ClimateHack Vol 109: IKEA Preowned

Hi There,

Summer may be coming to an end but that doesn’t mean the fun times have to.

There’s a whole number of upcoming Climate Tech events happening globally from UK’s The Heat (in Oxfordshire) to Sweden’s The Drop (in Malmo), New York’s Climate Tech Week (in New York) to SOSV's Climate Tech Summit (Online).

To track all of these upcoming events, Net Zero Insight recently put out an updated list of what’s planned in 2024, and if you scroll right to the very bottom you’ll see our very own HackSummit New York which is coming up in December 👀 

But now I’m wondering, with more climate tech events on than any other year, what is the primary motivation to get you excited about attending another event?

Let me know below:

In Today’s Edition;

🔎 Root, based in Berlin, raised €8M to help food and beverage companies to manage their climate footprint.
🌊 Norway’s Ocean Oasis secured a €6M grant to advance its innovative wave-powered desalination technology.
🌡 Californias’ Calectra secured $2M to scale its thermal storage technology, with which it aims to decarbonise heavy industry.

Digest x Climate

🪑 IKEA is testing out IKEA Preowned, a new peer-to-peer marketplace for buying and selling second-hand IKEA products. The firm says they’re tapping into both a growing customer demand for secondhand products and if successful is a potentially a big step towards making the company more sustainable (more secondhand = less new production and waste).

👕 Netherlands-based ASN Impact Investors has pulled out of the clothing sector due to “sustainability concerns”, pointing to things like hyper production of cheap goods and microplastics as part of the problem.

🇰🇷 South Korea’s Constitutional Court has called on the government to strengthen its climate action, claiming that current policy fails to safeguard basic human rights, and ordering lawmakers to set firm emission reduction targets from 2031.

🌡 Scientists at Stanford and Colorado State University have developed an AI-powered method to analyse the impact of global warming on specific extreme weather events, such as heat waves.

🦜 We pulled together a list of 30 biodiversity startups to watch, according to VCs like Planet A, Serena and Ananda Impact Ventures.

👂 Check out this video of researchers using ecoacoustics to listen to soil and determine its health status.

🎟 Hurry: +20% of tickets to the HackSummit in New York are gone. Lock in the best rates to come join us, and 500+ others, on 12-13th December for 2 days of the most productive networking and deal-making you’ll have all year.

AgriFood x Climate

🔎 Root, based in Berlin, raised €8 million seed funding for its RootOS platform, which helps food and beverage companies to manage their climate footprint and reduce their GHG emissions.

🌾 US-based HabiTerre secured $10 million at the first closing of its Series A funding round, led by John Deere. Its environment systems models are designed to deliver actionable insights to improve agricultural productivity, efficiency, and environmental outcomes.

🍎 Seattle-based startup Terrantic closed its seed funding round with $3.5 million to scale its data platform for food supply chain, designed to to assist food processing companies in minimising food waste and improving their yield by optimising their supply chain operations.

🥛 US-based precision fermentation startup De Novo Foodlabs secured $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Joyful Ventures. It will use the funds to scale production of its animal-free lactoferrin, NanoFerrin.

🛰 NASA awarded a total of $1.25 million to three US teams in the final round of its Deep Space Food Challenge. The winner of the $750,000 grand prize, Interstellar Lab, has developed a self-sustaining growth system for fresh vegetables, microgreens, and insects necessary for micronutrients.

👨‍🌾 Moonshot factory Alphabet X’s latest spinout, Tidal, secured undisclosed funding to support sustainable aquaculture, using AI and computer vision to give farmers a fuller picture of their harvests and catch potential issues before they can do any harm.

🔎 Germany’s CinSOIL is developing software to help food and agritech companies decarbonise their supply chains at the farm level, including an AI-powered tool to support soil carbon sequestration and biodiversity restoration. 

💧 Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark have discovered a way to produce proteins by feeding yeast with wastewater from the food and pharmaceutical industries.

👨‍🌾 British ag biotech company Legume Technology secured a grant of £2.15 million from the Gates Foundation and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office to further develop its affordable soil treatments for smallholder farmers in Africa.

Carbon x Climate

💨 Berlin-based Meloon GmbH, which specialises in the development of high performance membranes for carbon capture, secured investment from BackBone Ventures to further develop its technology.

🤝 Dutch carbon storage startup C-Questra is partnering with US-based RepAir Carbon to develop the EU's first onshore Direct Air Capture and Storage project in France. The project will use a heat-free, ultra-modular electrochemical technology, which reduces energy consumption by 70% compared to conventional DAC solutions.

🚢 VTT has joined forces with LUT University to launch a sea container pilot plant in Finland, which will convert captured carbon dioxide into compounds that can replace fossil raw materials in the production of plastics and chemicals.

👀 Laura at HACK is putting together a list of deep tech carbon removal companies - if there’s anyone you’d like to add, please do so in the comments here.

