🚿 ClimateHack Vol 107: AI-powered showers

Hi There,

We’re back 👋 

Wether you’re reading this from the beach, in the lab or while on a conference call, we hope you’re having a great summer so far.

There’s two weeks of climate tech news to catch up so let’s jump right in.

But before that - remember the poll we ran asking wether you feel guilty when flying?

Well, over 150+ of you replied, and here’s the results:

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Always (35%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ Sometimes (33%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Rarely (17%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Never (15%)

If you find yourself sulking on your return flight this summer - just know that there’s very likely someone else on the plane who does too.

In Today’s Edition;

🧱 US startup Graphyte secured $30M in a Series A funding for their carbon casting technology.
🔎 German startup osapiens raised €110.7M Series B funding to support companies in navigating ESG regulations.
💧 Boston-based Cala Systems raised $5.6M for its AI-powered water heater which is designed to forecast hot water demand.

Digest x Climate

👀 Discover: Our list of 60+ Climate Deep Tech VC’s actively investing in climate tech moonshots. The list spans across funds between $20M to $20B, from the dedicated solo GPs to opportunistic generalists.

💡 Jump: Into the mind of a Climate Deep Tech VC as we chat with Collab Fund Partner Guy Vidra on why they’re betting big on Climate Deep Tech and which sectors they’re looking to invest in next.

💧 Interesting: Tenochtitlan and how it managed its water could be key to why Mexico City is the way it is today. Check out this video.

🐠 Cool: Scientists have discovered “dark oxygen” being produced in the deep ocean, by lumps of metal on the seafloor which are able to make oxygen because they “act like batteries”.

👀 Woah: Josh McGinnis tried out a plastic-eating strain of fungus, and it worked!

AgriFood x Climate

🦠 Vilnius-based Biomatter secured €6.5 million to develop new-to-the-world enzymes for industries including chemical manufacturing, agriculture, food, and life sciences.

🌴 NoPalm Ingredients, based in the Netherlands, closed its seed funding round with €5 million. It will use the funds to scale production of its sustainable alternative to palm oil, made from upcycled agrifood side streams via a patented fermentation process.

🌾 Danish agtech Agrobiomics secured €4 million from NOON Ventures to bring its abiotic stress protectant to market. Fortify is designed to make plants more climate-resilient and able to protect themselves against stressors such as drought and salinity.

🧪 Swedish food tech Melt&Marble received grants totalling €2.76 million from the EIC Accelerator and the Horizon Europe Framework Programme to launch its “designer” fats in 2025. It uses precision fermentation and microbial engineering to produce sustainable alternatives to animal fats, cocoa butter, palm oil, and more.

🍄 Millow, based in Sweden, secured a grant of €2.4 million from the EIC Accelerator and the SMEs Executive Agency to scale production of its plant-based meat alternatives, made with 50% mycelium and 50% Swedish oats.

🧫 Poland’s first cultivated meat startup, LabFarm, received €2 million from the country’s National Centre for Research and Development as it works to optimise its bioprocesses and scale its production.

💸 Two students from the University of Waterloo in Canada received over $700,000 in grants from the Good Food Institute, Mitacs and New Harvest to further their research into advancing cultivated seafood production with AI.

🦆 France’s Gourmey became the first cultivated meat company to apply for regulatory approval in the EU, and also filed dossiers in Singapore, the US, the UK and Switzerland for its cultivated duck.

🐄 Dutch startup Mosa Meat hosted the first public tasting of cultivated beef in the EU, bringing together Dutch cattle farmers, food product developers and industry representatives to taste its hybrid beef burger.

🐟 US-based AQUA Cultured Foods secured GRAS status for its fish-free seafood, including tuna and scallops, which are made via biomass fermentation. 

🥔 Israel’s ReaGenics has used plant cell culture to develop a potato with 31% protein content, and believes it can increase this to 40%.

Carbon x Climate

🧱 US startup Graphyte secured $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Prelude Ventures and Carbon Direct Capital. It dries out and compresses materials like timber and farming residues, that would otherwise release carbon via burning or decomposition, into blocks wrapped in protective barriers, and stores them underground with sensors.

🪨 Applied Carbon raised $21.5 million Series A funding for its farm robot, which works directly on farms to turn plant waste into biochar and capture CO2.

Energy x Climate

💫 US-based Type One Energy secured $53.5 million, in a seed extension round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, to bring its fusion technology to market at “a breakneck pace”.

📊 Splight Inc. raised $12 million seed funding to tackle energy curtailment with AI and inverter-based resources as a source of reliability. It will use the funds to expand its presence in North America and the EU.

🔎 US-based Daylight Energy secured $9 million, in a Series A funding round led by a16z crypto, for its next-gen distributed energy platform, which offers renewable products such as solar photovoltaics, battery storage, thermodynamics, and energy saver systems.

