🔮 ClimateHack Vol 28: VC Climate Predictions

Hey There,

Welcome to the 238 new readers who joined us recently from this Linkedin Post 👋

As a quick refresher - we send out a weekly newsletter on Friday covering the top Climate Tech news and opinions of the week.

This year we're excited to:1) Double down on featuring more incredible guests from the climate sector.2) Create new resources, lists, guides for climate founders and funders.3) Meet our readers in-person at our events (first up is Zurich, then London).

I respond to all newsletter replies, so if there's ever a random idea, thought or opinion you want to share - just hit reply.

With that out the way, here's what's in today's edition:

🔮 10 Trends top Climate VC's are watching in 2023.🧫 A TLDR overview on the current state of cultivated meat.🏗 £8 million in new funding for graphene-enhanced concrete.

Digest x Climate

📈 What’s up? Data from Zap-Map shows that the UK electric vehicle charging network has expanded by 30% in the last 12 months.

📉 What’s down? Water levels at the world’s largest man made dam, the Kariba reservoir, are at a record low of less than 1%, curtailing power to Zambia and Zimbabwe and damaging the local tourism and fishing industries.

🤷‍♂️ Vanguard is quitting the main financial alliance on tackling climate change, citing investor “confusion”, marking a major blow to the net zero project.

🇸🇬 Singapore has appointed its first Government Chief Sustainability Officer to drive its sustainability efforts, including 4x solar energy deployment by 2025, reducing waste to landfill 30% by 2030, reducing water consumption, green-er buildings, and introducing cleaner energy cars.

👀 Here’s a handy list from Sifted of all the new first-time European VC funds of 2022, including raises from UK's solo GP Fund, Unruly Capital, and Zurich-based Backbone Ventures.

🏔 This is the current sad state of the ski slopes in Switzerland due to unusually high temperatures across the country (it's 12° today where I'm at - 3x the average January temperatures)

Carbon x Climate

🌾 Seed stage climate tech startup Agrology is amongst six partners awarded $5 million by USDA’s Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities initiative, thanks to its MRV platform, ground-truth measurements, and monitoring of greenhouse gases and soil carbon respiration.

💰 Dutch carbon capture technology startup CarbonOrO Holding secured investment from Japanese oil and gas producer Inpex for its tech designed to reduce the cost of CO2 capture from industrial production.

🏭 Germany is drawing up legislation to enable the use of underground carbon storage technology, which has yet to be deployed at scale, and could potentially open a new market in the country.

🤝 SK Earthon, based in South Korea, is joining forces with British carbon capture and storage specialist Azuli International to develop CCS solutions globally, starting with Australia and the US.

💡 Good Read: State of CDR (carbon removal market) - a look at why so few companies are purchasing removals at scale, and how can that be changed?

Food x Climate

🍄 MycoTechnology’s fermented mycelium ingredients, FermentIQ™ MLL and PTP, have been granted Novel Food status by the European Commission, and has its sights set on expansion into the European market, partnering with IFF for co-development and Brenntag for distribution.

💰 Star of the West Milling Co. received a $4.9 million grant from the USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, for its project dubbed “A climate-smart strategy for the Michigan foodshed”, focused on helping Michigan growers move towards sustainable production.

♻️ Singapore startup AlterPacks raised $1 million pre-seed funding, in a round led by Plug and Play APAC and Seed Capital, to turn food waste into sustainable food containers. Its main raw materials are spent grains, a by-product of manufacturing foods like beer.

🇮🇱 The Israel Innovation Authority announced a Request for Proposal to establish new infrastructure for precision fermentation production in the country, as part of a national operational plan to “maintain and expand the strength of its developmental ecosystem in the field of alternative proteins”.

🧫 Here’s why molecular farming - aka using plants as natural bioreactors - is the next big thing in food tech, according to Sifted.

💡 Good Read: The most comprehensive study on cultivated meat, broken down into a Twitter thread

Energy x Climate

🌡 Swedish heat pump supplier Qvantum, whose technology is suited to densely populated areas, secured €41.2 million in a round led by Thomas von Koch and IKEA's investment arm Ikeasfaren.

☀️ A University of Sydney Professor has received $2.78 million from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to commercialise cutting-edge solar technology, that uses perovskite-silicon cells, in partnership with local startup SunDrive.

📆 Europe’s ITER Project just announced a five year delay. Its first plasma production is now set for 2030, a major blow for European nuclear fusion technology.

💡 Good Read: Looking at why the cost of battery electrolytes have halved.

Construction, Transport x Climate

💰 UK-based Nationwide Engineering Research and Development (NERD) raised £8 million seed funding to commercialise a graphene-enhanced building material called Concretene, which is a stronger and more sustainable product than traditional concrete

🔋 Charging network EVgo is partnering with Amazon to offer Alexa-enabled car drivers the ability to ask Alexa to find the nearest public charging spot, and even ask her to pay for the charge, later in 2023.

📊 Good Data: Here's a quick look at which countries product the most lithium vs which countries consume the most.

Conversations x Climate: Climate VC Predictions

We asked VC's at EQT, Collaborative Fund, Übermorgen Ventures, Trellis Road, AENU, Planet A, Partech, 2150 and Norrsken VC for their Climate predictions of 2023.

Here's what they said.

TLDR:

1) A bundle of (clean) energy ⚡️2) Catalysing carbon capture 💨 3) Rewards and reforms 📈 4) Decarbonized Materials 🛠 5) Future of our agrifood system 🌾 6) Scaling sustainable protein 🧫 7) Overcoming bottlenecks 🔬 8) More specialist & diversity funds 💵 9) Closing the loop on the circular economy ♻️ 10) More resilient founders and businesses 🚀

My additions: A huge year ahead for fungi and the biggest tech-to-climate tech career transition we've yet to see.

What's on your list?

Memes x Climate: 

I wish you all the confidence of this guy in your upcoming VC pitches in 2023.

Thanks for reading, and hope your first week of 2023 has been an awesome one.

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Curated by Nicola, Editorial by Arman