Construction x Climate

🏢 Zurich-based Optiml secured €3.5 million, in a pre-seed extension round led by BitStone Capital, for its digital decarbonisation platform for real estate investment and renovation planning.

Energy x Climate

☀️ Estonian energy producer Sunly secured €300 million to support the construction of 1.3 GW of solar, wind, storage, and hybrid parks across the Baltics and Poland, helping to reduce these countries’ reliance on Russian gas.

🔋 French startup WATTALPS raised €11 million Series A funding to make high-performance lithium-ion batteries affordable. It will use the funds to open a larger production facility for its batteries, which are designed to support decarbonisation of heavy-duty vehicles.

💨 Cache Energy secured $8.5 million seed funding for its novel approach to energy storage. It stores power in chemical bonds inside pellets made of lime derived from limestone, in an approach it calls “coal without consequences”.

🌡 Calectra, based in California, secured $2 million, made up of $1.6 million pre-seed funding and $400,000 in government grants. It will use the funds to scale its thermal storage technology, with which it aims to decarbonise heavy industry.

🔋 New startup Luxera Energy launched as a full-service Battery Energy Storage System investment platform, and will start with developing and selling utility-scale BESS projects.

🏭 The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is investing £30 million to support innovation and research into cleaning up the UK’s oldest nuclear sites, which were designed without decommissioning in mind.

💨 The world’s most powerful floating wind turbine, OceanX, which has a total capacity of 16.6 MW, set sail last week.

Funds x Climate

🇩🇪 Germany’s UVC Partners closed its largest fund to date with €250 million to support early-stage deep tech startups in the DACH region.

🇨🇭 Zurich-based VC Redalpine closed its largest-ever fund, Redalpine Capital VII, with over €179 million to “unlock innovation across Europe”. It works with category leaders across sectors including AI, biotech, fintech, and energy.

🇨🇭 Direttissima Growth Partners raised €120 million for its first fund, with which it will build a portfolio of up to ten companies working across the fields of industrial digitisation and automation, energy technologies and mobility.

🇩🇰 Danish VC Nine Realms secured €50 million from the European Investment Fund to support early-stage startups working to decarbonise the supply chain sector, which can account for up to 90% of a consumer good’s carbon footprint.

🇺🇸 BEVC, based in California, is raising a €25 million climate fund, marking a shift from its previous focus on the life sciences.

🇬🇧 London-based Arāya Ventures secured $10.6 million at the first close of its Arāya Super Angel Fund, which will support up to 60 pre-seed and seed stage founders working in health tech, fintech, climate, commerce and work across the next four years.

🌎 Cox Enterprises has partnered with gener8tor to launch the $3 million Cox Cleantech Accelerator, a 12-week program to support early-stage startups working on innovative cleantech solutions.

Materials x Climate

🛰 AstroForge, based in the US, secured $40 million Series A funding in a round led by Nova Threshold to support its goal of becoming the first commercial company to develop asteroid mining technologies.

🧪 Tallinn-based UP Catalyst raised €2.36 million in a seed extension round to further develop its CO₂ processing technology. It produces carbon nanomaterials and graphite from CO₂ emissions, and will use the funds to develop an industrial pilot facility capable of processing 100 tons of CO₂ annually.

🍄 Estonian startup Myceen secured over €2 million in grants to bring its carbon-negative, mycelium-based materials to market. Its products’ applications include building insulation materials, which are soon to be tested in a pilot project.

🖥 Swiss startup Apheros secured $1.85 million, and says it can boost data centre cooling by 90% with its metal foam technology, significantly improving their energy usage, since cooling accounts for nearly 40% of data centres’ total energy consumption.

Mobility x Climate

🛩 Sustainable aviation fuel startup Twelve, based in the US, raised $45 million from Fundamental and SMBC to build its first fuels plant in Moses Lake, Washington.

🚚 UK-based Sunswap raised £17.3 million to “decarbonise the cold chain” with its ‘Endurance’ unit for articulated lorries, which is powered by solar panels on the vehicles’ trailer roof, making for a potentially attractive option for fleet operators.

🚎 Polish bus manufacturer MMI secured €7.7 million from Vinci S.A. to develop a new generation of zero-emission buses, including electric and hydrogen-powered models, designed for maximum efficiency and range.

🛴 Shared e-scooter startup Beam Mobility has reportedly placed hundreds of extra “phantom” scooters on city streets in Australia and New Zealand, in order to avoid paying vehicle registration fees to local governments and so boost its profits.

🛻 Ford announced that the first vehicle to be built on its low-cost EV platform will be a mid-size pickup, due for launch in 2027. 

Water x Climate

🌊 Norway’s Ocean Oasis secured a €6 million grant from the European Executive Agency on Climate, Infrastructure and Environment to advance its innovative wave-powered desalination technology, which could provide potable water for up to 15,000 people in Gran Canaria.

Random Memes

🧼 This is peak advertising

How did you like today's email?

Love it😁Meh 😐 Hate it🙁

Editorial by Arman, Curation by Nicola