm that’s focused on tech that can help detect and contain wildfires? (No way.) How about a venture firm that’s dedicated to backing and building psychedelic businesses alone? As it happens, these outfits exist, and two of three of them have this week announced moderate-size debut funds, while the third suggests it’s on a path to doing the same. Viewed together, they create a picture of how the industry could potentially look over time. Let’s take the first firm, the one focused on oral health alone. Called Revere Partners, the New York-based outfit — which counts among its partners Mark Zuckerberg’s dentist father, by the way — seems still to be raising a fund. (It announced in a late-September press release that it is “launching” its fund, which is code for: we don’t exactly have a fund yet.) You might imagine in this case that a lot of wealthy dentists are pooling their money together to invest in technologies that they know could upend their industry. That could well be what’s happening. But give credit where it’s due. Dental care is a huge market that’s growing as the world’s median age rises. It’s expected to surpass $230 billion by the end of next year, according to the Office of the Actuary at the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Meanwhile, there are a lot of startup opportunities in the business — and not a lot of breakout winners yet. (Think dental insurance, direct-to-consumer subscription products, tele-health services, private clinics, mobile dentistry services, dental implant surgery companies, the list goes on.) Or let’s take another niche fund, the one focused on wildfire technologies, Convective Capital. My first thought reading about this one was: wildfires? Really? I happen to live in Northern California, where wildfires are a constant and very terrifying threat. It just seemed . . . very specific. I wasn’t alone in my skepticism. Founder Bill Clerico — who previously founded the fintech company WePay and sold it to JPMorgan Chase — told ZebethMedia earlier this week that the firm’s thesis was more polarizing than Clerico expected, and that some investors understood his pitch immediately while others thought focusing on wildfires was too narrow. But he managed to pull together $35 million in capital commitments for a debut fund and it’s easy to appreciate why. Extreme heat and dry conditions have begun fueling wildfires across the globe, there aren’t enough firefighters (or tech) to contain these fires, and, as Clerico notes, companies working on solutions to wildfires present a more straightforward investing opportunity than climate tech meant to tackle oncoming problems. Further, the thesis gives Convective more wiggle room than might initially be imagined. One of its first portfolio companies, for example, is Overstory, a four-year-old, Amsterdam-based startup that’s using AI and satellite imagery to optimize vegetation management for its customers, which are utility companies. (It raised a seed round late last year.) As for the psychedelics firm, it’s two-year-old, New York- and Chicago-based Palo Santo, a venture outfit that’s exclusively focused on backing and building emerging psychedelic therapeutics companies and that just today took the wraps off a $50 million debut fund. In the grand scheme of things, $50 million is maybe not too much to pour into an area that has long fascinated investors and founders alike. According to Crunchbase News, psychedelics-related startups — mostly therapeutics companies — raised more than $236 million between July 2021 and July 2022, compared with the $96 million they raised between July 2020 and July 2021. In fact, while most of those bets have come from funds that invest in other therapeutics or technologies, there’s reason to think it could become a standalone area of focus over time. Already, two psychedelics companies have gone public — Compass Pathways and MindMed. Some of the smartest VCs in the industry and pouring money into the sector, including early Compass investor Peter Thiel and SpaceX board member Steve Jurvetson (who told Bloomberg last year that he decided to carve up his own estate by giving around half of his net worth to fund psychedelic science!). There’s also a lot of excitement right now in particular over the potential for MDMA, known recreationally as Molly or Ecstasy, as a treatment for severe PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder with FDA approval expected as early as next year. Either way, I get the sense that the opportunities for similarly structured funds are limitless and that they could be a new entree point for existing and first-time VCs who have a unique specialty or perspective. (The venture industry is becoming more atomized by the year, thanks to special purpose vehicles and rolling funds and a whole lot of other ways for people to spin up their own business.) Also, as the big funds have gotten bigger in recent years, covering every stage and every sector — even veering into public companies — it seems logical that one of the only ways to

Royalty-backed Lightrock packs $834 million into its first climate fund • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Climate, Lightrock, VentureNo Comments

Lightrock, the London-based backer of neobank Niyo and “wood modification” company Kebony, has secured about $834 million (€860 million) for a new fund focused on climate tech. The private equity and venture firm says it will pump the money into startups focused on areas such as clean energy, decarbonization and sustainable agriculture. Lightrock plans to write checks as small as $10 million, and up to around $39 million, for startups in Europe and North America. Back in May, the investor announced its first fund for startups in Latin America. Lightrock has ties to royalty through a web of subsidiaries, which means the money it raised likely wasn’t too tricky to find. The firm is owned by LGT, which makes investments for rich people and institutions. LGT’s owner is the royal family of Liechtenstein, which has ramped up its environmental and social impact investments since that really big tax scandal. LGT promotes itself as being focused on sustainability, and to its credit, the firm has taken steps to limit its climate impact. Still, it hasn’t walked away from fossil fuels. LGT invests in oil and gas producers, so long as they are “strongly committed to the energy transition and have low revenues from oil and gas production.” LGT’s policies also permit investments in business that earn revenue via thermal coal (limited to up to “5% of their total revenues as of January). Lightrock says the money for its climate fund comes from investors such as LGT, some of LGT’s clients, the Grantham Foundation and Temasek, which is a holding company owned by Singapore. Temasek’s portfolio includes significant gas and oil holdings, which drive climate change.

Investing platform raises $10M to offer climate investing from a different angle to ESG ratings • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Climate, climate techNo Comments

Net Purpose, a platform for sustainable investors, has raised £10 million in a Series A round led by ETF Partners, funding which will be used to expand its product and team, says the company. The company is benefitting from a shit to investing in sustainable products. According to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, $120 trillion is committed to invest sustainably, with allocations growing at 22% year on year. New investors M-Tech Capital and Exceptional Ventures joined the round, and existing investors Jim O’Neill, former Chair of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Kevin Gould, Co-Founder IHS Markit, the Louis Family, Illuminate Financial, and Revent increased their commitments. Currently, investors rely on reported and estimated data and ESG ratings., These tend to measure financial risk, not social and environmental return. Net Purpose claims its platform looks more at social and environmental performance based on factual reporting. Indeed, there are claims that MSCI, the largest ESG rating company, doesn’t even try to measure the impact of a corporation. Sam Duncan, Net Purpose Founder and CEO said: “Net Purpose’ core differentiator is that we provide investment-grade facts on the social and environmental performance of companies and investment portfolios and no black box ratings or scores. Facts measure social and environmental performance, not financial risk. Net Purpose also has more and higher quality data than any other provider.” Net Purpose competitors are ESG Ratings providers like MSCI and Sustainalytics.