🐟 ClimateHack Vol 19: Cultivated Seafood x Climate

Hey There,

When Chris Sacca (co-founder at Lowercarbon Capital) gets on Techcrunch to talk about how investing in climate "almost feels unfair right now" - you know it will make it into today's intro.

It truly feels like 2022 will go in the books as a turning point for ClimateTech as we've see more founders, funders and builders entering into the sector (e.g this years TechCrunch Disrupt winner was a climate startup)

I'm a big believer that we're seeing, as Chris says, the "biggest economic transformation in the history of the planet" and the next 100 unicorns will come from this sector, and likely from this era.

That's what led us to launch HackCapital - making it easy for individuals to invest in Climate. We're still in private beta - but you can join the waitlist here.

What’s in today's edition? 🌱 Bioengineered houseplants that are 30x better at purifying air🏗 Swedish startup making carbon-negative construction material🐟 Why cultivated seafood might be a climate solution?

Digest x Climate

📉 What’s down? Climate change-fueled heatwaves and droughts are shrinking the rivers that feed hydropower plants across the world, affecting the biggest source of clean energy globally.

📈 What’s up? A new report from an international coalition headed by scientists from Oregon State University states that the Earth's vital signs have attained so-called “code red” and that “humanity is clearly experiencing a climate emergency.”

🛢 Shell has reported its second highest quarterly profit on record at $9.5 billion, but it has not paid the UK's windfall tax on energy firms because of a loophole, while consumers struggle to pay increasing bills. Bitter, moi?

❌ The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has proposed new rules to reduce greenwashing in ESG investments, with restrictions on how words such as ‘ESG’, ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ can be used in investment products.

Carbon x Climate

🪴 French company Neoplants unveiled Neo P1, a house plant that has been bioengineered to counteract environmental damage. It only requires watering twice a month, and is designed to capture and recycle air pollutants like formaldehyde, benzene, toluene, and xylene to improve air quality.

🔎 Australian startup Greener secured $4 million Series A funding, in a round led by NAB Ventures, to help small businesses move towards net-zero emissions with its business model that simplifies the decision-making process to help reduce and offset emissions.

📱 Joro raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital and Amasia, and featuring Jay-Z’s Arrive, among others. Its app helps consumers to track and reduce their carbon footprints, and it’s seeing an average compound monthly growth rate of 25%.

Food x Climate

🧑‍⚖️ Finnish startup Solar Foods received regulatory approval in Singapore for Solein®, its novel sustainable protein made out of electricity and air-captured carbon.

🧫 The Dutch government is investing €60 million into the country’s cellular agriculture sector, marking the largest government grant to date into cultivated foods.

🧀 Israeli companies Brevel and Vgarden are joining forces to develop plant-based cheese made with microalgae protein for the global market, with first products expected to reach shelves in 2023.

🌾 AgroSpheres, based in the US, raised $22 million Series B funding to develop the next generation of environmentally-friendly crop protection products, its AgriCell and AgriShell platform technology, that have a multi-year shelf life and high efficacy in the field.

🌳 US-based agroforestry platform Propagate, designed to integrate trees and shrubs into crop and animal farming to improve soil health and wildlife habitat, secured $10 million Series A funding in a round led by The Nest.

🌊 A new study of nearly 99% of all food production on land and sea, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, offers a “new guide to weighing total ecological consequences of crops, livestock and seafood” - so basically, exactly how your diet affects the planet.

Materials x Climate

🏗 Paebbl raised €8 million seed funding to bring its carbon-negative construction material, made with carbon captured from industrial facilities or from the air mixed with water and ground silicate rocks, to market.

🌱 UK-based sneaker brand LØCI secured £4 million seed funding from high-profile investors, including Leonardi DiCaprio, for its vegan, biodegradable shoes that are crafted from certified recycled ocean plastic.

Energy x Climate

🔋 The UK government has announced £211 million in funding to support battery research and development, key in the nation’s “world-leading renewables industry and growing electric vehicle sector”.

⚡️ British startup Centrica Business Solutions is set to begin a 12-month trial project to inject hydrogen into a gas-fired, grid-connected power station to reduce its carbon intensity.

