👀 ClimateHack Vol. 74: 100 most influential climate leaders in business

Bonjour,

If you’re in Paris next Tuesday, come join us at our ClimateHack meetup at Station F together with Techstars & Google where we'll be talking about the challenges and opportunties in the current fundraising landscape.

Or if you’re across the Atlantic, we’ll be hosting our inaugural ClimateHack New York meetup on the 30th November covering how to build the ideal climate capital stack with SOSV, Trintiy Capital and Alumni Ventures.

Elsewhere in the world? Don’t worry, ClimateHack meetups are coming in full force across these 10 cities.

In Today’s Edition;

👀 TIME magazine released their 2023 list of 100 most influential leaders in climate.
💰 CarbonCapture and Heirloom secured $47M in offtake agreements from Frontier.
🧪 Material Impact announced their $352M fund for material science startups.

Digest x Climate

👀 TIME magazine put out their 2023 list of 100 most influential climate leaders in business. The list features innovators like LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren, policy maker Marina Silva, Brazils’ Minister of Environment and content creator Jimmy Donaldson (aka: Mr Beast).

📈 What’s up? A new study published in Frontiers in Science raises a red flag over continued global warming after net-zero.

📉 What’s down? New research published in Nature Climate Change demonstrates that a changing environment affects how our brains work, and how climate change could impact our brain function in the future. 

💡 Good Read: TechCrunch shares how ‘deepwashing’ could potentially slow progress in European climate tech investing.

Carbon x Climate

💨 Italy’s CarpeCarbon secured €1.7 million pre-seed funding. It’s the first Italian company developing Direct Air Capture technologies to remove CO² from the atmosphere and store it safely underground, and it will use the investment to design the country’s first DAC plant in Piedmont.

🛰 This satellite launched by Canadian company GHGSat will start tracking C02 emissions from worst polluters from space.

📈 Jessica Burley of Planet A Ventures looks at why pricing climate risk plays a critical part in the path to net-zero.

💰 CarbonCapture Inc. and Heirloom secured $47M in offtake agreements from Frontier to remove 72k tonnes of CO2 by 2023.

AgriFood x Climate

☀️ US-based Aigen Robotics raised $12 million Series A funding, in a round led by Australian VC ReGen Ventures, to scale its fleet of solar-powered autonomous agricultural robots, which have sensors, cameras and software that monitor and manage plants in the field.

🥤 Le Fourgon, based in France, secured €10 million Series A funding. It has developed a wide range of returnable beverages, food and household products, currently delivered door-to-door every day in over 2,000 French cities, which so far have helped to replace more than 10 million single-use bottles and containers.

🌾 French biotech Toopi Organics has been awarded €8.4 million from Europe’s flagship innovation program, the EIC Accelerator. The startup develops plant fertilisers derived from the fermentation of human urine, which it collects using waterless urinals in motorway rest areas, theme parks, music festivals and agricultural events.

🛒 New French startup Ida raised €2.7 million seed funding to supply supermarkets and grocery stores with its tablet app, which is connected to an AI-powered sales forecasting algorithm that guides humans when it’s time to reorder some fresh products, optimising the process and reducing waste.

🍦 Unilever has granted a free non-exclusive license to the ice cream industry for 12 reformulation patents, enabling manufacturers to reformulate products to remain stable at a warmer freezer temperature of -12°C, instead of the current standard of -18°C, a move which should lead to more energy-efficient freezer cabinets on a global scale.

Water x Climate

💧 Scientists from the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia in Spain have developed self-propelled, laccase-coated micromotors, which cleanse wastewater and generate ammonia as a potential green energy source.

☀️ Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a floating, solar-powered device that can turn any open water source, including contaminated water or seawater, into clean hydrogen fuel and purified water, anywhere in the world.

Energy x Climate

🏠 Oslo-based Otovo secured €40 million to scale its residential solar and battery installations marketplace to profitability, having already completed over 20,000 solar energy projects across 13 European markets.

⛽️ Efenco, a clean energy startup based in Estonia, raised €4.5 million to further develop its “fire on turbocharge” technology. It uses cold-plasma assisted combustion technology to improve the combustion efficiency of natural gas by up to 40%t and of hydrogen by up to 75%.

🌊 Scottish startup Mocean Energy raised £2.7 million for its hinged raft that floats in the sea and harnesses wave energy to produce electricity, designed to power subsea applications such as underwater vehicles or provide electricity to the grid as part of an offshore wave farm.

💨 Octopus Energy’s generation arm made its first investment in Germany’s offshore wind sector, taking a 5% stake in Butendiek, an 80-turbine offshore wind farm in the North Sea.

⛽️ ADM and Marathon Petroleum Corp. opened their joint venture soybean processing complex, Green Bison Soy Processing, which will source and process local soybeans to supply the resulting oil exclusively to Marathon as a feedstock for renewable fuels.

Transport x Climate

🚲 French startup Upway raised €30 million in a Series B funding round led by Korelya Capital. It buys second-hand e-bikes and refurbishes them in its own warehouses before selling them to consumers with a one-year warranty. 

🚁 US-based Joby Aviation and Volocopter performed brief demonstration flights of their electric aircraft in New York City this week, at a press conference during which Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would electrify two of the three heliports located in Manhattan.

🔌 UK supermarket Asda owner EG Group has acquired Tesla’s latest ultra-fast charging units, which can be used by any brand of vehicle, as it seeks to expand its rapidly-growing EV point business.

⛏ Fossil fuel giant Exxon aims to start producing lithium in 2027 and, by the start of the next decade, intends to drill “enough lithium to supply the manufacturing needs of well over a million EVs per year”, using its direct lithium extraction tech.

🔋 Toyota has expanded its partnership with US-based Redwood Materials, which will supply the automaker with cathode material and anode copper foil for battery cells produced at its $13.9 billion EV factory in North Carolina that’s slated to go into production in 2025.

Materials x Climate

💦 Refilled, based in Sydney, secured $1.3 million to roll out its smart drink dispensers, designed for use with reusable bottles, with the aim of saving one million plastic bottles from landfill.

🔎 Scientists have analysed pellets derived from recycled plastic, gathered across 13 countries, and have discovered a multitude of hazardous chemicals, including pesticides and pharmaceuticals.

Funds x Climate

🧪 Boston-based VC Material Impact announced a new $352 million fund, with which it will support inception-stage companies developing “products enabled by innovations in materials science”.

🌳 Australian Indigenous-led impact fund First Australians Capital secured $3 million from US fintech Square founder Jack Dorsey to support Indigenous-led businesses creating social and environmental impact.

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia’s NEOM has launched its investment arm, the NEOM Investment Fund (NIF), aiming to support the buildout and development of NEOM’s 14 priority sectors (including clean tech) - having already invested in cultivated seafood player BlueNalu.

🔎 Bas Van Den Brande of Carbon Equity dives into the numbers behind BP's claim that their investment arm will deploy 90% of their funds into climate tech.

Tweets x Climate

 🎤 Let Taylor’s outfits help break down the new U.S. National Climate Assessment report:

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Editorial by Arman, Curation by Nicola