🚤 ClimateHack Vol. 66: $70M to electrify boats

Hey There,

2 months ago we announced our global search for the first-ever ClimateHack cohort to start taking our climate-tech community offline.

Today, we’re excited to unveil the 19 selected Ambassadors - including founders at emerging climate techs, to VC’s at some of the hottest climate funds - that will be rolling out ClimateHack across their cities.

Starting from October, you’ll be able to meet these ambassadors and your local climate tech community, in-person, through free quarterly meetups happening in:

🇫🇷 Paris
🇩🇪 Berlin
🇨🇭 Zurich
🇮🇱 Tel Aviv
🇬🇧 London
🇹🇷 Istanbul
🇺🇸 New York
🇿🇦 Cape Town
🇳🇱 Amsterdam
🇺🇸 San Francisco

If you enjoy these newsletters, you’ll love the meetups. Look for the upcoming dates to follow here soon.

In Today’s Edition;

🚤 LA-based Arc secures $70M Series B to electrify boats.
🍑 Austria's Kern Tec raised €12M to upcycle stone fruit pits.
📦 Germany's Traceless secured €3M for their granulate solution.

Digest x Climate

📈 What’s up? A new study published in Nature Geoscience shows that unprecedented heat is likely to lead to the next mass extinction.

💸 New research from Bethnal Green Ventures, HSBC Innovation Banking and Floww found that 84% of surveyed angel investors have recently supported impact startups.

📉 What’s down? TechCrunch shared research underlining that the vast majority of VC-backed UK startups do nothing to either measure or offset their carbon emissions.

🐊 Researchers at the University of South Florida have secured a $1.5 million grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency to safeguard the local environment by building four additional bio-infiltration systems around a local stormwater pond to prevent pollutants from entering it.

🏢 Engineers at the University of Pittsburgh secured over $700,000 to develop a digital twin of the building that houses the sustainability institute, to investigate the impact of climate change on critical infrastructure.

Carbon x Climate

🇦🇪 Zero Carbon Ventures, based in the UAE, raised $5 million seed funding to support researchers and startups specialising in carbon-reducing technologies and “accelerate its efforts towards global sustainability initiatives on a wider scale”.

Food x Climate

🍑 Austrian startup Kern Tec raised €12 million Series A funding to upcycle stone fruit pits into plant-based dairy alternatives. It will use the funds to scale up European production and enter the US market in 2025.

🦗 Cricket One, based in Vietnam, closed its Series A funding round with an undisclosed “seven-figure” sum and opened what it claims is Asia’s largest cricket processing facility to target human and pet food markets with cricket protein powders, textured cricket meat, cricket snacks and supplements.

🌴 Scientists at Queen Margaret University, Scotland have developed PALM-ALT, a clean-label, healthier and more sustainable alternative to palm oil, made from a byproduct of the linseed industry along with fibre and rapeseed oil.

🍖 JBS has begun construction on “Brazil’s first” cultivated protein R&D innovation centre, set to open in Q4 2024. It will be the largest food tech research facility focused in the country.

🏭 UK CDMO Extracellular has opened what it says is Europe’s largest contract pilot plant for cultivated meat and seafood, to support companies looking to scale up their operations.

🧫 DSM-Firmenich has developed new single-cell proteins, designed for use as an animal feed ingredient, which it says have the capacity to produce net-zero carbon proteins.

🌾 The Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform launched its global framework for regenerative agriculture, Regenerating Together, designed for practical use at farm-level to bring about “large-scale, long-term systemic change within the global food supply”.

🥬 The Dutch arm of vertical farming startup Infarm has been “declared bankrupt” according to official documents. The company is now reportedly focusing solely on the Middle East, and is rumoured to have raised $40 million – $50 million in new funds from Qatar.

Water x Climate

💧 Michigan State University secured a $2.1 million grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency to enhance the safety of drinking water. Researchers will study the health hazards associated with pathogen levels and disinfectant byproduct concentrations within drinking water distribution networks.