🔥 UK-based HiiROC has developed a way to produce hydrogen and solid carbon, using patented plasma torch technology, that comes at a lower cost and with zero emissions.

Funds x Climate

🍚 Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures is joining forces with Wavemaker Impact, Temasek and GenZero to help decarbonise rice cultivation, the second-largest source of GHGs in agrifood due to methane-emitting bacteria generated from flooded rice paddy fields.

💰 Global asset manager BlackRock raised $4.5 billion to create a climate-focused fund, Global Infrastructure Fund IV, to support companies across the low-carbon power, energy, transport and logistics, regulated utilities, and digital infrastructure sectors.

🇦🇺 Australian government-backed startup agency LaunchVic is supporting three local accelerator programs, including newly-formed Climate Salad, with $3.1 million in funding.

🏆 Three Israeli climate technology researchers and six startups working on climate crisis solution received over $2 million in grants at an event for the first-ever Climate Solutions Prize. Winning startups included Smart Resilin, a producer of a bio-based alternative to pollutant glue components, and Red Solar Flower, a maker of semi-transparent, non-silicon solar panels for agricultural areas.

Conversations x Climate: Cultivated Seafood 🐟

This week news broke of our latest investment into Israeli cultivated seafood startup, Forsea Foods and their $5.2M Seed led by Target Global. 

Let's meet the team and learn more about why conserving our oceans might be an overlooked solution to climate change.

Why these co-founders are developing novel 3D tissue structures for cultivated seafood?

It’s estimated that the oceans contain about 38,000 gigatonnes of carbon - making them by far the largest reservoir of carbon on Earth (sorry rainforests).

There are many reasons why overfishing is a climate issue, but TLDR is that oceans essentially act as a "Chief Climate Regulator". When the ocean ecosystem is disrupted, for example by trawlers destroying corals and carbon sequestering phytoplankton, it means we're undoing the hard work of one of our biggest climate allies.

And the issue is only getting worse. People love their seafood, and according to the FAO, fish stocks worldwide have reduced by a third due to overfishing and habitat destruction. And WWF states 85% of the world's fisheries are either fully exploited or overfished.

Without viable, tasty, mouth watering and affordable alternatives - there are no signs of our fish consumption slowing.

To tackle the challenge, biotech engineer Roee Nir and two senior researchers Iftach Nachman and Yaniv Elkouby teamed up to launch Forsea Foods, scalable alternatives to wild-caught seafood - starting with eels (which has seen its population decline by 90% in the last 25 years).

Born in October 2021 with support from the Israeli Innovation Authority and The Kitchen Hub, the company figured a way to grow a 3D tissue structure without the need to grow the fat and muscle tissues separately, meaning they can better replicate the flavour, texture, appearance and nutritional value of eel.

This week Forsea Foods announced a seed round of USD $5.2M with investment from the Target Global, The Kitchen FoodTech Hub, PeakBridge VC, Zora Ventures, Milk & Honey Ventures and angels investors from FoodHack (aka: HackCapital).

The funding goes towards growing their cultivated eel meat and accelerating R&D for other fish species. As well as expanding their core technology to large-scale bioreactors, and an increased focus on improving production, yield and profitability.

This is just one of the many startups tackling ‘Fishless fish’ which the Guardian this week called "the next big trend in the seafood industry".

Notable cultivated seafood companies include San Diego-based BlueNalu which have raised $84.6m since its founding in 2018, and Wildtype (pictured below) which has received $100m in series B funding with investments from Leonardo DiCaprio, Bezos Expeditions and Robert Downey Jr’s FootPrint Coalition, among others.

All this means that one day, in hopefully the near future, you'll walk into your favorite sushi bar, order up some California roll's and Unagi sushi's, pay the usual tab, and walk out not even realising you've just tucked into fish grown from cells, not from the oceans.

Memes x Climate: 

VC's will take any opportunity to offload last years egroccery plays 🛒

Thanks for reading - if you enjoyed this edition, please feel free to forward it to a friend, founder or investor interested in climate tech.

p.s. The male <> female ratio in the photos this week was poor, let's change that - send us more female-led climate news for next week!

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Curated by Nicola & Arman