☕️ ClimateHack Vol 20: Coffee x Climate

Hey There,

I have no ideas for a smart or thoughtful intro today - so let's do a poll instead:

What’s in today's edition? ☕️ Beanless coffee as a climate solution.🛰 $24.7 million for AI-driven textile inspections.💼 Will tech layoffs drive a boom in climate talent?

Digest x Climate

🌾 Perennial crops: What if we had field-tested technology to address runoff, erosion, drought, flooding, biodiversity and carbon emissions? Enter perennial crops. Their longer life cycle means deeper roots, fewer inputs, less runoff and lower carbon emissions. As the first perennial crops are now farm-viable and reaching scale for food manufacturers, writer Sam Panzer take's a look into the innovation and investment needed to commercialise them. (FYI: most of Sam's past predictions end up becoming true).

📈 What’s up? Tech Nation’s Climate Tech Report 2022 found that investment into UK climate tech startups is on course to double year-on-year, having already reached $7.5 billion.

📉 What’s down? The UK has been criticised for failing to pay the $300 million in climate funds that it promised to assist developing countries ahead of the COP27 climate summit.

👀 German early-stage tech investors Atlantic Labs and FoodLabs launched their Founders for Climate initiative, aiming to establish what the companies are calling “Europe’s first ClimateTech Entrepreneur in Residence” to bring solutions to the climate crisis.

Carbon x Climate

🤝 The Indonesia Stock Exchange has signed a memorandum of understanding with Singaporean startup Metaverse Green Exchange to build a carbon registry and exchange with blockchain as the infrastructure layer.

⚡️ Emerson Electric Co is selling a majority stake in its climate technologies unit to Blackstone Inc in a $14 billion deal, as it “pivots to supplying to a booming automation market”.

🚗 Volvo Car Australia has committed to make its range fully electric by 2026, four years earlier than its parent company’s global target.

Food x Climate

🛰 German startup Constellr raised €10 million seed funding to scale its space-based water monitoring solution that can derive water needs and water availability across every field on the globe, with which it aims to safeguard the world’s food supply chain.

🧬 Portfolio co: Israeli biotech BioRaptor secured $3 million in a funding round with lool Ventures, CPT Capital, and FoodHack . The startup is building an operating system for biology research and manufacturing to “put the power of AI-generated insights into the hands of scientists”.

🫖 Young Mountain Tea secured $1.1 million to support its efforts to help its Himalayan tea farmers with a farmer-owned factory and launch zero-waste tea bags, entirely made of compostable materials.

🐄 A new report, State of Climate Action 2022, suggests that the EU is falling short on its methane targets, and says that limiting meat consumption to two burgers per week is “critical”.

Materials x Climate

👕 Smartex raised a $24.7 million Series A funding round for its AI-driven textile inspection technology that leads to fewer defects, and reduces environmental waste, so could transform the clothing industry.

♻️ Australian recycling startup Samsara Eco raised $54 million in a Series A funding round. It is looking to build its first plastic recycling facility before Christmas, and has partnered with Woolworths Group to launch the first enzymatically recycled packaging, that is set to hit supermarket shelves next year.

🐚 Cruz Foam, based in California, secured $18 million Series A funding for its naturally-derived and compostable alternative to Styrofoam, made with chitin, the material that makes up the shells of most crustaceans.

🔎 Israeli startup Airovation Technologies signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Phoenicia, the country’s only glass manufacturer, to install its technology that transforms its own carbon dioxide emissions from its plant into minerals that can be used in the glass production process.

☕️ Bruvi’s coffee pods are designed to disintegrate, reducing waste, thanks to its plastic-degrading bio-enzyme technology, which causes organic fermentation in an anaerobic environment so doesn’t produce microplastics as a by-product.

Energy x Climate

☀️ SolarSquare secured $13 million Series A funding, in a round led by Lowercarbon and Elevation Capital, to bring solar modules to rooftops in India, where fewer than 0.5% of homes have rooftop solar systems.

💸 British renewable energy investment platform PF Nexus raised £625,000 seed funding to support its growth plan and launch new features.

🪨 A new report from non-profit climate organisation Clean Air Task Force finds that, with investment in innovation, superhot rock geothermal energy could be cost-competitive with other zero-carbon technologies, while having a small land footprint.

💨 Ohio-based startup Aeroseal seals building air ducts and walls to prevent energy leakage, reducing energy waste and lowering bills. Old homes, especially, are major culprits, typically losing between 25% and 40% of the heating or cooling energy put out.

Funds x Climate

🇦🇺 Australian venture capital firm Blackbird raised the country’s first $1 billion VC fund, and has already made 18 investments into startups working in industries from AI to manufacturing and e-commerce.

🏦 The Business Development Bank of Canada announced a new $400 million climate tech fund, which it described as a “renewed commitment” to help build “world-class Canadian cleantech” companies.