🌊 Engineers at MIT and in China are aiming to turn seawater into drinking water with a solar-powered completely passive device which allows water to circulate in swirling eddies, inspired by the much larger "thermohaline" circulation of the ocean.

Energy x Climate

⚡️ Swiss startup Pexapark secured €20 million Series C funding to further expand its renewable energy investment platform, designed to bring price transparency to 19 individual markets around the globe.

📊 Continuum Industries, based in Edinburgh, raised €8 million Series A funding to transform energy infrastructure planning using AI. Its Optioneer platform analyses the considerations for power lines, onshore and offshore cables, and pipelines for hydrogen, water and CO2, shortening the process for energy transition to just eight weeks.

🏗 Austria’s Greenwood Power, which produces power and voltage sensors for gas and air-installed local substations to reduce grid destabilisation caused by production and demand fluctuations, secured €5.1 million to support its expansion plans.

🏡 Stuttgart-based Metergrid secured €2.7 million seed funding. Its SaaS platform in effect turns landlords into small renewable energy companies, who can leverage Metergrid’s system to manage the whole process and provide an additional revenue stream from a property.

Transport x Climate

🚤 LA-based electric boat startup Arc secured $70 million Series B funding to develop a new higher volume electric boat designed for wakeboarding, wakesurfing and other watersports such as tubing.

🚛 German startup Fernride, which provides scalable automation solutions for the trucking industry that allow remote-controlled operations, added $19 million to its Series A funding round, bringing the total round to $50 million.

🏭 Ford has immediately halted work at a $3.5 billion factory in Michigan, and will not resume until it is confident in its “ability to competitively operate the plant”. The facility was planned to make cheaper lithium iron phosphate batteries using tech from China’s CATL.

🔌 A former Tesla executive has launched Plug, an online wholesale marketplace for used electric vehicles for dealerships, fleets, and consumers.

Materials x Climate

📦 German biomaterials startup Traceless Materials secured €36.6 million Series A funding to scale production of its granulate solution, an alternative to plastic, which is based on the science of agricultural residues and saves up to 91% of CO2 emissions and 89% of fossil energy during production.

♻️ Hamburg-based Resourcify raised €14 million in a Series A funding round led by Vorwerk Ventures. Its waste management and recycling platform is designed to manage recycling pickup locations, on-site handling of recyclable materials, materials transport and more.

🔎 Swiss-American startup Atinary Technologies, which uses machine learning to accelerate the materials and molecules discovery process, raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by AgFunder and supported by Cherubic Ventures.

💡 A new $2.5 million project, led by Cornell University, is aiming to use CO2 emissions and residue from aluminum recycling to produce high value products.

Construction x Climate

🏡 Berlin-based Novo raised €1 million pre-seed funding to accelerate the decarbonisation of real estate at scale. Its tech is designed to automate and speed up the process of analysis, planning and financing of energy renovation, and, over the next six years, aims to enable 35 million buildings to save up to 80% of today’s carbon emissions.

Funds x Climate

💨 SET Ventures announced the launch of it's $200 million fourth fund, double the size of its previous fund, to invest in a carbon-free energy system, and will focus on companies “built on digital technologies and data”.

🚜 Private equity firm Paine Schwartz Partners closed its latest fund with $1.7 billion to support the sustainable food and agribusiness value chain. Its most recent investments include AgroFresh Solutions, Costa Group, Elemental Enzymes, HGS BioScience and Monterey Mushrooms.

🤝 Berlin-based climate-first VC fund Extantia Capital, whose portfolio companies include the likes of Magnotherm, H2Pro, BeZero, and Reverion, secured €10 million from Dutch private equity firm Invest-NL.

💡 Here’s the 100+ climate technologies startups should be working on, according to 42 top ClimateTech investors.

Memes x Startups

⚡️ Remember the good ‘ol energy days?

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Editorial by Arman, Curation by Nicola.