🌡 Austrian heat pump company ecop received €8.5 million from the European Innovation Council Accelerator to scale production of its novel rotation heat pump, which allows factories and local and district heating systems to efficiently recover and reuse their waste heat. 

⚡️ British startup Axle Energy raised €8.3 million seed funding, in a round led by Accel, for its smart energy platform, which helps energy suppliers and manufacturers of electric vehicles and heat pumps to integrate their products and customers with local and national energy markets.

🏡 Greenely, based in Sweden, closed its Series A funding round with €8 million. Its energy management platform is already serving around 200,000 households in its home market, and it will use the funds to expand into neighbouring Nordic countries.

☀️ German solar startup MARCLEY raised over €4 million for its tech platform, which offers owners of multi-family homes a solar solution that allows residents to benefit from green electricity.

🖥 Netherlands-based OpusFlow secured €1.7 million for its all-in-one ERP system focused on sustainable installation companies, designed to support seamless integration with external systems and rapid feature development.

💡 Engineers at MIT have developed a method for producing hydrogen fuel using recycled aluminum, saltwater, and coffee grounds.

ESG x Climate

🔎 German startup osapiens raised €110.7 million Series B funding to support companies in navigating ESG regulation with HUB, an AI powered cloud-based platform designed to simplify compliance.

📊 British ESG management platform FuturePlus closed a seven-figure seed funding round, bringing its total raised to date to £2.7 million, to further expand its operations.

Materials x Climate

🍄 New Zealand-based Mushroom Material raised $8.5 million seed funding to build a 1,300-square-metre pilot plant, where it will prove that its fungus-based polystyrene substitute is a viable alternative to the highly polluting plastic.

👨‍🏭 SirenOpt closed its seed funding round with $6.6 million for its real-time manufacturing sensing and software platform, which leverages proprietary cold atmospheric plasma and physics-informed machine learning technologies.

💥 Dutch startup VSParticle raised €6.5 million in a Series A2 extension round led by NordicNinja. Its technology enables materials to be broken down to the size of nanoparticles and produced at the push of a button, supporting creation of new materials that will power next-generation products. 

🏗 Cocoon, based in the UK, secured $5.4 million pre-seed funding to transform the molten runoff from steel production into “e-slag”, a sustainable alternative to cement, with technology designed to slot into existing steel production workflows.

🧪 Swiss-US-based Matereal raised $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by the Collaborative Fund. It will use the funds to commercialise its groundbreaking chemical platform, Polaris™, which is a sustainable and safe alternative to traditional polyurethane.

🎨 Adept Materials secured $4 million seed funding, in a round led by D.R. Horton, for its dehumidifying paint and primer system aimed at bathrooms, which draws in moisture as humidity rises in the bathroom and doesn’t release it until the humidity in the bathroom drops. 

🚗 MycoWorks and General Motors unveiled Cadillac's latest concept EV, SOLLEI, which they claim is the first car with a mycelium leather interior.

⛵️ UK-based Sustainable Sailing and the Sadler Lab at the University of Edinburgh are undertaking a research project to repurpose plastic fibres from waste textiles from sailing boats into new chemicals such as vanillin.

Mobility x Climate

🔌 Wallbox, a smart electric vehicle charging and energy management provider based in Spain, secured $45 million in a funding round led by Generac Power Systems to further expand its operations.

🔋 UK-based Addionics raised $39 million, in a Series B funding round co-led by GM Ventures and Deep Insight, to scale production of its cost-efficient EV batteries made with “wavy foil”.

🚗 Australian rideshare car rental firm Splend secured $20 million from the government-backed Clean Energy Finance Corporation to increase its electric vehicles fleet.

🛩 Swiss startup Metafuels received a grant of $4.9 million from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy to build an e-SAF pilot plant for the development of its sustainable aviation fuel, aerobrew, which it says can replace conventional kerosene regardless of the size and type of aircraft or whether it operates short- or long-haul.

🛸 H55, based in Switzerland, closed its Series C funding round, which included investment from the Government of Québec. It is developing electric propulsion systems that are clean, safe and affordable, to support the aviation industry in reaching net zero by 2050.

Water x Climate

💧 Cala Systems raised $5.6 million in a seed funding round led by the Clean Energy Venture Group and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. Its AI-powered water heater is designed to forecast hot water demand and heat the water in the tank accordingly, improving efficiency and reducing energy bills.

Funds x Climate

🇺🇸 Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures secured $839 million for its third flagship fund, which ​​makes it the largest climate fund raised so far this year. It will use the capital to support early-stage climate tech startups, having invested in several notable companies to date, including the likes of Redwood Materials and Pivot Bio.

Memes x Climate

👀 Expect the exact opposite at the HackSummit in December.

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Editorial by Arman, Curation by Nicola