🙋‍♀️ Amazon has earmarked $50 million of its $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund for women-founded and women-led climate tech companies, to support them in scaling their climate solutions.

💰 Third Nature is on track to raise $35 million for its first VC fund, which will tackle some of “the biggest planetary challenges”, since “simply decarbonizing our economy won’t restore planetary health”.

🤝 The UK’s Environment Agency has deployed some of its pension fund into Berlin-based climate tech VC firm World Fund, that is investing in startups developing solutions that save a minimum of 100Mt CO2 emissions per year.

🍸 Climate Tech Cocktails announced the launch of a new early-stage fund, Climate Tech Circle, and has already invested in Avalance Technology and SCiFi Foods, with a third investment to be announced soon.

Conversations x Climate: Bean-Free Coffee ☕️

This week I reached out to Maricel Saenz, co-founder of Compound Foods, the foodtech startup recreating coffee without coffee beans.

They just launched (and quickly sold out of) their first product, Minus a beanless cold brew which the internet seems to absolutely love.

I was curios to learn more about why my coffee addiction might be a climate problem, and how I can fix it (while keeping caffeinated).

Q: Why is my coffee addiction a climate-problem?

I love coffee, you love coffee, we all love coffee. Well, most of us: coffee is the second most consumed beverage after water.

But coffee production is double trouble.

Coffee, a sensible crop, is grown in the coffee belt near the Equator. I like to say that it is a bit like me: under 25 degrees is too cold and above 30 degrees is too hot. Climate change is leading to changes in temperatures that are hindering the coffee plant’s ability to grow and thrive. Studies suggest that 50% of the land where we currently grow coffee will be unsuitable by 2050.

And I know that sounds far away, but natural disasters like floods, droughts, and frosts are affecting coffee plantations now. Once plantations get affected by one of those events, it’s extremely hard for farmers to recover.

Everyone in the industry is concerned: “Climate change is going to play a bigger role in affecting the quality and integrity of coffee," Howard Schultz. This predicted shortage in coffee supply is met with an increase in demand - an expected 3x times as much by the end of the century all with less than 50 percent of the land available.

This gap is also causing an increase in the price of coffee, which probably many of you have felt. And unfortunately, that is not all. Coffee is killing itself. Coffee ranks 6th as one of the most polluting crops in our value chain, its production is inefficient and energy and water intensive.

Q: Why did you launch Compound Foods and what do you do?

In visiting my homeland of Costa Rica, I’ve seen first-hand how coffee is affecting biodiversity.

I wondered if it was possible to love coffee and conservation at the same time. Turns out, with enough creative fermentation, crop substitutes, and the perfect team of coffee geeks, you can. More here on the "how we do it".

Our Mission at Compound Foods is to create better products for the planet and people, and that use resources more efficiently. If we want to feed a couple extra billion people on this planet, we need to figure out a better way to produce our food.

Our Vision is to build a technology platform that allows us to transform inputs that are low in water use, low in carbon emissions, grown in the US, and by-products into delicious, valuable, sustainable products using fermentation.

We are starting with coffee because we don’t want to live in a world without coffee or a world without good coffee.

Q: You launched Minus this week, can you share what led you to that first product and how was it received?

Our first product, Minus, is a cold brew made with fermentation and a combination of whole-food ingredients that are low in water and carbon emissions, and that can be sourced in the US, to achieve the bitterness, acidity, and smoothness of your favorite cold brew but with a fraction of the environmental footprint.

Minus is roasted, fermented and brewed just like, well coffee! Instead of beans, we roast upcycled ingredients, roots, seeds and legumes which we then grind and brew in a gorgeous fermentation batch with caffeine.

To validate our product, we asked a third party to conduct a life cycle assessment (LCA), a process of evaluating the effects that a product has on the environment over the entire period of its life, thereby increasing resource-use efficiency and decreasing liabilities.

And ta-da! Results came back showing that our Minus cold brew uses 94% less water, generates 91% fewer carbon emissions, and needs 86% less land use when compared to traditional cold brew.

In short: our approach works and it can make a difference for our planet.

As for how it was received, we sold out in 24 hours and I'll let Chris from Lower Carbon Capital (one of our early investors) answer how it tastes:

Q: Where can we follow you and Compound to stay in the loop?

Find me on Twitter and find us on Instagram and Linkedin ☕️

Tweets x Climate: 

Using this weeks meme spot to highlight something more important - there's been loads of tech layoffs this week at a time when there's ton's of open roles in ClimateTech startups.

If you know someone that's been affected by recent job cuts - see below or refer them to our Jobs Board here. Let's do some good together and bring more talent towards the climate economy.

Thanks for reading - Two Chris Sacca tweets in one email? Someone please forward this to the Lower Carbon Capital team and tell them to come on as a guest next time.

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Curated by Nicola & Arman